Branding and the Scars of Memory

Lowell Gudmundson, Mount Holyoke College

The words brand, or even “branding,” are staples of early 21^st century capitalist, coded language, with institutions as diverse as banks, clothiers, and colleges agonizing over just how to cultivate “brand image” or “brand loyalty,” while occupying or seeking this or that “market niche.” If imitation constitutes the sincerest form of flattery, then corporate leaders have recently found no shortage of sincere imitators in colleges and universities, large and small, for the first time offering “naming rights” not only to buildings but even to colleges and departments in exchange for generous financial support, a very oblique and personalized form of branding to be sure. Even librarians are being encouraged to consider just how to cultivate their own strategies for brand recognition and loyalty, using the discount retailer Target as their model. Witness the recent article in the on-line version of one of their professional journals: view text

While one person’s strategy for success may be another’s standard of vulgarity, it should come as no surprise that the same capitalist societies in the Americas that never squarely faced the issues of economic justice or reparations tied to four centuries or more of slave labor in their own development should so blithely employ a term, branding, that to others might well have very different, deeply offensive associations. Appropriately sanitized versions of our shared American history have long had the uncanny ability to avoid saying certain things while freely borrowing the terms once used for entirely different practices. In the recent controversy over appropriate standards for the teaching of history to middle school students in Minnesota, for example, those who opposed studying the economics of slavery in American history revealingly admitted that if the fact that in the American past human beings had been bought and sold, exposure to that fact could “prejudice the students against a free market economy." [view text]

Far more sophisticated elisions are to be found in the “educational materials” developed by the trade group, the “Cotton Council of North America.” Seeking to build on their highly successful “fabric of our lives” marketing campaigns of the past, the Council prepared an historical essay on “Cotton: The Perennial Patriot,” which mentions by name Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson, Eli Whitney, and even the Civil War, but chooses to name neither African Americans nor slavery as part of the story. [view text] Corporate, or in this case, commodity branding can even be pursued in the full historical view of those who suffered branding, without the least hint of bad conscience!

The scars of historical memory tied to branding remain highly visible, however, among people of African descent throughout the Americas. Among all those who trace their ancestry to one particular town in Guatemala this is especially true. Far from an antiseptic, marketing term for today’s consumer society, branding has obsessed many of those who grew up in San Gerónimo, Baja Verapaz during the first half of the 20^th century. As conversational trope, archival obsession, or resounding denunciation, elder chomeños all seem to have one or another version of the horrific legend to communicate to anyone willing to listen. Here branding and its discussion implicitly maps out both a shared communal history and, paradoxically, a way to honor its victims, their own forbearers.

Each version of this communal history had its own distinctive features. Many would claim that the practice of branding continued long after the formal abolition of slavery (in 1824). Fewer might follow this up by invoking indirect eyewitness testimony or proof from third parties, claiming that someone or other had seen such scars on elder relatives in the early 20th century. Others would tell of equally horrific, if more remote in time, practices under slavery of facial or forehead branding rather than the more common assumption of the practice of non-visible brand markings to be hidden under clothing. Whatever the version and the placement of horrific accent or emphasis, this obsession with telling the tale of a slavery denounced in the telling itself proves unsettling to any listener foreign to the conventions of the elder villagers, most now living in the capital, Guatemala City.

Where did this particular discursive obsession come from? Surely not from direct observation, despite the more radical claims of eyewitness testimony by some. Surely not just from villagers' extraordinary discernment of this uniquely vicious dehumanizing intent on the part of those who branded human beings as chattel, much less as a protest against the callous retention of the term by today's all too oblivious leaders of free-market societies. How, why, when did this discursive strategy become enshrined as part of the local oral tradition among a people whose interactions with literate society and its textual traditions is spotty at best?

As with many other aspects of historical memory for those who grew up in San Geronimo before mid-century, the native-son intellectual and would-be historian, Victor Flores Lucas, seems to have planted the seeds of powerful beliefs and conventions. Just as with his obsession with San Geronimo's Colonial heritage of architectural distinction, its Dominican religious organization as a slave community owned by the Order, and most especially its African descent, Flores Lucas was clearly obsessed by branding and its historical meanings. In his rambling, nearly 800 page manuscript, never published in his lifetime, Flores Lucas devotes a small section to describing his search in the archive (AGCA) for original drawings of what he believed to be the brand used to mark all slaves legally imported into Guatemala during the Colonial Period, the colloquially termed "Casimba." And while few if any of his fellow chomeños and residents of the capital active in the community association ever saw this writing, his tireless participation in the group and equally tireless recitation of his historical facts/findings within the group seem to have had a major impact in forming opinions retained as part of oral traditions.   Victor Flores Lucas clearly sought out historical evidence that would ennoble his community by way of denouncing the practices imposed on them by their oppressors.  Oddly, he studiously avoided denouncing those oppressors by name, perhaps for fear of compromising some of his many other story lines - Dominican veneration, happy endings, struggle and achievement, etc. He did, however, squarely place himself and his mother's family among the slaves, those of African descent, those branded. His view of things was clearly picked up and repeated by his fellow chomeños, whether they also placed themselves and their families in all these same categories then or now, perhaps as a way both of belonging in the present and sharing in the condemnation of past slavery by conjuring up this particularly vivid and painful image.

Portrait of Victor Flores Lucas Drawing from the original document This iron was named “Casimba”; it was used to brand colored slaves from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

In so doing his noteworthy accomplishments as a local historian pale in comparison to his salutary linguistic warning. His archival obsession and conversational impact powerfully and uncomfortably remind us of the non-neutrality and non-transparency of language. If the ignorance of history leads to its repetition, a sure sign of this as a likely outcome can be found in the ignorant use of hurtful, indeed obscene language, as if it too had no history, no freight, no horrific imagery deeply embedded in its casual usage.