Buffalo Soldiers

This dissertation examines the historical and archaeological traces of a group of Black, Mixed-Race, and Mexican U.S. Army laundresses’ and high ranking enlisted soldiers’ families who lived in a small neighborhood of laundresses’ quarters at the late nineteenth century Fort Davis, Texas. This far West Texas frontier post is distinguished by its association with Black enlisted troops and a ethno-racially diverse population situated  on both a geographic frontier and a race relations frontier. In this complex environ, the families of laundresses and high ranked enlisted soldiers were positioned in such a way that their socio-economic and military status marked them as community leaders and care-takers; as such, the inhabitants at the quarters were situated on the edge, yet at the center of military and civilian life, working-class and middle-class status, and Black-White-Mexican race relations. Thus, their daily interactions occurred across various scales — with family members inside the home, between larger groups of fellow working women and soldiers, within the larger racialized military community, and as members of the larger town community.

I suggest that the laundresses’ quarters’ community’s location within a matrix of highly ambiguous social and geographic landscapes resulted in inhabitants constantly embodying and actively negotiating between multiple lived realities that were shaped by various coexisting and (sometimes) conflicting ideologies. I employ a queer theoretical framework combined with third-space theory to understand the fragmentation and fluidity of experiences that occurred throughout the resident’s daily lives and social interactions. (Re)orienting how identification processes in cultural meeting spaces shaped and altered structuring beliefs highlights contextually specific past practices and performances and how enmeshed their identities truly were. In particular, the material traces of past identity making behaviors can bring to light the dis/misorientations of social actors that do not fit the static and boxed categories so often used to describe and order stories of the past. Rather than trying to describe the complexly variable experiences of past peoples with categorizable identities, I show that it is more effective to engage the ambivalent, inconsistent, and diverse meanings in the material record. This allows for a more nuanced understanding of the past and illustrates how queer moments of unintelligibility regularly occur in lived reality, both past and present.

Largely ignored by scholarship and increasingly occluded in historical memory, Tombolo was once so central to Italian culture and politics that even allusive references to the term could conjure the doubt, anxiety, and indignation of a society working to recover after the war. A pine grove located between Pisa and Livorno, Tombolo housed a large American encampment, which was both a key staging site for the Allied invasion of Italy and a centre of power for the post-war American occupation. It was also the site of a flourishing black market, rampant prostitution, and racial tensions, which combined to give it an outsized role in the Allied occupation as well as in the Italian imagination. Indeed, a mix of prurience and prejudice made Tombolo a kind of Italian obsession after the war. It became the "città proibita" or forbidden city, the subject of lurid tales of white slavery, murder, and kidnapping, money laundering, and thefts totalling billions of lire. In countless journalistic exposes, short stories, novels, and even two neorealist films-Tombolo, paradiso nero (Ferroni, 1947) and Senza pietà (Lattuada, 1948)-Tombolo was the staging ground for a cultural confrontation with the transgressions of the Second World War and the post-war occupation. As such representations made clear, violent clashes in Tombolo pitted not only American against Italian but also white against black, northern against southern, man against woman, Right against Left. In art as in life, therefore, Tombolo became the "contact zone" for the competing racial regimes of Jim Crow and Fascism, and for the resistance against those regimes: the nascent American Civil Rights movement and Italian anti-Fascism. Then it was largely-but not entirely-forgotten. I argue that, despite this willful act of collective forgetting, the contact and conflict of Tombolo substantially re-shaped both Italian and American society in the years that followed the conclusion of the Second World War.

Born a slave in Kentucky, William Gibson served in both the famous 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry during the American Civil War under his alias John Saunders and as a Buffalo Soldier with the 10th United States Cavalry. As a boy, he self-emancipated and took the Underground Railroad to freedom and relative safety from the Refugee Slave Act of 1850 in Chatham, Canada West. He was the only member of his family to seek freedom before the war.

The Second Oregon Volunteers played an important role in the Spanish-American and Philippine Wars from the summer of 1898 to the spring of 1899. They were among the first U.S. soldiers to land in the Philippines; they occupied and guarded the city of Manila when the war against Aguinaldo’s Philippine nationalists commenced, and they served in the interior during the campaigns of early 1899. There is considerable evidence that these Oregon soldiers took part in the same sorts of war atrocities described in the Congressional hearings of 1902. Their private accounts of the war provide use with valuable insight into the soldier’s vision of the war, of their own actions, and of their visions of the enemy. Their writings suggest that they understood their Filipino enemies through the lens of American race relations.  They patterned their vision of Filipinos on their conception of other non-white peoples of the United States. In so doing, Oregon soldiers were able to engaging in wartime practices that would have been considered barbaric if carried out against European adversaries.

The actions and attitudes of the Oregon soldiers do not stand out as anomalous in the history of the war. They are interesting precisely because they appear so representative. Their conduct in the war was no different than that of other state volunteer or U.S. regular regiments.  The Oregon Volunteers were ordinary citizens who served only briefly as soldiers in the midst of the normal civic and professional lives.  Their attitudes on the war, on race, and on America’s mission in the world are consistent with those expressed by their fellow Oregonians at home, their leaders in the federal government, and many of the most influential writers of the day.