A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
The essays in this collection are unified by three specific themes: landscape, movement, and technology. Landscape involves the ecological backdrop of the northern Rio Grande valley, including past and present environments. Movement refers to the positioning of people across the landscape along with the dynamic and fluid nature with which people—past and present—view their relationship with the “above” and “below.” Technology not only refers to the tools and facilities that past people may have used but to the organization of labor needed to cooperatively exploit a variety of subsistence resources and the exchange of products across the region. This volume provides both a cross section of current research from expert scholars and a broad perspective that seeks to integrate new data from lowland and upland contexts. From Mountain Top to Valley Bottom will appeal to those interested in obsidian source studies, geoarchaeology, past climatic regimes, foraging societies, early agriculture, ceramic technology, subsistence, early village formation, ethnogenesis, and historic multiethnic economies.
Kessell provides exciting accounts of the explorations of Francisco Garcés, de Anza's expeditions, and the Yuma massacre. Drawing from widely scattered archival materials, he vividly describes the epic struggle between Bishop Reyes and Father President Barbastro, the missionary scandals of 1815–18, and the bloody victory of Mexican civilian volunteers over Apaches in Arivaipa Canyon in 1832. Numerous missionaries, presidials, and bureaucrats—nameless in histories until now—emerge as living, swearing, praying, individuals.
This authoritative chronicle offers an engrossing picture of the continually threatened mission frontier. Reformers championing civil rights for mission Indians time and again challenged the friars' "tight-fisted paternalistic control" over their wards. Expansionists repeatedly saw their plans dashed by Indian raids, uncooperative military officials, or lack of financial support.
Friars, Soldiers, and Reformers brings into sharp focus the long, blurry period between Jesuit Sonora and Territorial Arizona.
Faced with the prospect of moving to another place, Bowers finds herself thinking about the familiar world in new and unfamiliar ways. Through her eyes, too, we see how an interest in nature and the outdoors developed from early childhood and how simple curiosity has led her to the most surprising discoveries. At odd and unexpected moments, her work also seems to bring new insights into herself and her life as a writer, a wife, and a mother. These pages promise a new adventure at every turn in the trail. For sheer terror, there's a climb up the face of Baboquivari, for laughs, there's the great bagworm caper, and for some quiet truths, there are themes of gain and loss, of connection and reconcilliation. Crunching through winter snow or sweating under summer sun, we know we're in the hands of an experienced guide. And we know we couldn't ask for a better companion.
These documents give a sense of immediacy to the military operations, Indian activities, and missionary work going on in Tucson and the surrounding areas. They also demonstrate that Hispanic families maintained continuity in military and political control on the frontier, and clearly show that the frontier was not beset by anarchy in spite of the change in national government. In the forty chapters of translated documents in this collection, the voices of those who lived in what is now the Arizona-Sonora border region provide firsthand accounts of the people and events that shaped their era. These documents record such events as the arrival of the first Americans, the reconstruction of Tucson’s presidio wall, and conflict between Tohono O’odham villagers and Mexicans. All are set against the backdrop of an unrelenting Apache offensive that heightened after the departure of the Spanish military but that was held in check by civilian militias. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction in which historian Kieran McCarty provides background on the documents’ context and authorship. Taken together, they offer a fascinating look at this little-known period and provide a unique panorama of southwestern history.
Aware of the complexity of this fifty-year struggle, historian Edward Leo Lyman carefully traces the key figures, events, and cultural shifts leading to Utah’s admission to the Union. Utilizing an abundance of careful research, Finally Statehood! is a unique attempt to understand the state’s history on both a local and national level, with each political roadblock, religious conflict, and earnest attempt at compromise meticulously examined under the vantage of time.
Frontiersman, colonizer, missionary to the Indians, and explorer of the American West, Jacob Hamblin has long been one of the most enigmatic figures in Mormon history. In this defining biography, Todd Compton examines and disentangles many of the myths and controversies surrounding Hamblin. His Grand Canyon adventures and explorations as a guide alongside John Wesley Powell are well documented, as are his roles as a missionary, cultural liaison, and negotiator to the Indian tribes of southern Utah and Arizona. Hamblin struggled in this latter role, sometimes unable to bridge the gulf between Mormonism and Indian culture. He disavowed violent conflict and ceaselessly sought peaceful resolutions where others resorted to punitive action. He strove above all for mutual understanding in the absence of conversion.
A Frontier Life provides a rich narrative that fleshes out a picture of a sometimes vilified figure, particularly in regard to his connection to the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre, where Compton provides nuanced discussion clarifying Hamblin’s post-massacre role—he was not present at the massacre, but reported on it to both Brigham Young and military investigators. Compton’s engagement with Mormon historiography and previous Hamblin portrayals will make this work of particular interest to both scholars and students. The casual reader will take pleasure in learning of a true pioneer who lived life at the geographical, cultural, and spiritual boundaries of his era. This dramatic, entertaining biography is a truly significant contribution to Mormon history.
