Recently I’ve been fixated on the concept of inheritance, and how it is that our inheritance(s) become legible. Last December I came into possession of a collection of slides that my grandfather, Alfonso Arenales, took during his career as U.S. foreign service officer. Alfonso is still alive, but these photos constitute some of my inheritance, albeit shared among my family. They are dated from the mid forties through the 1990’s. I came into possession of the slides when my mother and aunt moved Alfonso from Bethesda, Maryland to Colorado so that he could be closer to them. He has Alzheimer’s and needs help to perform most daily functions, and now lives in an assisted living residence in Boulder. As they packed up his house the slides appeared among his voluminous papers and records. I asked if I could take them and scan at them, afraid that otherwise they might be lost.

Before delving in I imagined that they would be family photos. I knew that Alfonso was an avid amateur photographer; during my childhood he would always bring a 35mm point and shoot with him on visits and outings, and would regularly pause the group for snapshots. I imagined that the images contained babies, birthdays, and vacations from my mother and aunt’s childhood. To my surprise, the labels on the slide boxes showed spacetime coordinates including: Tehran, 1959; Rio de Janeiro, 1964; Chile, 1972; East Berlin, 1972; Brasilia, 1974; Paris, 1975; London, 1975; Luanda, 1976; Capetown, 1976; Transkei, 1976; Guatemala, 1980.

Some of these seemed to me like tourist destinations, but I recognized others as conflict zones and/or sites of U.S. political, economic, and military intervention. I knew that Alfonso worked for the U.S. State Department as a foreign service officer for most of his career, and that his major postings were in Africa and Latin America. But the box labels implied a broader involvement. When I read those places and dates, dark fantasies of Alfonso orchestrating military coups and gathering information for imminent U.S. interventions spring into my mind. He is and has been evasive about his career, and if he says anything he talks in anecdotes and generalizations. His evasiveness fuels my suspicions and imagination. When I press him for details, he says he doesn’t remember. “Just office work, administrative work... but that was all company stuff.” Occasionally he will say more, and what he does reveal seems to hinge on status. Once he told me about his time as a young counterintelligence officer during the U.S. Occupation of Japan. I imagine he thinks his role in the occupation lends him an air of the historical. After his stint in the occupation, in 1947, at age 19, he entered Columbia University in New York as a freshman, attending on the GI bill. Among his things I also found a typed out copy of an essay for an English class at Columbia. The first two sentences read:

While with the Occupation Forces in Japan, I was quite frequently asked a great many questions about the United States by Japanese of all backgrounds. There is one question that remains in my mind as a question I would like to ask of every American: “Is America forcing democracy on the world?”

The essay asks a series of questions about the reasons and limitations of U.S. intervention abroad, and reflects on the entitled attitude of Alfonso’s fellow occupiers. In a moment of adolescent foresight, Alfonso prefigures the trajectory of events that he would participate in throughout the remainder of the 20th century. I imagine that this dogged him for the rest of his career.

I hoped that the slides would bring clarity, either by proving my grandfathers indisputable monstrousness, or his innocence. Instead, I find the images banal and opaque. If Alfonso organized (or resisted) violent regime change in Latin America and Africa, I can’t tell from the pictures. They tell me that he played a bit part in a series of sweeping global events.

Each set of slides (originally a single roll of film) tells of a series of arrivals and departures. I read them as montage, each roll a little film told in disjointed stills. They often begin with aerial photographs from the window of a descending aircraft. Then some shots from a moving vehicle, featuring motion blurred landscapes and people. Shots taken on foot framing architectural or natural landmarks. Advertising and telephone poles are a recurring theme. I look for signs, graffiti, or other crumbs of context to reverse engineer and create meaning. But there is a constant frustration in my looking. Whatever hard facts I can glean from the photos is pale in comparison to the information in Alfonso’s mind, tantalizingly close but impenetrable. I used to think that if I asked the right questions he would tell me everything. My experience with Alfonso makes me question the extent to which what he tells me is filtered through a complex network of denial, deception, and amnesia. I imagine that there are things he doesn’t want to tell me or anyone. Maybe things that he would deny having done or seen, even to himself, or that he has repressed and effectively forgotten. And then there’s the more recent development of his Alzheimer’s disease, which can subject these memories or motivations to any combination random loss, sudden recall, mismatching, and cross referencing. I understand this complex of obfuscation as an apt metaphor for the process of writing and comprehending history.

