Michael Francis Jimenez, 1948-2001

Born August 14, 1948, in Merced, California, his mother’s hometown, to Mary Elizabeth Baker Jimenez (“Irish American”) and Salvador Jimenez (son of Spanish immigrants), Michael Francis Jimenez was his family’s first child. The family soon moved to Bogotá, Colombia, where the father was a Texaco labor negotiator. There, despite Colombia’s terrible violence in the 1950s, the young Michael lived a happy childhood with a younger sister and brother.

He returned to the United States for boarding school at the Blair Academy, in Blairstown, New Jersey, 1962-66, but Colombia stayed in him. For a senior research paper at Blair he wrote on the Colombian labor movement. He then went directly to Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut, where, barely surviving Calculus 1, he flourished in studies of modern European and U.S. history, political science, and “the problems of modernization in developing nations….Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia.” Trinity’s main influence on him came from Prof. H. McKim Steele, Jr., a historian of European expansion and conquests worldwide, who encouraged students to “look at language and institutions and how they work,” bringing into history “a mix of literature and economics and sociology.” Back in Colombia, the Trinity student knew, President Carlos Lleras Restrepo (1966-70) was accelerating the country’s official agrarian reform, increasing the distribution of land to landless peasants and promoting the organization of a massive new national peasant association. In Peru a nationalist military government was pushing drastic transfers of land and local power to poor rural communities. In Chile a Christian Democratic government was trying to meet peasant union demands for land. On Steele’s inspiration the young Jimenez thought he too would be a professor, of Latin American history or anthropology. He was already about commitment; in June 1969 he married a Mount Holyoke graduate (in Art History) a year older than he. In his senior year, through a program in “Non-Western Studies” that he and Steele designed, he did “field research in a Colombian rural community,” and decided to become a political sociologist. In 1970 he graduated from Trinity with honors and a Thomas J. Watson fellowship, to travel and study agrarian reform in Colombia, Peru, and Chile.

But he decided not to go back into “the field” until he had prepared himself better. He and his wife went instead straight to Stanford for his master’s in Latin American Studies. Stanford was then the best school anywhere for such studies, which were booming across the United States and Europe. It had none of the few American scholarly authorities on Colombia (Crist, West, Parsons, Harrison, Bushnell, Helguera). But it did have John J. Johnson, John Wirth, and visiting in 1970-71 (at the Center for Advanced Studies) Richard Morse. On Johnson’s vibrant, multi-disciplinary example (Wirth’s too), Jimenez reconsidered his scholarly options: political sociology still, or history or anthropology again, or somehow become a professor of all three? His professors could not get over his intellectual talents and independence. To one he was “a man of great energy and vigor--raw energy…a restless, probing intelligence….a joy to teach….a man of great potential. …not the obvious student, or the conventional academic.” Another saw in him “as high a potential as any student I have ever trained. …so broadly read….a very hard and fast worker. …has very strong views and is not always modest…, but so motivated to learn that he will listen and will revise.” Morse’s seminar on Latin American urban history, which Jimenez took and whence a paper he co-wrote on Colombia turned into his first publication, helped to focus him.1. By the academic year’s end he had decided again on history, as the Ur-social science. Using the deferred Trinity-Watson fellowship, he and his wife went back to Bogotá, for him to research and write a master’s thesis. His topic was a reform of Colombian land law in 1936 that restored the “social function of property.”2. In November 1971 he submitted the thesis, in January 1972 received his M. A. in Latin American Studies, and with his wife headed south to visit expropriated plantations and Andean villages in Peru and new collective farms in Chile. Already the scholarly challenge was also a moral challenge.

