Behind the Scenes Minis: Estevan and Fury

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday.

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Speaker 2: I'm Tracy B.

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Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

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Speaker 2: We talked this week about Stevan, and by extension, also talked about some very unsuccessful Spanish efforts to explore and colonize what's now Laurada and the whole coast from there into Mexico did not work out for them. I've had him on my list for a really long time with a question mark after it, just because I was not sure if it was ever going to happen, and then when I was looking specifically for something related to Morocco, that is where.

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Speaker 1: I wound up.

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Speaker 2: He's got some similarities to Cede Barik Bombay, who he talked about a couple or three months ago, not exactly the same situation, but in both cases, like European folks, really depending on their skill and knowledge to be able to survive in an environment that they were not used to. There are some sources that describe as Stevon as the first African American, which I get wanting to say that, but that is not an idea that existed in any way in the sixteenth century when he was saying so, one of the things that's interesting to me is how this fits in with the progression of how people thought, how specifically European people thought about race, because there wasn't really an idea of white at that time. There was an idea of black, encompassing most people who were African and in some contexts other people not generally from Europe.

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Speaker 1: But the.

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Speaker 2: Folks that might be grouped together today as white were more described as Christian right, and when what would become sort of the European powers colonizing the Americas were getting started in the idea of like not just having slaves, but like building a society that was rooted in slavery. Initially, it had been thought of as acceptable to enslave people who were not Christian, so it would, you know, within the European Christian context, it would be acceptable to enslave Muslims, or enslave African people of an indigenous African religion, or to enslave indigenous American people who were not Christian. But then there were also missionary and evangelical efforts to convert people to Christianity. So it's like you convert your enslave population to Christianity, now what. And it was through that shift that categories began to be created. Just the separating black and white. These are both socially constructed things. They do not have any basis in biology, right, or anything like that. Their basis is in generational son.

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Speaker 1: Expoture, right, Like I always when I boil it down to that, it's so absurd, yeah, that it's hard not to laugh. But I also then feel guilty for laughing, because what a mess we have made because of it, so much of a mess.

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Speaker 2: I don't remember the person's name, but there is one particular person that's like one of the earliest people to have started conceiving of like all Africans as one race, which is just not an idea that had existed before.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 2: So Stevin lived at a time that like these categories were still being thought of in formula and formalized and adopted within European societies, and the idea of African American as that means something today that was not even that was so far away. He's, like, we said, the first non indigenous person of any race to make it as far into North America as what we know as New Mexico and Arizona. But that is not the same thing as being an African American, as that term means.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, if you could speak one of the many languages he spoke and went back in time and tried to explain this, you would get what yah stairs up blankness. This episode was wild to me because it's talking about like where I grew up. Oh yeah, you know, I after I was nine. I grew up on the Gulf Coast and I actually just got back from Tampa Bay, So like it was just like, is this the time travel yeah of my map story? Yeah, kind of Yeah.

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Speaker 2: I also read a number of essays that we're talking about weather, like how his position within this group of four changed over the course of their efforts to get back into Spanish controlled and territory, and then after they got to Mexico City, and how it seems like he was in a kind of.

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Speaker 1: Great area for a while where he.

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Speaker 2: Maybe wasn't being seen exactly as enslaved, but also didn't seem to be free. And there was an argument in some of these essays that I found interesting but also incorrect, because a lot of them were like they couldn't have thought of him as their slave because they were relying on him for their safety and survival. And I'm just like, yeah, like the entire American South, for the entire history of slavery, you had enslaved people who were making people's food and delivering people's babies and driving their carriages, like literally doing all of the things that were required for survival. That wasn't exclusive to the American South, but like the American South became a society where that was entrenched, and a lot of enslaved African people were handling everybody's very survival all the time. And even after you got out of the South and slavery was abolished in places outside of the South, there were still people who were free black people being treated as second class citizens, who were still doing all that completely critical work. And I was like, that's just you. You cannot say he wasn't like their slave because he had he had their lives in his hands. I'm like that a lot of enslaved people had white people's lives in their hands, like they literally took care of their infants, Like yeah, yeah, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. It was I was like that your argument is not adding up to me. It does for sure seem like that he based on other things beyond the fact that he had their lives in his hands, that it seems like that they he wound up in kind of a nebulous area. But right, yeah, I was like, this argument is not adding up to me. This is one of those things where I hope, well, I don't want to say that I was gonna say, I hope no one ever makes a movie about him, because I feel like it would very quickly devolve into like super tropey feel good. But then if the right person made the movie, it would be fine. But I just think the odds would be long. Then it wouldn't it wouldn't get a little yeah whitewashed. There are a couple of biographies about him. One of them I think was written in the sixties, if I remember correctly. I did not read that one, but I did read I think read is. I did not thoroughly read it. I did read Esteban by Dennis Herrick with reading more meaning confirming particular details. Yeah, not reading the whole thing thoroughly. And that one just came out in twenty eighteen, so it's a pretty new book and it is from the University of New Mexico press. I generally found it to be more accessible than a lot of things that are published through university presses.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: I'm not saying that university universe city presses are inherently inaccessible, but I do read some books that have come from university presses that are there's like more jargon from the field of history, right, They're just more academic.