I open an unmarked box of slides and lay them on the light table in the order that they were taken and look for clues that will help situate them geographically. The series features a small entourage of people who seem to be sightseeing. They are at an overlook, gazing into the distance. I want to know who these people are, were they Alfonso’s co-workers? Next, there are photos of oil infrastructure (large storage tankers) and a small airport. Then a photo showing insectoid helicopters with glass shells, followed by frames filled by an expanse of blue ocean, studded with oil flares and offshore rigs. Two or three photos depict a large rig getting closer and closer, then suddenly the group is standing on the deck, gaping at equipment. One photo portrays Alsonso himself wearing a bright yellow life-vest; I assume he has given over the camera to one of his companions. Finally, a shot from the helicopters as the sun sets over a golden ocean dotted with ships and tankers.

In one photo, early in the series, I see a group posing in front of a small plane. A squat structure sits in the background with block letters sign that spells out CABINDA. A Google search tells me that Cabinda is an exclave province of Angola landlocked by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a border on the Atlantic Ocean. The coast of Cabinda features some of the largest offshore oil fields in the world. These fields were first drilled by the Cabinda Gulf Oil company in the mid fifties during Portuguese colonial rule. Why was Alfonso on an oil rig off the coast of Cabinda? Was this a work related excursion? If so, what was the reason for the trip?

I can see some additional lettering on the airport, but I have to scan the slide and zoom in on my computer screen to make it out. I can read the words “VIVA MPLA,” and “MPLA” scrawled in red spray paint in a few places on the building. I find out that MPLA is the acronym for the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, a de-colonial guerilla communist liberation movement and political party founded in 1956, who fought a war against the Portuguese from 1961-74. With this in mind, I reconsider the image. I see a political visit by state or corporate affiliated personnel who may be complicit if not responsible for the policy of colonial resource extraction depicted in this roll of film. The group is posed in front of a piece of public infrastructure (an airport), likely built in service of oil extraction, which also bears the marks of a militarized decolonial resistance movement struggling against the powers the group represents. Even though I didn’t notice the graffiti initially, now I can’t imagine that Alfonso captured it by accident. Did he stage this photo for the irony, or as a kind of smug taunt to the MPLA? Or for some other reason?

Checkpoint Charlie, East Berlin, 1972

In 1968 in East Berlin, behind the Iron Curtain, a journalist and Stasi officer named Julius Mader published his catalog of CIA personnel titled Who’s who in CIA. It is a laundry list of suspected associates or agents of the CIA. Alfonso appears in the book, though Mader himself admits that many among the 3000 names listed are simply State Department personnel with an intelligence background (Alfonso fits into this category). Here is a translation of Alfonso’s entry:

Arenales, Alfonso Born March 1, 1926; Languages: Portuguese, Spanish; 1944/47 G 2-Service in the U.S.-Army; 1948/56 Journalist; since 1957 in the State Department, duty in the CIA; Deployed: Teheran, Rio de Janeiro, Santo Domingo (second secretary)1

Rathaus, East Berlin, 1972

Berliner Fernsehturm, 1972

Chile, 1972

Brasilia, (date unknown)

Other allegations of Alfonso’s involvement with the CIA rely more on circumstantial evidence. He was included in Peter Gribbin’s list published in CounterSpy in 1979 of “U.S. government employees who have collaborated or worked with the CIA in a functional capacity.” An addendum adds that “it should be noted that during Arenales’ three years in the Dominican Republic (1964-67), Lyndon Johnson and the CIA overthrew the democratically elected president Juan Bosch; invaded the island with over 40,000 U.S. Marines; and sent in Brazilian troops to crush the popular resistance movement.”2

Gribbin’s opinion is clear: Alfonso’s proximity to these events implies his guilt or at least his compliance. The photo’s testimony, on the other hand, is opaque, aside from the occasional enthusiasm for a sunset, an oil flare, or a telephone pole.