By then Jimenez had applied to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D. in Latin American history. Harvard had no authority on Colombia either, but did have John Parry, a grand master of the history of European maritime exploration and overseas expansion, and me, whose book on an agrarian revolution in the Mexican Revolution had recently appeared. One of Jimenez’s referees emphasized his “burning commitment to social history which is not trendy or politically-motivated”; another, “his insatiable intellectual curiosity and his deep commitment to understanding Latin America.” Jimenez himself declared his “active concern for the future of that continent,” and his hope “to engage in an in-depth research project on some aspect of agrarian history in Latin America, preferably the study of a social protest movement among the peasantry.” Almost surely he already had a particular movement in mind, the one Colombian Communists in the 1930s had organized down the mountains southwest of Bogotá, up from the mighty Magdalena River, in the province of Cundinamarca’s township of Viotá.1 (As he later wrote, he wanted to find “in the Colombian Andes…an Emiliano Zapata,” at least a revolutionary village like Anenecuilco.) At Harvard in 1972-73 he took among other courses a seminar on the Spanish empire with Parry and one on “interpretation of the Mexican Revolution” with me (where he wrote his paper on Andrés Molina Enríquez), and in 1973-74 did his general examinations on medieval Europe with David Herlihy, Latin America 1500-1810 with Parry, agrarian history with David Landes (History vs. Jimenez’s ideal on peasants then, Barrington Moore), and Latin America since 1810 with me. The next year, like other third-year students, he began teaching, as an assistant in Parry’s courses on “European Oceanic Discovery” and in mine on “Latin America from the 1760s…to the Present,” and as a tutor both in the History department and in the History and Literature program. For him these were not jobs, or simply for credentials, but the time he took to read (it seemed) everything in Widener Library on Latin America that he had not already read, histories of every kind old and new, memoirs, journals, novels, poetry, and periodicals galore, to prepare himself abundantly for his students--and for his dissertation. He may well have read everything in Widener on Colombia; he had already defined his dissertation topic, the history of “Red Viotá.”

1. Richard Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America (Anchor Books, 1971), pp. 226, 231-238.

In the spring of 1975 Jimenez and his wife were planning their trip to Colombia, for him to start his research, when she was diagnosed with cancer, and suffered a prompt, radical mastectomy. He went alone that summer to Bogotá, gained access (never before granted) to the Ministry of Labor archives, studied its agrarian records 1950-70, and delved deep into other national and provincial archives. But he and his wife stayed in Cambridge the academic year 1975-76, he as before assisting Parry and me in our courses, tutoring, reading voraciously, mastering new ranges of comparative agrarian history and sociology, lavishing his learning on the students; and his wife became pregnant. The summer of 1976 in Washington and Cambridge he searched British and U.S. (classified and unclassified) records on 19th- and 20th-century Colombia. Then his wife’s cancer returned, in her brain. In September 1976 in Cambridge she gave premature birth to a healthy child, a daughter. Caring for his dying wife down to her death in December 1977, meanwhile helping to mother their child, assisting Parry and me, and tutoring, he also exhausted Widener, the Cabot Science Library, and the Law Library for his scholarly needs, and tore into Baker Library’s collection of old business manuals and periodicals. In 1978-79, still in Cambridge, mothering his daughter, tutoring triple time, he mastered Baker’s collection on the international history of coffee. Not until 1979-80, his daughter old enough for him to take with him to Colombia, did he finally go back into “the field,” for more archival research and to interview Viotá veterans.

By then he knew better than anyone else he was not going to find a Zapata or an Anenecuilco in the Upper Magdalena valley, and had explained why. Cundinamarca’s hot country was fundamentally different from Morelos’s, a frontier opened by capitalist entrepreneurs in the last 100-120 years, a country of plantations, but of coffee, not sugar, where planters had had to attract laborers from elsewhere, made them tenants, but never held steady command over them, and since the 1930s, because of the Communists among them, had lost land and power to them. Villages there were not anciently rooted communities, but settlements by the 1930s only two or three generations old, of families fractious from the first, united politically, because of the Communists breaking into political independence, their historic accomplishment materially by the 1960s a “panoply of [former] tenant and peon homesteads,” culturally an abiding faith in the old Popular Front. Viotá was a base not of revolution, but of local, popular, fiercely combative self-defense; its Communism, egalitarian proprietary production.1

1. Michael F. Jimenez, “Viotá: The History of a Colombian Coffee Municipality, 1870-1970: A Working Paper,” Cambridge, 1978.

