Essay on Internalized Oppression and the Culture of Silence

How does the life, and death, of a person who was hung 168 years ago affect the lives of people today? The truth is, on the surface level it does not, but without looking at the politics of the time to find reasonings in their judgment one cannot delve into the truth of how the story of Josefa Segovia. To answer this question I will be using an argument that I first heard during my second lecture of this class: “History is not always spoken as linear, sometimes it is cyclical” to show how the inconsistent deliverance of her side of the truth which was lost to the word of a land-holding white man. In this examination of Josefa Segovia’s unclearly written story, I will prove that history is not only part of the past, but of how the people of today “reconstruct the past”, as well as examine how Truillot proves an ideology of the Four “I’s” of Oppression which I will use to deconstruct the narratives of this story (Coloradoinclusivefunders.Org, 2010).

Josefa Segovia, aka 'Juanita' aka Inez Pari lived in a period where land-holding white men held the power, which comes as no surprise. But more importantly, a post-US/Mexico War period where most, if not all, natives of the Mexico territories were scrutinized and where the ink of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was still fresh but already fading away from the minds of people in power. During this time the Gold Rush and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought many cases to courts in the newly acquired land - consistent with a high number of lynchings. Although the subject of our narrative was not like the majority of people who were coming to California in search of riches, neither was she someone who could benefit from any sort of Land Act instituted to reclaim property, Josefa was the first and only woman to be hanged in California.

However, I believe she was the only one to be “worthy” of her story being written and told. Although I would like to believe men in power would have the reasoning to punish women who have committed crimes previously, I find it hard to believe that the first and only woman who was lynched was also Mexican when the majority of the population during the events of 1851 were white Americans (Web.archive.org., 1988). To be fair, many critics of the Western legal process felt that juries and judges were too merciful when convicting defendants. These same people who defended lynching as a valid form of justified action also criticized the expenses incurred through judicial proceedings for which they blamed lawyers. Not only is the way the law works a form of Interpersonal Oppression but it is also internalized oppression (Coloradoinclusivefunders.Org, 2010). The Mob mentality of these times made people believe that they had the right to enact whatever justice they saw fit, which is obvious in the “trial” of Josefa.

The hasty nature of the trial, without a doubt, had something to do with the impact of racial tensions lingering from the recent War of the United States Against Mexico. Had Josefa been a white woman, people would probably have waited for a legal trial to sentence her. This incident continues to resonate with many young and old people of today because California sentenced to death the first woman by its legal system before even a year of being a state.

Ironically, the trial occurred the day after the country’s Fourth of July celebration, and the first year that California celebrated as a state. The residents of the town of Downieville, like most towns in the area, took advantage of the celebration to be as rowdy as possible. The town was full of tourists and residents who were ready to gamble, drink, and fight. From a sociological standpoint, you can look at Josefa’s, and her husband or boyfriend Juan aka “Jose”, way of living as another reason for their institutional and internalized oppression. The way they are oppressed is found in their livelihood, Jose who works in a saloon, and Josefa who presumably was not allowed to work due to being a woman, accompany him. If one sits down and analyzes the danger of being a dealer, especially during a time when people feel their freedoms are at an all-time high, you can assume that the couple was on edge making sure nothing would occur at their place of work and protecting themselves.

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Trouillot argues during the process and production of history, silences are constructed during four different points: “the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)” (Trouillot 26). He continues to back his assertion of these four points of motion by stating that “any historical narrative is a bundle of silences, the result of a unique process.” (27) He defines silence as dissection of active dialects where history is the “synthesis”.” (48) A historical source must be evaluated both in terms of how it was made, the circumstances that might have affected its creation, and how it is being viewed years later. In this way, history and the consumption of history by the public should be a dual process: historians need to understand and contextualize how and why this source or product was created as well as help the public to understand why they are viewing the source or product in a way that they are doing so.

This incident portrayed the full sadism and cruelty in which Anglos enforced their “justice” on Mexicans. In retaliation for the murder of an itinerant Methodist minister, according to one description: “Clusters of hair torn from the scalp and other signs of lengthy torture were manifest” (100). Family members and mass outraged by this violent act eventually led to a jury against Reverend Oscar P. Mcmains for the murder of Cruz Vega, however, despite the verbal admittance of his role, his “eloquent defense” led him to only be found guilty in the fifth degree, and eventually, all charges were dropped.

Ultimately Trouillot is concerned with power: how it is used and who wields it, how this power results in the silencing of some histories but not others, and how power impacts and constructs the dominant narratives of history. Our Western historiography remains incomplete without attempting to recover these silences. As historians and public historians, we must be aware of these silences and work to remedy them while remaining educationally skeptical about our dominant narrative of history. We must also be aware of how these silences impact the public we are seeking to engage.

Antonia Castañeda argues that the predominant trend in United States history was to exclude women, and women of color in particular, as actors, narrators, and subjects of history. Even within women’s history, there are internal divisions in terms of how class, gender, race, and violence are written.

These kinds of oppressive attitudes and behaviors are backed up by institutional arrangements. This helps to clarify the confusion around what some claim to be 'reverse racism'. People of color can have prejudices against and anger towards white people, or individual white people. They can act out those feelings in destructive and harmful ways toward whites. But in almost every case, this acting out will be severely punished. The force of the police and the courts, or at least a gang of whites getting even, will come crashing down on those people of color. The individual prejudice of black people, for example, is not backed up by the legal system and prevailing white institutions. The oppressed group, therefore, does not have the power to enforce its prejudices, unlike the dominant group.