Michael F. Jiménez (1948-2001)

Michael Jiménez was passionate about many things: the coffee lands and, above them, the high sabana of Colombia where he grew up; issues of social justice; the liberating potential of radical Catholicism; and his students’ capacity for critical understanding and engagement in social action. He was a gifted teacher, a spellbinding orator, a loving father and husband, and a lively, compassionate friend who left a lasting imprint on all who knew him. As a vivid storyteller, Michael communicated his love of history to his university students and his own children: at age five his son David insisted on delivering history lectures to his kindergarten class. Michael created and participated joyfully in all sorts of communities; one of the last, a moving testimony to the warmth Michael generated, was the website his brother created through which Michael and his wife communicated with those they cared about in the difficult months from February 2001, when Michael’s renal cell cancer recurred, until 1 September 2001, when he died all too soon at the age of 53.Michael was born in California in 1948, the eldest of three children, son of an Irish-American mother and a father of Spanish descent. When he was very young, the family moved to Bogotá where his father worked as a labor negotiator for the Texas Petroleum Company (Texaco). During his childhood in the high Andes, Michael became heart and soul Colombian. In Bogotá he studied at the Colegio Nueva Granada, the American school, where he began his life-long friendship with Herbert “Tico” Braun, son of a hardware store-owner who had migrated to Colombia from Germany. They would later become two of the leading historians of Colombia working in the United States. Michael returned to the U.S. for high school, and, as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Connecticut, he joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to oppose the war in Vietnam, which he saw as a peasant war. He did an M.A. in Latin American studies at Stanford where he studied with John J. Johnson, and then travelled through Latin America for a year, studying rural politics and society on a Thomas F. Watson fellowship, which was awarded to unusually creative undergraduates.In 1972 Michael began doctoral work at Harvard University, with John Womack. Before beginning his influential work on Zapata, Womack had intended to investigate the agrarian origins of violence in Colombia: his students Michael Jiménez and Mary Roldán were to do so in their own distinct, equally path-breaking ways. As Michael was completing his doctoral coursework his young wife Pamela Trigg died of cancer, leaving Michael to raise their infant daughter Christina on his own. (Gloria Emerson wrote about this period in Michael’s life in Some American Men [1985], reprinted in Vogue Magazine, which focused on how some progressive men were pioneering new lives and forging new values.)Michael’s Stanford M.A. thesis focused on the Colombian agrarian reform law of 1936; at Harvard he began what was to become a life-long inquiry, Braudelian in its depth, richness and scope, into the history of Viotá, an area of large coffee haciendas to the west of Bogotá that gave rise to an unusually creative, successful peasant movement in the 1920s and 1930s. The birth of agrarian radicalism in Viotá came to be expressed through peasant alliances with the nascent Colombian Communist party. Michael’s Harvard dissertation, on the origins of the Red Peasant Republic of Viotá, was the first in-depth study of a Colombian coffee municipio and all the actors there, landlords, peasants, politicians, tax collectors, lawyers, local merchants and chicha makers, their interactions, conflicts, and agreements.In 1982, before his thesis was done, Michael moved to Princeton, where he joined Stanley Stein who soon retired. Michael took up the post of instructor and then assistant professor of Latin American history. During his eleven years at Princeton, he was an immensely popular teacher, introducing courses on “Twentieth-Century Latin America,” “Tropical Commodities in the Modern World,” “Countrysides of the Atlantic World in the Long Nineteenth Century,” and winning the President’s Teaching Award. “I consider myself a leftist, a socialist, a marxist . . . a radical Christian,” Michael told an interviewer in 1994 (see Victoria Peralta and Michael La Rosa, eds., Los colombianistas [Santa Fé de Bogotá: Planeta Colombiana Ed., 1997], 196–208). His classes, with their 80-page syllabi, were serious and wide-ranging, combining political economy and the history of social classes with a vigorous sense of lived experience. Students from the Princeton years remember with respect and affection his decency, his humane spirit, his integrity, and his insistence that history matters for the present and the future. He also chaired the Princeton Borough Civil Rights Commission, and, in 1991, was an adjunct professor at the New School for Social Research.At Princeton, Michael began the long process of rewriting the dissertation to make it the book he envisaged. He intended to produce a masterwork, ranging from the late eighteenth century to the present, connecting the coffee region of western Cundinamarca to the nation and the Atlantic world. This was to be a work of comparative history that would bring together political economy, culture, politics, gender analysis, and that would help us make sense of twentieth-century Colombia, the breakdown