So prepared, Jimenez that year did massive research in primary sources. Besides combing Colombia’s trade, professional, and political journals and official and daily press for reports on “southwestern Cundinamarca” (1906-1940), he collected detailed notes on several public and private, published and unpublished, 19th- and 20th-century land surveys and censuses, the Cundinamarca provincial land registry (1903-50), estate accounts (including tenancy and employment tenancy records) from two big coffee plantations in Viotá (1909-43), presidential, congressional, electoral, and comptroller files on Cundinamarca, and municipal and notarial records in Viotá (1920-40), and recorded interviews with 28 persons intimately involved, on one side or another, in Viotá’s struggles in the 1920s and 30s. In a letter he wondered to me, in parentheses, “(Am I interested in too many things?)” No, his interests and intuitions were a mature rural historian’s.

In the fall of 1980, the world’s expert on Viotá’s history, Jimenez returned to Cambridge to raise his daughter, for lack of other support assist Parry and Robert Keith on a huge documentary project, and write his thesis.1 He could not do it all; he often had to let the thesis wait. In the spring of 1981 he won a Harvard Graduate School fellowship for 1981-82, so that he could finish that year. It seemed then that by spring ’82 he would complete an excellent dissertation, which with little revision would be a book of major significance on modern Latin American agrarian history, the first to integrate global, national, and local economic, social, and political factors to explain class, structure, and movement in a modern peasant revolt. Although he concentrated all he could on the thesis, he kept finding more background to explain, and did not finish. The pieces he wrote were superb, and in wonderful prose, flowing, moving, vivid, clear, but they would not go together as he wanted. The summer of 1982, drawn intellectually as well as politically, he spent in Nicaragua translating for Robert Coles, interviewing children. In 1982-83 he again assisted me, in a big (for me) new course proposed to explain historically the then current Latin American state terrorism. He better than the instructor mastered the history, sociology, and literature of state violence and torture. But he continued to struggle with his thesis, which was brilliant as he told it, but which he could not yet compose in the balance he thought just right.

1. John H. Parry and Robert G. Keith, eds., with the assistance of Michael Jimenez, New Iberian World: A Documentary History of the Discovery and Settlement of Latin America to the early 17th Century (Times Books, 1984), 5 vols., IV, 407-550.

Because of the Reagan Administration’s decision in early 1983 for terrorism in Central America, a long trial of the soul began there that spring, grieving souls elsewhere concerned for human dignity there. Jimenez in Cambridge that spring, certainly expecting to bring his thesis finally together that summer, accepted the offer of an assistant professorship at Princeton to start that fall. Even in the comprehensive, subtle terms in which he had earlier been thinking, he certainly could have finished then, and quickly published a splendid book, richly learned, rambling, but acute in its analyses, fascinating in its narrative, a neo-Marxist One Hundred Years of Strife and Solidarity. But his work in Nicaragua and his reflections then on politics, religion, and civility were complicating the balance he wanted, turning class more subjective, adding weight and edge to questions of culture, and he did not finish that summer or that fall. The more he learned, the more his sense of the right balance shifted.

At Princeton, only an instructor (no Ph.D.), teaching, writing, rewriting, he found a new subject in his material, “the provincial middle classes.” Rural rebellions in 20th-century Latin America, it struck him, were “not just spasms of the lower classes in response to worsening economic conditions,” or “mechanical responses to the implantation of export economies.” For “peasants, artisans, and proletarians” to revolt, he could testify from Nicaragua, they required “politics” and “ideology,” which (forget the Comintern) “Jacobinite” country-town “petty bourgeois” provided them in “radical liberalism.”1