Winner of the Evans Biography Award, the John Whitmer Historical Society Best Biography Award, and the Francis Armstrong Madsen Best Book Award.
A view of Nevada history by native Nevadan and historian Hulse that suggests prosperity be based on diverse businesses rather than on a gaming-financed economy.
When readers see the names Mark Twain and Dan De Quille, fake news may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But these legendary journalists were some of the original, and most prolific, fake news writers in the early years of Nevada’s history. Frontier Fake News puts a spotlight on the hoaxes, feuds, pranks, outright lies, witty writing, and other literary devices utilized by a number of the Silver State’s frontier newsmen from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Often known collectively as the Sagebrush School, these journalists were opinionated, talented, and individualistic.
While Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who got his start at Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise, and Dan De Quille (William Wright), who some felt was a better writer than Twain, are the most well-known members of the Sagebrush School, author Richard Moreno includes others such as Fred Hart, who concocted a fake social club and reported on its gatherings for Austin’s Reese River Reveille, and William Forbes, who enjoyed sprinkling clever puns with political undertones in his newspaper articles.
Moreno traces the beginnings of genuine fake news from founding father Benjamin Franklin’s “Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle, Number 705, March 1782,” a fake newspaper aimed at swaying British public opinion, to the fake news articles of New York and Baltimore papers in the early 1800s. But these examples are only a prelude to the amazing accounts of petrified men, freeze-inducing solar armor, magically magnetic rocks, blood-curdling massacres, and other nonsense stories that appeared in Nevada’s frontier newspapers and beyond.
One of the Most Important Battlegrounds in the History of America
While it is in the eastern United States where most Americans identify our military history, the vast, resource-rich Pacific Northwest, stretching from Northern California through British Columbia, endured a series of battles and wars over the course of the nineteenth century that were of regional and national importance. It was here where Great Britain and the United States had their final confrontation in the Americas, where Chief Joseph attempted to secure independence for the Nez Perce, and where the Oregon Trail marked the first great migration to the West of settlers bent on carving out new lives in the wilderness. The Pacific Northwest also saw some of the only attacks on the mainland by Japan during World War II.
Beginning with the earliest known accounts of wars among the American Indians of the region, Fighting for Paradise: A Military History of the Pacific Northwest describes early European contact, including British trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Jedediah Smith, and John Jacob Astor's trading post. The competition over the lucrative fur trade led to the "Pig War," which almost resulted in another armed conflict between Great Britain and the United States, but it was the influx of settlers from the Oregon Trail that touched off the long bitter battles between whites and American Indians. Starting with the 1847 Whitman Massacre and the ensuing war it touched off, the book covers the next three decades of violence, ending with the Sheepeater's War in 1879. Kurt R. Nelson then relates the Pacific Northwest's contributions to the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, the Mexican Punitive Expedition, World War I, and finally World War II, where the region fought Japanese submarine attacks and was harassed by balloon bombs. Throughout, the author provides current information about the state of preservation of various battle sites and other points of historical interest. Accompanied by maps and photographs, Fighting for Paradise provides insight into an area of American military history, rich in drama, that is not generally known.
The 85-mile-long Columbia Gorge forms part of the border between Oregon and Washington and is one of the nation’s most historic and scenic landscapes. Many of the region’s cultural divisions boil over here—urban versus rural, west of the mountains versus east—as well as clashes over private property rights, management of public lands, and tribal treaty rights.
In the early 1980s, as a new interstate bridge linked the City of Portland to rural counties in Washington, the Gorge’s renowned vistas were on the brink of destruction. Nancy Russell, forty-eight years old and with no experience in advocacy, fundraising, or politics, built a grassroots movement that overcame 70 years of failed efforts and bitter opposition from both Oregon and Washington governors, five of the six Gorge counties, 41,000 Gorge residents, and the Reagan administration. While building her campaign, Russell stopped subdivisions, factories, and government neglect through litigation brought by her organization, Friends of the Columbia Gorge, and last-second land purchases by the Trust for Public Land (TPL). Initially ignored, then demonized, Russell’s tires were slashed and her life threatened.
The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act barely passed—on the last day of the congressional session in 1986—and was signed by a reluctant President Reagan hours before the bill would die. Russell positioned the Friends to be a watchdog and orchestrated the purchase of thousands of acres of land for the public. Bowen Blair, an attorney, former executive director of Friends of the Columbia Gorge, and TPL senior vice president, brings an insider’s perspective to the tumultuous and inspiring story of this conservation battle.
