EUC recently welcomed Professor Alexander Aviña as a scholar-in-residence from the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University (ASU). His research focuses on 20th century Mexico, with an emphasis on revolutionary movements, the Mexican Left, state violence and terrorism, immigration, and the history of narcotics production and trafficking. As part of his residency at EUC, he presented a seminar on “Notes on the Palestine-Mexican Border” where he discussed the long-running wars on migrants and refugees – robbing them of the right to stay home – as well as discussed with Professor Gabriel Rockhill from Villanova University the “Intellectual World War Trilogy: Western Marxism, French Theory and the Culture of Empire.”
EUC Special Projects Assistant, Gurneet Singh, interviewed Professor Aviña to get to know more about his visiting scholarship at York University.
Q. Can you begin by describing your research interests and why you chose this as your career path?
A. As a historian of Latin America, my research focuses on the post-1940 period in Mexico. My first book, Specters of Revolution, was based off my doctoral dissertation, which chronicled the history of two peasant guerrilla movements that emerged in southern Mexico in the 1960s and 70s led by rural communist schoolteachers. As a graduate student, I was fortunate that a new incoming presidential administration from a right-wing party, declassified millions of police, military, and intelligence documents. This allowed me to write the history of these two peasant guerrilla movements, with a solid archival foundation.
My research also involved going into southern Mexico, specifically the state of Guerrero, to interview people who had fought in the guerrilla movements. I discovered that as part of the Mexican government’s counterinsurgency against these two peasant guerrilla movements, the government would load people onto airplanes near the resort city of Acapulco at an Air Force base and then fly the airplanes over the Pacific Ocean to dump people into the Pacific Ocean as a terror tactic. In my research, I uncovered that the Mexican Air Force was using Israeli-made planes. I began wondering why the Mexican military had Israeli-made aircraft and what role Israel may have played in the Cold War in Latin America, in terms of counterinsurgency, population control, and backing up horrific military dictatorships and death squad regimes in South America and in Central America.
My research also focuses on the type of state terrorism and counterinsurgency tactics of the Mexican government to annihilate these two peasant guerrilla movements. My current book project looks at what I term, the Mexican government’s “war against poor people,” to squeeze out a peasant guerrilla movement. My research revealed a story that involves a state effort to eradicate the guerrilla left and then using the cover of a war on drugs to obscure that fact. My current research paths include a global perspective with the Mexico-Palestine border and the origins of Mexico’s war on drugs as being a cover for a broader war against poor people and the armed left.
Q. How does your work connect to the research at EUC and why were you interested in collaborating with the faculty?
A. One of the difficult things as an academic and as a scholar, is presenting ideas that are not as developed yet, but you feel like you are onto something, and you want to workshop them in front of a friendly audience to get feedback. That is one of the reasons I wanted to present this paper on the Notes from the Palestine- Mexico Border in a place like York University, knowing that some of the scholars at York would serve as both a friendly and critical audience. Especially considering I am talking about Palestine and genocide, which in certain settings can invoke a type of backlash that is not productive. I want to be challenged in good faith and in a way that can help me continue to refine and elaborate that idea.
I have also previously worked with Professor Justin Podur. I have learned and developed as a scholar from his work and approach to both academia and how he presents his ideas to public audiences. I also know Professor Carlota McAllister’s work as an anthropologist in Guatemala, which has been helpful for my own research on the Mexico-Palestine border. In terms of how it manifests itself in a place like Guatemala in the 70s and 80s, in which Israel had a genocidal role in fueling horrific massacres and genocide. It was a combination of scholars whose work I have learned and benefitted from, both academically and politically, but also the idea that I would be in a setting where I could trust the people who were going to be there to offer incisive and productive suggestions and critiques.