Jiménez, as he then began accenting his name, took until December 1985 (eight years after his wife’s death) to submit his dissertation to Harvard.2 It was substantially different from what he could have submitted two years earlier, better organized, as E. P.-Thompsonian (despite its title) as a history of modern Colombia could be, conceptually confident in its adoptions (“possessive individualism”) and innovations (“popular liberalism” going “radical,” “brutal intimacy”), and shorter (even if in two volumes), because it stopped circa 1930. Before, he had so much on Viotá’s background that he felt he was “really writing…two dissertations--one about the foundations…the other about the movement itself.” The one he left in Cambridge was the first. Its argument in a (too long) sentence: Between 1870 and 1930 Viotá’s export-led, frontier-opening, politically handicapped coffee planters (Liberals under Conservative governments) made their tenants their worst enemies, practically squatters on their land, trespassers, poachers, moonshiners, smugglers, demanding squatter’s rights, publicly defiant of local and national officials, rioting in town over taxes in 1918, forming peasant leagues in the 1920s, staging rent strikes, forcing contracts on the planters, ever more “radical.” It hurt him to cut the thing in two, barely introducing “the movement,” Communist Viotá in action, 1930-1970. (“…a certain loss…because I wanted to write a larger history of rural rebellion.”) But the second part he would soon restore in the revision for his book.

1. Michael F. Jiménez, “Social Movements in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America: A Reconsideration [June 1985],” in Dan C. Hazen, ed., Latin American Masses and Minorities: Their Images and Realities (Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials, 1987), 2 vols., I, 49-66. 2. Michael Francis Jiménez, “The Limits of Export Capitalism: Economic Structure, Class, and Politics in a Colombian Coffee Municipality, 1900-1930” (1985), 2 vols. For their help he particularly thanked Charles Bergquist, Enrique Ogliastri, Marco Palacios, Hermes Tovar, Herbert Braun, and Catherine LeGrand. Jiménez received his Ph. D. from Harvard at its next awards of the degree in March 1986.

As only then it could, Princeton raised him to the promised assistant professorship. This gave him his first firm scholarly base. And having let go of his thesis he changed some intellectually. For at least 15 years he had thought he was a Marxist. 1 It was never Marxism’s dialectics, materialism, or analytical demands that attracted him, but its “absolute historicism.” Feeling “challenged” at Princeton to do more than he already had on “politics and culture,” especially “gender relations,” he did not quit Marxism, but he did subsume it (intact, he thought) into a universal, radical humanism. In the spring of ‘86 he joined Yale’s Latin American Labor History group, urging more study of peasant “civic culture.”2 Before long the group’s “heart and soul,” he pressed to include “the middle classes” in labor history. Recalling Johnson, he argued that middle-class “Jacobins” claiming “freedom and equality” had created both modern Latin American civil society and modern Latin American revolutionary voluntarism, a culture of contradictions for any “social movement,” including labor. For him too then class, gender, race, and capitalism became “social constructions.”

1.It may have been reading Hobsbawm on Viotá that made him want to be a Marxist. Gott (1971), op. cit., 226, had quoted a passage from E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Revolutionary Situation in Colombia,” The World Today (June 1963), pp. 248-258. 2. John French, “Third Yale Conference on Latin American Labor History,” International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 32 (Fall 1987), p. 80.

A sabbatical in 1987-88 Jiménez had planned to spend putting his book in order for publication. Instead he produced three impressive articles. In the first he cunningly elaborated his argument on “the middle classes” through an essay on contemporary Latin American “Catholic radicals.”1 If he missed the full importance of old Catholic Action for the new, post-1960 Catholic radicalism, he rightly explained this movement (as no one else in print then did) in terms of the long, broad run of Latin American “radical democratic politics,” civil, lay, and military. A second article came from his thesis (and would have been a perfect chapter in his book).2 Fifteen years of reading and research on Central Colombian planters, their projects, boasts, analyses, criticisms, laments, actual businesses, and ultimately fatal compromises between 1870 and 1930, Jiménez gracefully condensed into a poignant, compelling explanation of Viotá’s historical particularity, how its planters lasted as long as they did, and why finally they failed. The third article was another chunk from his thesis, revised under feminist criticism, on Viotá’s peasant women pre-1930.3 His original account of patriarchy “fractured” on the frontier, “brutal intimacy,” lordly assaults on tenant women primarily to degrade their fathers, husbands, brothers, working women persisting nonetheless in their independence, enterprise, and resistance, he redid into a brilliant, strongly persuasive argument that would have been crucial, as he suggested, to explaining Viotá comunista, post-1930. Despite a mystical lapse (“preconquest patterns” surviving “underground”), this was maybe the best, certainly one of the most significant, historical essays of his generation on Latin American gendered relations. On two of the most confusing issues for young historians then, “resistance” and “gender,” he was as always remarkably independent, true to his sources, lucid, and discriminating.