of social bargaining, the possibilities for peace and the advent of war. Over the years, elaborating and reelaborating the manuscript became an immense burden that weighed on him—by 1993 it was not done and so he moved to the University of Pittsburgh with its large Latin American studies program. At the same time, reworking the book with new analytical perspectives and new sources was his joy; it was an essential dimension of the world he inhabited and he wrote beautifully with great insight, verve and care in a prose that is a delight to read. Michael submitted the book to Duke University Press in September 2000, just as he came up for tenure at Pittsburgh, hardly a month before the cancer was diagnosed.Over the years, Michael published many substantive articles, some directly related to his Viotá investigation and some think-pieces that went off in new directions. Taken together these writings make a major contribution to Colombian and Latin American history. Three articles deal with coffee: one, a fascinating investigation of the development of coffee consumer markets and advertising practices in North America; and the others, subtle studies of the multiple problems faced by the businessmen who founded coffee haciendas in western Cundinamarca. This revisionist analysis of landlords provides an insider’s view of their ongoing struggles with unstable markets, unresponsive government and contestatory labor, lending new insights into the difficulties of establishing profitable export enterprises in Latin America. Michael delved into the gendered cultural tensions that informed landlord-tenant relations: he wrote an influential article, published in Spanish and English, on landlords’ sexual coercion of peasant women and peasant responses, and, in his book, explored the taxing of home-brew liquor produced by women as a major element in peasant unrest.Michael was highly respected in Colombia, especially among the new generation of Colombian social historians. Arturo Alape was the mentor who introduced him to fieldwork in Viotá; and he counted among his good friends Mauricio Archila, Colombia’s most prominent labor historian who always thanked Michael in his acknowledgements, and Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, the economic historian of Colombian elites who dedicated his most recent book to Michael. Michael also maintained warm academic relations with Bernardo Tovar, Medófilo Medina, Alberto Flórez, Ana María Bidegain, and Fernán González. Michael was the only foreigner invited to contribute to a volume on the history of everyday life (he wrote on the countryside), and his commentary on approaches to the study of social movements at the important conference on Colombian historiography held in Bogotá in 1993 rendered Michael’s wide theoretical knowledge and deep understanding of Colombia accessible to university students there. He also frequently exchanged ideas with investigators at the progressive Jesuit Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular (CINEP) whose socially engaged research he admired.In the early 1990s, his first daughter nearly grown, Michael married Lynn Sanborne with whom he had two children, David Manuel and Eliza Rose. At Pittsburgh as at Princeton, Michael attracted hundreds of enthusiastic undergraduates; he participated actively in training graduate students, several of whom, including James Sanders and Gary Long, worked on Colombia with him, and he often contributed to the Latin American Labor History Conference. At Pittsburgh, Michael became involved in national debates on history teaching: in 1995 he served as a panelist to review the National History Standards for the Council on Basic Education in Washington, D.C.As the violence in Colombia intensified, he began publishing on agrarian radicalism and the guerrilla movements. Michael’s study of the divergences of official liberalism and popular liberalism in Colombia and of how popular liberalism, associated with small property and peasant autonomy, evolved into agrarian communism is an original argument that helps explain the origins of the FARC guerrilla movement. His article with his close friend Marc Chernick on the logic of the Left in Colombia is perhaps the best interpretation in English of why and how guerrilla groups emerged in Colombia in the 1960s and 1970s; and at Lehigh University in 1999 he explained the causes of the present crisis in Colombia in a sophisticated, vigorously argued conference paper that deserves publication.Beyond Colombia, Michael wrote two pathbreaking essays on major issues in twentieth-century Latin American history—Liberation Theology and the role of the middle classes. In both, Michael expressed deep concern with prospects for radical democratic projects, and he challenged Latin American historians to grapple with how to “address the political and moral questions of power, authority and resistance in the contemporary world.”In one of the two laudatory reports that led Duke University Press to accept his long-awaited book manuscript, a reader wrote, “Michael Jimenez has long been viewed as one of the most promising Latin American historians of his generation.” It is a great loss for his family, the many students he inspired, and the profession that he died so prematurely.(I highly recommend John Womack Jr.’s excellent “Eulogy for Michael F. Jiménez” on the Internet at www.geocities.com/michael_f_jimenez/womack.htm)

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.