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Speaker 1: They're not intended for a general audience.

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Speaker 2: That's a better word than what I was trying to say. And this one I thought, I felt like, did a really good job of setting some context that will make parts of it more understandable for a general audience that a lot of times the more academic work would just skip over, kind of assuming that the audience reading it would already know this stuff. Yeah, and that was one of the things that I was like, Oh, I like that this is included, which is something that I would not necessarily see coming from an academic press. And a lot of the cases, so if people want more detail, because there is so much more detail about this whole expedition, that's one of the places you could go look for it.

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Speaker 1: Again.

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Speaker 2: That is Estebane by Dennis Harre, which came out in twenty eighteen from University of New Mexico Press. I tried to read a lot of stuff from a lot of different perspectives to see how, like, how are scholars who grew up in Morocco talking about him, How our indigenous anthropologists and historians talk about them talk about him.

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Speaker 1: There's a lot.

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Speaker 2: There's definitely more about him now than there was even ten years ago available for folks who are interested. We talked about Buck versus Bell this week.

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Speaker 1: Oh, we sure did.

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Speaker 2: That, Like that case has come up in a number of previous episodes. I did not have the experience I expected to find when I started researching it, because I knew I knew the basics of the case, right. I knew that Carrie Bell had a child, and that Carrie's mother had also been institutionalized, and that there was this argument that Carrie should be sterilized, that she could not have any more children, and that three generation of imbeciles is enough is quoted all over the place. I did not expect number one as much information about Carrie Buck as has been unearthed. I mean, there's still big gaps in it, but largely because of the work of Paul Lombardo, Like there's a lot more known and documented about her and her family today. I was not really expecting. Maybe I should have been, but I wasn't really expecting the story of the court case to involve everybody basically railroading it through. Like I just it did not really occurred to me at the beginning that this was going to be a story in which the attorney that was appointed to represent Carrie Buck was really going to be working for the other side for all practical purposes like that. I was not I did not realize that was going to be the case. And I said already, like literally three hours after I emailed you this outline came all the headlines about the request to overturn Obergefell, and already we have talked earlier this year about the request not exactly requid, but like the attempts to have the Supreme Court overturn the constitutional right to birthright citizenship. I'd already had in my mind, like there have been a lot of times that the Supreme Court has authored decisions that have made things worse, and I wasn't expecting in this case for that to extend to her not even really being defended. Yeah, it was just not I don't know, I was not expecting that.

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Speaker 1: This one makes me such a rage monster for two, for many reasons, but the big two. Okay, One, there sure is a lot of discussion about what is appropriate for her, and no discussion at all about teaching men not to take advantage of women, right, which makes my blood boil and I want to say a lot of words that are not suitable for this podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Two, while we were discussing this, I thought back to my own by choice sterilization and how when I first started raising that issue to my doctor, I think I was twenty nine. I talked to several different doctors about it, and at the time all of them wanted to talk to my husband about it. And it's like, you know what, even if you do want it, you still have to get a dude's permission. Yeah, what the heck? Man? Yeah, those two things really made me. I rate throughout to read it this episode.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, on your first point, that was one of the lines of argument that her attorney could have pursued if he had wanted to, because there was a lot of discussion about like, oh, well, she's obviously irresponsible, she's obviously just going to have a lot more children if we don't do something about it. It was never brought up that her account was that he had raped her, and that just wasn't brought into the questioning at all. I don't know of any consequence that ever happened to him in any way. And as we said, like his his aunt was the person that raised Carrie Buck's baby, all of which is infuriating. And then on your your second point, it is the same double standard as we see in gender affirming healthcare. If you want to have a breast augmentation because you are a cisgender woman who wants bigger breasts, great, nobody is really going to challenge that. But if you are a trans woman who wants a breast augmentation, there are a bajillion hurdles and attempts to outlaw that entirely, and a bunch of absolutely blatant misinformation about what is happening with children's gender affirming care, which in the vast, vast majority of cases involves things like socially transitioning, so letting kids use the name and wear the clothing that they would prefer to wear, and hormone blockers, which we have plenty of documentation about because they are routinely prescribed to kids who are going through precocious puberty, meaning going through puberty too early, medically too early, and so like, if a cisgender child is in precocious puberty, puberty blackers no problem. If a trans child would like to put off the physical changes of puberty until they are older and can think about what it will mean to have a permanently life changing, physically changing surgery, suddenly puberty blockers becomes a whole big deal, and that also infuriates me. All of this stuff is tied together. Trans rights are connected to disability rights, all of this, there's this, they all. They have a lot of similar roots.