1.Michael F. Jiménez, “‘Citizens of the Kingdom’: Toward a Social History of Radical Christianity in Latin America,” International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 34 (Fall 1988), pp. 3-21. 2.Michael F. Jiménez, “Traveling Far in Grandfather’s Car: The Life Cycle of Central Colombian Coffee Estates. The Case of Viotá, Cundinamarca (1900-1930),” Hispanic American Historical Review, LXIX, 2 (May 1989), pp. 185-219. 3. Michael F. Jiménez, “Gender, Class, and the Roots of Peasant Resistance in Central Colombia, 1900-1930,” in Forrest L. Colburn, ed., Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (M. E. Sharpe, 1990), pp. 121-150.

He did not yet go back to his book, but ahead to the paramount question he had to answer to connect his “two dissertations”--so as to finish the book. He had not earlier connected “the foundations” and “the movement,” because he had not resolved the question of “the movement,” the relationship between Viotá’s Communist rebels of the 1930s and 40s and the Upper Magdalena’s Communist guerrillas organized in the mid-1960s, the most serious leftist force in the country in 1990, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, the FARC. As he now saw the question, he would have to refute the heaviest social science on 20th-century Colombia, the studies of the country’s civil war in the 1940s and 50s, a rural holocaust, La Violencia, before which Red Viotá had flourished, after which the FARC. And boldly he made a good first try; among the scholars he corrected were two historians he admired almost as much as Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Charles Bergquist. In his reinterpretation La Violencia was not simply “struggles for land,” or an aborted “social revolution,” or “Hobbesian” feuds, but “partisan slaughter,” during which, “beneath” which, at least in the Upper Magdalena, “the rural poor” were struggling “to be in, though not of, the market.”1 For nearly a century they had wanted not only land, but into the market “on their own terms.” The old “oppositional culture and politics,” the radical, democratic, egalitarian “possessive individualism” he knew in Viotá, was, he proposed, typical of the entire region. By implication (at least) Viotá’s history was the region’s history, in its “movement” the meaning of the movement at large since the 1960s, old frontier rebellions writ anew and on the move in the FARC. The argument stuck at assertion; Jiménez did not know enough about the FARC. With a young political scientist from Columbia expert on all Colombia’s guerrillas, he tried again.2 The argument went much farther, cogently connecting the old “radical democratic tradition” to “a radically democratic agrarian guerrilla,” representing the FARC as no more (or less) revolutionary than savvy, armed, anti-corporate, combat-ready homesteaders. But it did not take into account Colombia’s new, U.S.-demanded Cocaine Boom and U.S.-promoted Cocaine War, which was changing the FARC. Soon revised by its co-authors, the argument recognized the FARC’s shift from “local…revolutionary agrarianism” to a new “national insurrectionist strategy.”3 There Jimenez had the key to ending his book: connect Viotá and the FARC, add an epilogue on “radical democracy” up through the FARC’s bravest operation, its Unión Patriótica in 1985, and stop in 1987, when Colombia’s Dirtiest War (so far) began. But he did not see an end; he saw the old struggle continuing.

1.Michael F. Jiménez, “‘The Many Deaths of the Colombian Revolution’: Region, Class and Agrarian Rebellion in Central Colombia,” Papers on Latin America, No. 13 (Columbia University, Institute of Latin American and Iberian Studies, 1990). 2. Marc W. Chernick and Michael F. Jiménez, “Popular Liberalism and Radical Democracy: The Development of the Colombia Left, 1974-1990,” Conference Paper, No. 43 (Columbia University-New York University Consortium, 1990). 3. Marc W. Chernick and Michael F. Jiménez, “Popular Liberalism, Radical Democracy, and Marxism: Leftist Politics in Contemporary Colombia, 1974-1991,” in Barry Carr and Steve Ellner, eds., The Latin American Left: From the Fall of Allende to Perestroika (Westview Press, Latin American Bureau, 1993), pp. 61-81.