The development of San Francisco’s outlying region from a wilderness into a prosperous village and farming mecca shows how quickly in-migration coupled with economic diversification can establish a stable settlement structure upon the landscape. Otterstrom describes an intricately woven tapestry of interrelated people who were contributing creators of a wide variety of prosperous northern California environs. He uncovers the processes that converted this sleepy post-Mexican outpost into a focal point of nearly hyperactive youthful growth. The narrative follows this crucial story of settlement development until the dawn of the twentieth century, through the interconnected framework of individual and family ingenuity, migration trajectories, and diverse geographical scales.
Multiplying individualistic experiences from across far-flung appendages of the Northern California system into larger and larger scales, Otterstrom has achieved a matchless historical and sociological study that will form the basis for any future studies of the area.
The first people of the Pecho Coast were part-time residents who exploited shellfish, fish, and marine birds, including the flightless duck, Chendytes lawi, which sustained hunting drove to extinction ca. 2800 cal BP. This marked the only unequivocal case of prehistoric, human-caused extinction in western North America. Cold, productive seas allowed inhabitants to weather droughts of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (950–600 cal BP), after which shell beads became increasingly abundant, representing either the initial appearance of Chumash-speaking peoples or attempts by Chumash leaders to consolidate power through gifting, reciprocal exchange, or forced conquest. During the mission era, fishing sustained the Native community as, for the first time, individuals became fully sedentary, foraging within a limited radius to avoid contact with the Spanish.
This record reveals a unique story of local adaptation, anthropogenic habitat change, social differentiation, and, ultimately, resistance to colonial invasion.
Monterey Park, California, only eight miles east of downtown Los Angeles, was dubbed by the media as the "First Suburban Chinatown." The city was a predominantly white middle-class bedroom community in the 1970s when large numbers of Chinese immigrants transformed it into a bustling international boomtown. It is now the only city in the United States with a majority Asian American population. Timothy P. Fong examines the demographic, economic, social, and cultural changes taking place there, and the political reactions to the change.
Fong, a former journalist, reports on how pervasive anti-Asian sentiment fueled a series of initiatives intended to strengthen "community control," including a movement to make English the official language. Recounting the internal strife and the beginnings of recovery, Fong explores how race and ethnicity issues are used as political organizing tools and weapons.
In the series Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ.
Filipino Americans are now the second largest group of Asian Americans as well as the second largest immigrant group in the United States. As reflected in this collection, their lives represent the diversity of the immigrant experience and their narratives are a way to understand ethnic identity and Filipino American history.
Men and women, old and young, middle and working class, first and second generation, all openly discuss their changing sense of identity, the effects of generational and cultural differences on their families, and the role of community involvement in their lives. Pre- and post-1965 immigrants share their experiences, from the working students who came before WWII, to the manongs in the field, to the stewards and officers in the U.S. Navy, to the "brain drain" professionals, to the Filipinos born and raised in the United States.
As Yen Le Espiritu writes in the Introduction, "each of the narratives reveals ways in which Filipino American identity has been and continues to be shaped by a colonial history and a white-dominated culture. It is through recognizing how profoundly race has affected their lives that Filipino Americans forge their ethnic identities—identities that challenge stereotypes and undermine practices of cultural domination."
In the series Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ.
In this fascinating, detailed history, William Issel recounts the civil rights abuses suffered by Sylvester Andriano, an Italian American Catholic civil leader whose religious and political activism in San Francisco provoked an Anti-Catholic campaign against him. A leading figure in the Catholic Action movement, Andriano was falsely accused in state and federal Un-American Activities Committee hearings of having Fascist sympathies prior to and during World War II. As his ordeal began, Andriano was subjected to a hostile investigation by the FBI, whose confidential informants were his political rivals. Furthermore, the U.S. Army ordered him to be relocated on the grounds that he was a security risk.
For Both Cross and Flag provides a dramatic illustration of what can happen when parties to urban political rivalries, rooted in religious and ideological differences, seize the opportunity provided by a wartime national security emergency to demonize their enemy as “a potentially dangerous person.”
Issel presents a cast of characters that includes archbishops, radicals, the Kremlin, and J. Edgar Hoover, to examine the significant role faith-based political activism played in the political culture that violated Andriano’s constitutional rights. Exploring the ramifications of this story, For Both Cross and Flag presents interesting implications for contemporary events and issues relating to urban politics, ethnic groups, and religion in a time of war.
A Force for Change is the first full-length study of the life and work of one of Oregon’s most dynamic civil rights activists, African American journalist Beatrice Morrow Cannady. Between 1912 and 1936, Cannady tirelessly promoted interracial goodwill and fought segregation and discrimination.
