Ann S. Blum (1950–2015)

Abstract

Ann S. Blum, a preeminent historian of the Mexican family, died on November 28, 2015, 16 months after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Ann's compassion and keen intelligence permeated her scholarship, teaching, and leadership in the field of Latin American history. Raised in an academic family, Ann eventually returned to academia on a circuitous but seemingly inevitable path, one always grounded in the meaningful relations she forged with friends and colleagues along the way. Her first book on scientific illustration and her second on family, work, and welfare in Mexico were both foundational in their respective fields. Her mentoring—of her diverse undergraduates at the University of Massachusetts Boston, of a whole generation of graduate students at the Oaxaca Summer Institute, and of her colleagues in Latin American history—made her a pillar of humanity and intelligence in our scholarly community.As an undergraduate, Ann twice dropped out of Smith College to travel and pursue a variety of interests. Her penchant for ordering and analysis emerged as she catalogued photographs of archaeological digs for the School of American Research in Santa Fe and, later, as an archivist at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, work that nurtured her growing enthusiasm for scientific illustration. There she began a series of projects that culminated in her prizewinning book Picturing Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration (Princeton University Press, 1993). Widely praised as an indispensable work in US natural history, Picturing Nature examined the role of scientific illustrators in the emergence of professional zoology in the nineteenth century. Itself richly illustrated with artists' published renderings of birds and wildlife, Picturing Nature provided a definitive cultural and social history of scientific illustration, illuminating the taxonomies of scientific representation as well as the social relations between artists and scientists.Like her early publication record, Ann's educational career demonstrated her independent and innovative spirit. She returned to college to complete her BA in the mid-1980s, designing her own degree in American studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she would later return to teach after earning her PhD in 1998. As a graduate student in Latin American history at the University of California, Berkeley, Ann quickly became a kind of intellectual and emotional touchstone for a broad cohort of students in Latin American studies, a model of integrity and collaboration in the often-competitive world of graduate studies. Fellow students relied on Ann to lead productive seminar discussions, provide astute and humorous commentary, and give generous advice on papers and proposals.The Berkeley years also framed Ann's pivot from the study of scientific representation to the history of the family, labor relations, and the state in Mexico. Critically engaged with emergent trends in Latin American social history, Ann devised an innovative approach to the family, eschewing romanticized notions of affective ties and patriarchal norms in favor of analyzing the operation of gender and generational hierarchies in the formation (and dissolution) of urban Mexican working-class families in the decades surrounding the revolution. Ann also brought from her previous work on scientific illustration a continued interest in visual culture that greatly enriched her research and publications.From the outset, Ann unapologetically embraced her identity as a historian of childhood and family, an emergent field that her work would transform, define, and advance as an important area in the history of Latin America and elsewhere. Grounded in the realities of her own family history as a working mother of son Vann (who came to Ann and her husband, the scholar Peter Taylor, through an open adoption that has since given them a wide extended family), Ann brought an enviable focus and discipline to her field research, showing up before the archive doors opened, working through the day, and returning home cheerfully to sort out the jewels and puzzles contained in her notes. But even within this tight research regime, as her students and colleagues will attest, Ann always made time to share her discoveries and debate their meaning over tasty meals and many cups of coffee. Ann would also deploy her study of the Mexican family to challenge the idea that histories of childhood and family could exist outside politics: “Students and other scholars sometimes ask me why I study the family when there are other far more important, more political topics. . . . The family is political and it is key to our understanding of politics on intimate, national, and global scales.”1Ann's total mastery of this new field was reflected in her doctoral dissertation, which won the best dissertation prize of the New England Council of Latin American Studies in 1998. Her article on child circulation, published in the same year, quickly became a guiding work for an emerging generation of infantólogas in Latin America and beyond. Another article from this project, “Cleaning the Revolutionary Household: Domestic Servants and Public Welfare in Mexico City, 1900–1935” (2004), is one of the best discussions of this elusive group of workers for any pre-1945 period for any country in Latin America. By approaching domestic service through changing informal and formal patterns of adoption, Ann explored the relations and negotiations of domestic servants among themselves (as