Alfonso posing on an offshore oil rig near Cabinda, Angola (date unknown)

Workers on an offshore oil rig near Cabinda, Angola (date uknown)

Military demonstration in Santiago, Chile, 1972

Chilean coast, 1972

Among the slides are three rolls from South Africa (or occupied Azania) in the mid 1970’s. In one set marked Cape Town, I can see mountains and green farmland from above, then a few modern looking government buildings. Then some shots from a vehicle moving down a highway, then a dirt road. A school ringed with barbed wire, and many angles on a large neighborhood of small houses in rows. A few black children wearing school clothes standing at the edge of a path, regarding the camera. These photos tell obliquely of apartheid. I wonder about Alfonso’s role there, and from what position he aimed his camera. I also think about the technologies of settler colonialism, and the traces of it visible to me in the photographs, separation implied in the gaps between images. I wonder about the afterlife of apartheid, and how that violence is absorbed by a landscape. How do these sites look today?

South Africa, 1976

South Africa, 1976

South Africa, 1972

South Africa, 1972

South Africa, 1972

A few of the images of South Africa look like they could have been taken in or near my hometown of Louisville, Colorado, a result of a previous wave of settler colonialism. The dry greenish brown grass and rocky hills would fit in either place. I see the geography that I explored as a boy. The stretches of surviving prairie between housing developments, criss-crossed by dirt bike paths. The enclaves of prairie dogs that were trapped and relocated during the course of my childhood, a final eviction proceeding.

Louisville was a wonderful place to grow up. I strain to remember being taught about the longer history of that place, and I realize bitterly that I wasn’t. In front of city hall in Louisville is a bronze statue of a coal miner, a tribute to it’s boomtown origins as one of a number of coal mining settlements in the area. I learned in elementary school about the hard labor of the miners, and about a long miners strike that culminated in violence in 1914, in which National Guardsmen and mining company mercenaries fired on striking miners and their families. We did not learn in school, however, the fate of the indigenous people who occupied the area before Louisville was settled.

From my own research I can gather a haphazard and regurgitated account of this history. Characterized by a series of displacements, bogus treaties, and threats leading ultimately to massacre, the trajectory of the oppression of Arapaho and Cheyenne people in the foothills of Colorado is as convoluted as it is tragic. It is just one interlude in the long history of deception and betrayal that is the story of westward expansion. I feel betrayed that I have to piece this history together on my own, that my family raised me there as if it were neutral ground, a place for me to explore as if it belonged to me. I want to find someone to blame for this oversight. I also feel gratitude for that childhood. These two feelings fold into a deep ambivalence that permeates how I understand the world.

It is very scary for me to acknowledge the ways in which this ambivalence, this deep suspicion, is also directed at myself. I like to think that racism, chauvinism, stunted emotional intelligence, and ableism ad nauseum exist in me only minorly, and that I am doing the good, hard work to regulate and overcome them. But I am continuously fascinated and humbled by how the residues of these systems and technologies reside and emerge in me. I process my grandfather’s photographs in terms of this feeling; when I look at them I ask myself each time, what was his opinion, what was he doing there, and how does it make me feel? I am drawn, morbidly, towards the worst possible version of events, the version of history where Alfonso is a monstrous state actor masquerading in his twilight years as a loving and jovial grandpa. That fantasy contains the kernel of betrayal I referred to earlier, of not being taught about the violence inherent to the place I was raised. It also offers the comfort of rejection; I could simply condemn him and hold my high ground. But the photographs and my conversations with him point me towards a muddier situation, in which he only had partial information about any given context and about his function within a larger system. Maybe he was complicit yet unaware, or maybe aware yet ineffectual, or some combination. In the absence of clear evidence or confession, his role in history becomes a projection screen for my fears and hopes, an analogue to help me grapple with my own position.

Endnotes1 Mader, Julius. Who’s Who in CIA. Berlin, Julius Mader, 1968.2 Gribbin, Peter. “Brasil & CIA”, CounterSpy, April – May 1979, pp. 4-23