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  • In Memoriam: R. Douglas Cope (1955–2019)
  • Jeremy Ravi Mumford

R. Douglas Cope, Associate Professor of History at Brown University, died on October 6, 2019, at Rhode Island Hospital. He was 64 years old. Doug was the author of the influential 1994 book, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (University of Wisconsin Press), and a legendary teacher at Brown for over 30 years.

Growing up in a working-class family in Port Huron, Michigan, Doug earned an associate’s degree in Humanities from the St. Clair County Community College in 1977, and a BA in History from Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, in 1979. He went to the University of Wisconsin–Madison for his PhD, where he worked with Thomas Skidmore, Florencia Mallon and Steve J. Stern. At Wisconsin, Doug was part of an influential cohort of social historians of Latin America who channeled leftist political commitments into rigorous and innovative research strategies. His dissertation, which he began as a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico City, formed the first stage of a lifelong, deeply personal engagement with the history of the poor and working classes in colonial Mexico City. He earned his PhD in 1987 and published The Limits of Racial Domination in 1994.

The Limits of Racial Domination investigated the relationship between race and class in mid-colonial Mexico City, through the lived experience of so-called casta identities: negro, mulato, mestizo, zambo, and others. New Spain was a center for race ideology in the Hispanic world. Although the baroque system of racial subcategories catalogued in Mexican casta paintings was largely imaginary, the law imposed real and often punitive distinctions between indigenous, mestizo, African-descendant, and Spanish populations. Previous scholars assumed that most people accepted and internalized these identity labels. Through a variety of imaginative archival strategies, Doug uncovered evidence of ordinary people challenging them, switching between them, and marrying or socializing across them. In Steve J. Stern’s words, “He sensed, probably because of his own keen sensitivity to social class dynamics, that the casta system might end up being more a reflection of elite sensibilities than [End Page 319] on-the-ground realities of social life. And he was determined to understand plebeian life on its own terms.” It may be that growing up in Michigan between the 1962 Port Huron Statement and the 1967 Detroit riots, when racial strife exploded the dream of working-class solidarity in America’s industrial capital, helped shape his perspective: casta was a false consciousness, projected by colonial elites to divide and dominate the plebeian majority. Its failure as a hegemonic ideology helped explain the later phenomenon of mass mestizaje in Mexican history, and it was an emancipatory counterexample to twentieth-century North America.

Doug’s book received honorable mention for the 1995 Herbert E. Bolton Prize for the year’s best book in Latin American history. After a quarter century, during which race (or “race”) has dominated the agenda of colonial historiography, the book remains relevant, holding its place on undergraduate and graduate reading lists. This is due to its vigorous, jargon-free prose, clear framing of issues, and a series of discrete research inquiries (for example, his tabulation of personal names as evidence of identity-claiming) that are useful for teaching.

Following brief stints at the University of Oregon and the University of Miami, Doug came to Brown in 1988. He became known as a gifted teacher and charismatic lecturer, receiving Brown’s William G. McLoughlin Award for Excellence in Teaching. Doug expanded colonial Latin American history into a two-semester sequence, half of which focused on social history and half on Atlantic World imperial politics. He also created courses on the Mexican Revolution, modern Mexico, Maya peoples, invasion and conquest, and—a few years ago—a new course on early modern pirates, which became one of his most popular. He lectured with confidence and fluency, filling his presentations with stories and unexpected piquant details. More than one of his undergraduate students ended up a professional historian, including Leo J. Garofalo (Professor, Connecticut College; Brown class of 1992), who recalls: “He showed all of us that history was fun, that it mattered, and...

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