mothers and daughters), with their employers (as employers and adopters), and with the state (as trainers, regulators, and protectors). That article won the 2004 best article award from the Labor Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association as a first-rate example of the new new labor history written around issues of gender.Five years later, in Domestic Economies: Family, Work, and Welfare in Mexico City, 1884–1943 (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), Ann made an indelible imprint on the scholarship of family history, the history of childhood, and welfare, gender, and labor in modern Mexican and Latin American history. For Mexicanists in particular, Ann fundamentally changed the way we think about the relationship of the state to the family and broke open the history of childhood. First, Ann skillfully characterized the modern Mexican state, rendering it palpable in the form of the institutions, agencies, ideologies, programs, and services that Mexicans interacted with every day. By analyzing the degree to which the 1910 revolution transformed families and state policy, Ann convincingly showed that although the postrevolutionary state rejected Porfirian explanations of vice and poverty and dramatically expanded the number and scope of public welfare actors who sought to incorporate the urban poor, after 1910 the Mexican state perpetuated established gender roles and privileged a middle-class model of a revolutionary family (responsible wage-earning fathers, virtuous housekeeping mothers, protected children) that was rooted in the Porfiriato. In this periodization and careful balance between change and continuity, Ann's work engaged with the best of recent social and cultural histories of the Porfirian and postrevolutionary periods.Second, in Domestic Economies Ann developed an increasingly child-centered analysis, looking to discourses about and experiences of children as fertile ground for understanding the evolving state and popular understandings of the Mexican family. A gentle skepticism fueled her incisive, deconstructivist approach to state projects and their advocates. By looking at patterns of child circulation and welfare policy, Ann showed how motherhood was unevenly constructed across classes in large part by state policies and prevailing moral ideologies about illegitimacy. She dismissed the fictive script of the monolithic welfare state, deftly demonstrating how state-sponsored orphans actually circulated among and between networks of mothers, domestic workers, and state officials. By examining adoption petitions, she revealed the ways that potential adoptive parents and adoptees articulated their understanding of the state's message about the revolutionary family. Finally, ever attentive to the material, symbolic, and semiotic power of work, she described families in terms of the respective labor—compensated or not, gendered and unevenly distributed—of their individual members. In the last several years, Ann advanced her new project on fatherhood and work in Mexico, drawing on a rich collection of men's autobiographical writing to deepen our understanding of the shape of the family by analyzing the historical construction of masculinity through fatherhood. Those of us who saw or read her initial presentations of this project looked forward to watching it develop with the grace and erudition of her previous research.From 2000, Ann deployed her incisive wit, collaborative energy, and engaging pedagogy at UMass Boston, where she served as chair of Latin American and Iberian Studies and reshaped its interdisciplinary and area studies scope. In addition to her warm mentorship of junior colleagues, Ann dedicated countless hours to the practice of faculty governance, defending student and faculty rights with equal vigor, compassion, and insight. In courses spanning the history of Latin America and Mexico as well as topics in film, revolution, food, and popular culture, Ann was known for her student-centered and labor-intensive approach to teaching undergraduates. Her mentorship inspired many to follow Ann's path as a scholar-teacher in Latin American history.Ann's teaching and mentorship extended internationally through her work (since 1999) at the Oaxaca Summer Institute, a yearly month-long graduate seminar on modern Mexican history and culture held in Oaxaca, Mexico. With Bill French and Bill Beezley, she introduced a whole generation of US and Mexican graduate students to gender history, the history of childhood and the family, and methods of life writing, and she served as role model and mentor as students conceptualized and developed their research. Always a stickler for high standards of critical analysis and archival research and inspired by Latin American struggles for social justice, Ann led by example as a teacher and colleague.Ann was the kind of scholar whose modesty and integrity infused and animated her other work, from committee service at UMass Boston to panels organized on domestic service history and Central American scholarship and the teaching of her many immigrant and first-generation college students. Her character and kindness were evident even to those who met her briefly, from the least experienced panel presenter to the technician staffing a conference panel. Distant friends and colleagues always looked forward to those times when Ann Blum would return, smiling and ever thoughtful, into our lives: a panel in Chicago or New York, a coffee in the Zócalo, or a hike in the hills of Oaxaca. We have lost a fine scholar, valued mentor, and dear friend.