2007 CLAH Luncheon Address: History and the Goddess Fortune: The Case of Santiago de Liniers

"As ill-luck would have it"¹

"As good luck would have it"²

First let me welcome y'all to Atlanta.

Let me begin by telling you what I'm not going to do. There is no subaltern theory, gender theory, queer theory nor any discussion of race, class and gender (RCG) in my talk. Nothing will be constructed, deconstructed, structured, conceptualized or historicized. I will not speak of hegemony or hegemonic processes, "weapons of the weak" or contested terrains, discursive mechanisms or hidden discourses and I will not unpack concepts, tease out or discover embedded meanings or interrogate silences. Lastly, in this talk there are no subalterns and no one is contesting, negotiating, empowering or empowered.

Instead, today I want to talk about history and the Goddess Fortune. By fortune, I don't mean earned or inherited monetary wealth. Instead I'm using the term in the way it has been used since the ancient Greeks, that is good or bad fortune, good or bad luck.³ I've chosen to talk about luck because I believe it's an important element in history that tends to be overlooked. I also thought it would be a more interesting topic than colonial Argentine historiography, which to say the least, has an extremely limited appeal.

To begin with I do believe in luck, for by any measure I've experienced a great deal of it in my life. For starters, I married a man that I meet in Asunción, Paraguay and who I knew for three days when we tied the knot. We've been married for 41 years. That's luck! And I'm lucky enough to live in Atlanta, Georgia, where I'm sure you've noticed the AHA is now meeting. Clearly CLAH must be going through some budgetary constraints; hence, here I am: one of the few older historians (and a woman to boot) who resides in this fair city. Of course one person's good luck may be someone else's bad luck. So be forewarned.

I not only believe in luck in my personal life, but in my professional life. And I don't think I'm the only one in this room who has had the experience of accidentally coming across a document that turned out to be essential to an argument or to an entire study. We Latin American historians, often working in archives that are poorly catalogued or not catalogued at all, all have stories of lucky finds.

Not only have we experienced luck in our research, but a belief in luck is imbedded in Western culture. Luck can be on a small scale, something that happens to you or me, or on a large scale. We wish each other "good luck," when we sign off, undertake something new or depart on a journey both long or short. Thucydides mentions the good fortune of the Athenians, who were able to successfully take the island of Sphacteria because a fire revealed the Spartans' location. But there is also bad luck such as the ill fortune, in the form of extraordinary bad weather and high seas, that played an important role in the destruction of the Spanish Armada along the west coast of Ireland.⁴

I'm not suggesting that everything is a matter of luck, or that we and the historical actors that we study are devoid of agency. People are capable of acting on their own volition and changing the course of events. But I do think there's more to what happens than agency, or volition, or logical outcomes of action. In the words of the popular saying "stuff happens" and this is a form of luck.

To further illustrate how luck is an important factor in history, I'm going to talk about a man in lived in the Río de la Plata during the late eighteenth century: Santiago Liniers, described by his contemporaries as born "to suffer disgrace in spite of being zealous and having great knowledge and intelligence."⁵ Liniers...