Teaching Critical Histories of Latin American Archives as Feminist Pedagogy

This paper reflects on the practice of teaching critical archive studies—within colonial Latin American history, historiography, and methodology—as feminist pedagogy. Helping students to read primary documents critically is a staple for most teachers of history at the college level, and for historians of women and gender in Latin America, it is an important way of illustrating some of the ways that historical gender norms and power relationships shaped the contours of the societies under study, as well as how they have shaped the production of knowledge about those societies. It is less common, however, to approach the history, organization, and practices of Latin American archives in the same way. In the context of training graduate students in historiography and historical methodology, teaching critical archive theory—alongside a critical history of the formation, organization, and continued knowledge and information practices of specific Latin American archives—can serve as another layer of feminist historical analysis to equip future historians of women and gender with the tools to develop new methodological approaches to archives—both specific and in general. In addition, incorporating theories and histories of archives into our undergraduate courses, alongside the reading of primary documents, can help students think critically about what they have read and what it is possible to know about women’s lives in particular and about the workings of gender and patriarchy in colonial Latin America.