gm3133@nyu.edu

Through time there have been very diverse understandings of what trauma is, who can be traumatized, and what can cause it. If, for instance, for the first psychoanalysts (Freud, Charcot, Janet) trauma was an illness that could be cured through talking-therapy, then only susceptible —sometimes abject— subjects could suffer from it, and, hence, the root to their traumas was growing from within. Whether it is true that, according to psychiatrist Judith Herman’s account, for Freud, in the beginning, the illness of hysteria was due to domestic abuse, Freud eventually took this argument back so that he would not be blamed for stating that it was the society that was ill and not just his patients (Herman, 12). However, as the political climate in the Western societies began to change (specially after the first and second World Wars), it became easier, and even more of a responsibility for other clinicians and scholars to recognize that a lot of people suffering psychologically —and even physically due to somatization— and affecting others around them were actually victims of greater events and not just of their own frailness. Herman states that “there is a spectrum of traumatic disorders, ranging from the effects of a single overwhelming event to the more complicated effects of prolonged and repeated abuse. Established diagnostic concepts, especially the severe personality disorders commonly diagnosed in women, have generally failed to recognize the impact of victimization.” (2) Ever since, other traumatic events of human nature have been taken into consideration by this discipline, for example, gender-based violence, the aftermaths of the great wars, the history of the Holocaust. But, exemplary as those are, what about other cartographies, what about the trauma of the conquest, of genocide and slavery, the colonial trauma?
In the colonies, at least in those under the rule of the Spanish crown, there were two terms used for referring euphemistically the practices of forced Christian conversion and genocide and forced displacement: “pacificación y reducción”, or “pacifying and reduction”. Via these two practices that involved hunting, torturing and disbanding entire indigenous nations the colonizers captured indigeneity and pretended, maybe accidentally, to turn it into something else: instead of free peoples, docile servants, workers, and eventually citizens. The cruelties of the Holocaust sparked the creation of Memory Studies, inspiring ample research on generational trauma (Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory), however, those tragic events happened less tha a century ago; could we conduct research on how indigenous psychology and memory suffered and still suffers the colony —which according to some authors such as Anne Stoler in Duress has changed but not ended—. Freud also stated that “We must treat his [their] illness not as an event from the past, but as a present-day force,” (151) if our societies still endure the crisis of colonial abuse, then we can understand that this specific trauma is a matter of the present. For Paul Connerton, that that is inscribed in the archives, or those material registers of what has happened during the last five centuries could be our first source for retrieving knowledge of those traumas, however, “We commonly consider inscription to be the privileged form of transmission of a society’s memories, and we see the infusion and elaboration of a society’s systems of inscription as making possible an exponential development of its capacity to remember. […] Yet it would be misleading, on this account, to underestimate the mnemonic importance and persistence of what is incorporated.” (102)
The readings have helped me think about what trauma does, how does it affect memory and gets embodied; from Freud again I take that “the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it, not as a memory, but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it”. For me, there’s different ways in which the colonial trauma has affected people of indigenous ascend —that would consider themselves mestizos or mixed-race— and self-identifying indigenous people: while some people have used their bodies to perpetuate their memories, in order to not forget where they come from and what has happened, others might indeed have erased from their memories and family histories the fact that unjustified systematic violence makes up a great part of our stories. And how does that violence get acted out, repeated?, my answer would be through racism, misogyny and ableism, the same categories that colonizers implemented for deciding who would occupy which place in their new order. Whether conscious or not, the body and psyche perform. This notion helps me understand in part the deeply rooted racism among most people of color in present-day Mexico; it gets performed at nuclear individual levels: just in my family, I grew up considering myself inferior for being browner than my sisters and mom, and my dad would often joke about how he used to be white, but got sunburn (a very common joke). But that’s not the most gruesome exampl of nowadays racism, anthropologist Rita Segato has studied how most woman killed in the region just because of being woman were also mostly indigenous or of indigenous ascend. It also helps me understand why, specially in the North, conservative political parties leaded by Catholic white people usually get the most votes, and how immigrants usually face intense social rejection (just this year, in March, around forty migrants died in a Detention Center in Ciudad Juarez due to a fire from which no one wanted to free them); the characteristics that the colonizer were looking for in the new population they were pacyfing and reducing are very visible to me in these instances: people need(ed) to be Catholic, not racialized (or “as little” as possible), not feminine subjects for possible sexual abuse, and not in a forced displacement situation in order to be granted some dignity.
For Herman, we can never forget that there is a political dimension to trauma, whether in its origins or in the compromise of working with people who suffer from it. While thinking about what to do with trauma I remind Freud’s words on the purpose of tehrapy, “the aim off these different techniques is […] to fill in gaps in memory; dynamically speaking is it to overcome resistances due to repression.” (147-148) For me, these gaps to fill are not only that indigenous and other racialized people suffered from incredible violence in the Americas, but that we are their descendants and that that trauma we are still in many occasions acting it out. Following what Herman says (about the problems of coming to terms with endemic abuses of power, 176), I wouldn’t think institutional retribution would be the only way for repair, but actual social rememberance and change.  Whether the latter is possible or not, I do believe that, as Cathy Caruth says, “the history of a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another”, although at an individual level and for some persons, not all, and definitely, not for “intercultural healing” as she proposes. That’s when I tart thinking of performance in its other sense, as an artistic political discipline, one that enables mutual listening and commotion, one that can, in some instances, serve a therapeutic purpose. As Bessel Van dear Kolk argues, “the polyvagal theory helped us understand and explain why all these disparate, unconventional techniques worked so well. It enabled us to become more conscious of combining top-down approaches (to activate social engagement) with bottom-up methods (to calm the physical tensions in the body).” (108)