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Speaker 1: I am.

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Speaker 2: I'm frustrated and infuriated the same way you are. One of the things that I was looking up as I was researching this was like Virginia's apology for this law. There have been some states that have passed laws to compensate people who were sterilized under their eugenics programs. One of those is North Carolina, which is where I am from. North Carolina was the first state to compensate victims of its eugenic sterilization program.

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Speaker 1: I was not.

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Speaker 2: I don't think I was living in North Carolina when this happened, but I was not aware until googling around while working on this episode that North Carolina's legislation for this was largely led by a man named Larry Womble, who was my assistant principal. Huh, total news to me. He passed away in twenty twenty, I think twenty twenty. But yeah, like he was a big part of getting that passed in North Carolina. Not all states passed such programs. I don't remember if Virginia did or not. There are limits to how much money can compensate a person for surgeries made on their bodies without their consent or in some case even knowledge. I don't know if I have anything else to say about Buck versus Bill today me there, I'm just super mad. I'm also super mad. I've said before. It's been a super long time on the show. But I've said before, but I think some of the Supreme Court decisions that people learn the most about in the United States and the world of like K through twelve education are the Supreme Court decisions that made progress in making sure everyone had access in recognitions of this of the same rights. So things like Brown versus Board Right, things like Loving versus Virginia, which overturns Virginia's antime assagination law, which was also a eugenics law because it was about protecting white racial purity. But there are many many more Supreme Court cases that were the opposite of that, that were like I mean, some of which we've talked about on the show before, like Plusy versus Ferguson, dred Scott versus Sandford. The idea that the Supreme Court is somehow going to save us from horrific lawmakers has not worked out a lot of the time.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of a lot of the way those syllabi get put together. One a lot of times they get put into like civics classes that are very much in the raw ra this is the best way. So of course they're not going to include anything dicey. Yeah. Also, I mean, I will say we joked about it in the show, but like, it is hard to read and parse a lot of Supreme Court opinion writing because it tends to be very long and very verbose. And so the trick is that even if somebody like especially of your high school age and you get curious and you go looking. You really need an assist or to find a great study guide, yeah, to walk you through those, and those aren't always easy to find, right.

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Speaker 2: Sometimes they're also like Supreme Court opinions can be very dense with citations of all of the precedents, which can make it really hard to even get through a sentence sometimes because it feels like there's nine thousand citations in there, and if you're not familiar, you.

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Speaker 1: Have to do extra homework for each sense.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're not familiar with what all of those citations are about, then it can bog down really quickly. The fact that this decision was so short we could have just read the whole thing on the show really is wild dramatically shorter than.

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Speaker 1: Most decisions today.

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Speaker 2: And not in a way like if you look at very old laws in the United States, some of them are very short and are much much shorter than today, where bills can go on for hundreds or thousands of pages. And it's not quite like that. It's that this one was particularly unusually short and awful and never directly overturned. On that note, I hope everybody's Saturday is better than this episode was whatever is happening in your world? I hope it is going as well as it can go, and I hope you're able to take some time to kind of center and focus on yourself. I have found in my own life that if I am literally myself in every headline and every development all day long, forever, then I stop being able to cope with all of it. And so I have tried to make it a point to, at some points of the day see what's happening in the world, but at other points in the day try to be more focused on what I'm actually doing and what I can do to help when that's possible. We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We will have something brand new on Monday. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.