In April 1992 Jiménez remarried. Unable (still no book) to stay at Princeton, he accepted an appointment at Pitt (a haven of social history), and began teaching there in September ‘92. He and his wife soon had a son, and he did not return to “the field.” One of only two Americans (Frank Safford the other) invited by Colombian historians to an international historiographical seminar in Bogotá, he cautioned against too much “post-structuralism” in studying Colombia’s 20th-century social movements, and endorsed “resurrection of…a [Young Marxian?] tradition of radical political economy.”1 The next year he cut a piece of his thesis’s original, glorious, impossible Chapter III (“The Beverage of American Capitalism”) into a dazzling introduction to coffee consumerism, and revised other old pieces into another article (same argument as before) on why Upper Magdalena planters had failed by 1930.2 The year after, the only American in a Colombian collection on “the history of everyday life,” he blended pertinent parts of his thesis and new reading into a masterly essay on Colombia’s “everyday rural life,” emphasizing “struggles of the peasantry.”3 He and his wife had a daughter. Happy in Pittsburgh, thinking back again to Johnson, he did a deep reflection on Latin America’s modern “middle classes.” In an essay that should long interest scholars of the subject, he criticized “developmentalist” and “post-structural” neglect of it, vividly sketched Latin American “middle classes”’ special qualities, claims, and action, especially after 1930, insisted on both their contributions and their threats to civil society, noted the “radical democratic project” in Latin America’s “new social movements” in the 1970s and early 80s, and finally urged “being eminently clear about capitalism as a social construction.”4 He was again revising the manuscript of his book, when in October 2000 doctors found cancer in one of his kidneys. He died on September 1, 2001, his big manuscript still undone.5

1. Michael Jiménez, “En el taller del historiador: Comentario a la historiografía de movimientos sociales en Colombia: Siglo XX, in Bernardo Tovar Zambrano, comp., La historia al final del milenio: Ensayos de historiografía colombiana y latinoamericana (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1994), 2 vols., I, pp. 353-369. 2.Michael F. Jiménez, “‘From Plantation to Cup’: Coffee and Capitalism in the United States, 1830-1930,” and idem, “At the Banquet of Civilization: The Limits of Planter Hegemony in Early-Twentieth-Century Colombia,” in William Roseberry, Lowell Gudmundson, and Mario Samper Kutschbach, eds., Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 1995), pp. 38-64, 262-293 3.Michael F. Jiménez, “La vida rural cotidiana en la República,” in Beatriz Castro Carvajal, ed., Historia de la vida cotidiana en Colombia (Grupo Editorial Norma, 1996), pp. 161-203. 4.Michael F. Jiménez, “The Elision of the Middle Classes and Beyond: History, Politics, and Development Studies in Latin America’s ‘Short Twentieth Century,” in Jeremy Adelman, ed., Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History (Routledge, 1998, 1999?), pp. 207-228, 280-288. 5.Michael F. Jiménez, “Struggles on an Interior Shore: Wealth, Power, and Authority in the Colombian Andes” (532 pages, 2000).

Although he once described Thompson, whom he nearly revered, and Emilia Viotti da Costa, whom he much admired, as “‘post-structural’ Marxists,” he seems to have finally figured he was not. Whatever he meant by “the impact of gender on ‘the very construction of class,’” or “subaltern collective action,” he kept returning to a kind of historical materialism. As he explained Viotá, again and again, culture did not make its history; rather “history,” that is, “settlement patterns, economic organization and social change in the frontier area…since the sixteenth century,” made its culture and politics. But he kept arguing too that historical changes happened because of culture and politics. He could not think through the contradiction. At the end he most accurately described his scholarly work, as in the spirit of a book he had long loved, The Historian’s Craft. While for so long he had struggled to write in some Marxist vein, if only in honor of Viotá’s old reds, the women maybe more than the men, all along he had actually been following the great Marc Bloch, in that vast country where everything human mattered, anything human might be magic, and somehow even in dispute it was all one.

John Womack, Jr.
Cambridge, Mass.
March 6, 2002