Q. Can you elaborate on the “Mexico-Palestine Border” and how it relates to the concept of the “Empire’s Boomerang”?
A. Jimmy Johnson coined the term “Mexico-Palestine Border” in the early 2010s. He had started to see surveillance technology from the largest arms industry from Israel and began asking questions. Why did the U.S. have an Israeli surveillance company and why were its fixed surveillance towers popping up all over the Arizona-Mexico border? Many others will also talk about the border as a physical space that is enforced by Israeli drones, surveillance and even the ICE Border Patrol agents who have received training from Israeli border police. I am also thinking about the concept as an ideological space that brings together approaches and ideas that are being developed by ruling elites throughout the world in terms of how to deal with populations they deem to be surplus or disposable, because they get in the way, they don’t produce, they don’t work, and because they are politically inconvenient. Mexico-Palestine border allows me to connect the dots between someone’s genocidal calculus of someone like Netanyahu in the Israeli state, with what Trump is doing to migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, but also internally with ICE. Which is essentially waging a domestic campaign of ethnic cleansing. What makes this more urgent, is that because of climate change we are only going to see it intensify in an era of mass human migration. Where people are leaving places that are being decimated by the effects of climate change and trying to move to places where they can have a living. This is one reason why you have European elites watching and learning from Israel right now, because they are trying to prevent human movement from North Africa, from Sub-Saharan Africa, from different parts of the Global South, from coming into Europe.
The concept of the boomerang was developed by a poet from Martinique, A. Cesaire, in his famous 1950 book, “Discourse on Colonialism,” where he argues that the type of fascism and Nazism that Europeans witness and experience from the 1920s to 1940s, did not begin in Europe. He says those ideologies and techniques that pushed violence, brutality and exploitation began in their African and Asian colonies, which boomerangs back to them by the 1920s and 30s. He argues that people did not call it fascism until it started to impact Europeans. One way to analyze what we are witnessing right now, is that all that violence is coming home. Particularly if you watch what ICE is doing with the Border Patrol; it is a lot of the colonial terror tactics that they had been using in Vietnam or Latin America since the early 19th century. I would also stretch the metaphor and say that the U.S. is a settler colony, so a lot of those techniques began in the U.S. against Native Americans and enslaved Africans, and therefore already have certain technologies of repression and violence that were used against them.
Q. What insights can your work in “Specter of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside” from 2014 provide for the current situations within the U.S and Gaza?
A. There is a story in this book about one of the guerrilla leaders whose name was Lucio Cabanas, a rural schoolteacher. He had been a member of the Mexican Communist Party. He was killed fighting the Mexican army on December 2nd, 1974. He had interesting ideas of how to translate radical concepts like Marxism and Socialism into languages and ideas that peasant communities in rural Mexico could understand. The Mexican military killed him, and he was buried in a clandestine grave. They thought that by burying him in a forgotten place, they were also killing his ideas. By 2001, Lucio’s grave was discovered. The local population of his community organized a celebration of his remains being brought back to his town, and then built a huge obelisk and buried him underneath. One of the points from my book, and one of the points that I try to make with that story is that you can kill the revolutionaries, you can kill the radicals, but you cannot kill the idea. The ideas will continue to survive and to inspire anew, new cycles of resistance, of protest, maybe even of revolution. In the darkest times, when things look bleak, there’s things that we can hang on to from the past; ideas, concepts, the legacies of past movements and individuals, that serve as our torches to get through the dark times of the present. These ideas are always under the surface, ready to come back up again. We need to move away from the concept of history that is linear and think more about it in terms of cycles where the movement of time or history is driven by conflict and struggle. In certain moments, past ideas of defeated revolutions re-emerge and to inspire again. That is what my book shows, that even though these guerrilla movements in the 1970s were wiped out, their ideas, inspirations and legacies remain and can inspire new movements in the present.
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Alexander Aviña is a historian and professor—and the son of undocumented migrants from Michoacán, Mexico whose sacrifices and love made his educational achievements possible. He is the author of “Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside” (Oxford University Press, 2014). He was awarded the Maria Elena Martínez Book Prize in Mexican History for 2015 by the Conference on Latin American History and he has published articles in the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research and the NACLA Report on the Americas.