She gave hundreds of lectures to high school and college students and shared her message with radio listeners across the Pacific Northwest. She was assistant editor, and later publisher, of The Advocate, Oregon’s largest African American newspaper. Cannady was the first black woman to graduate from law school in Oregon, and the first to run for state representative. She held interracial teas in her home in Northeast Portland and protested repeated showings of the racist film The Birth of a Nation. And when the Ku Klux Klan swept into Oregon, she urged the governor to act quickly to protect black Oregonians’ right to live and work without fear. Despite these accomplishments—and many more during her twenty-five-year career—Beatrice Cannady fell into obscurity when she left Oregon in about 1938.
A Force for Change illuminates Cannady’s important role in advocating for better race relations in Oregon in the early decades of the twentieth century. It describes her encounters with the period’s leading black artists, editors, politicians, and intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, A. Philip Randolph, Oscar De Priest, Roland Hayes, and James Weldon Johnson. It dispels the myth that African Americans played little part in Oregon’s history and enriches our understanding of the black experience in Oregon.
A Force for Change is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of women’s history, gender studies, African American history, journalism history, and Pacific Northwest history. It belongs on the shelf of any reader interested in a richer understanding of the civil rights movement in Oregon and across the country.
Mitsuko “Mitzi” Asai was not yet ten years old in the spring of 1942 when President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 sent 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—about two-thirds of them US citizens—from their homes on the West Coast to inland prison camps. They included Mitzi and most of her family, who owned a fruit orchard in Hood River, Oregon. The Asais spent much of World War II in the camps while two of the older sons served in the Pacific in the US Army. Three years later, when the camps began to close, the family returned to Hood River to find an altered community. Shop owners refused to serve neighbors they had known for decades; racism and hostility were open and largely unchecked. Humiliation and shame drove teenaged Mitzi to reject her Japanese heritage, including her birth name. More than a decade later, her life took another turn when a Fulbright grant sent her to teach in Japan, where she reconnected with her roots.
In From Thorns to Blossoms, Mitzi recounts her rich and varied life, from a childhood surrounded by barbed wire and hatred to a successful career as a high school English teacher and college instructor in English as a Second Language. Today, Asai descendants continue to tend the Hood River farm while the town confronts its shameful history. Originally published in 1990 as Made in Japan and Settled in Oregon, this revised and expanded edition describes the positive influence Mitzi’s immigrant parents had on their children, provides additional context for her story, and illuminates the personal side of a dark chapter in US history. It’s the remarkable story of a transformation from thorns into blossoms, pain into healing.
Situated in the rugged hills west of downtown Portland, Forest Park is the nation’s premier urban natural sanctuary. It supports essential habitat for hundreds of native plants and animals, including species at risk, and is one of the largest city parks in the world. While extending critical ecosystem services to the region, it offers miles of outstanding hiking trails, all within minutes of the downtown core.
Forest Park: Exploring Portland’s Natural Sanctuary showcases this treasure in new light, offering a compendium of the most up-to-date and comprehensive information available. Twenty-one hikes covering 75 miles bring a full awareness of the park’s outstanding attributes. Hikes are grouped by theme to encourage people to explore Forest Park’s watersheds; geology; lichens and mosses; vegetation; amphibians and reptiles; pollinators; native wildlife; and wildlife corridors. Beautiful photographs and full-color maps accompany each trail description.
Forest Park is a shining example of the Pacific Northwest western hemlock community--an ecosystem unique among all temperate forests of the world. It is also an exciting model for a future Urban Biodiversity Reserve, a concept under development recognizing the park’s scientific, natural, and cultural qualities. Forest Park: Exploring Portland’s Natural Sanctuary will help all visitors discover the beauty and wonders of this extraordinary natural resource.
Melting sea ice and rumbling volcanoes. Sled dogs racing through unnamed valleys.
These were the images that came to mind when Molly Rettig moved to Fairbanks, Alaska to work as a reporter at the local newspaper. An avid environmentalist, she couldn’t wait to explore the vast, untamed spaces that had largely been paved over on the east coast. But when her 72-year-old neighbor, Clutch, invites her on a tour of his gold mine—an 800-foot tunnel blasted into the side of his house–she begins to question many of her ideas about Alaska, and about herself.
In Finding True North, Rettig takes us on a gripping journey through Alaska's past that brings alive the state's magnificent country and its quirky, larger-than-life characters. She meets a trapper who harvests all she needs from the land, a bush pilot who taught himself how to fly, and an archaeologist who helped build an oil pipeline through pristine wilderness. While she learns how airplanes, mines, and oil fields have paved the way for newcomers like herself, she also stumbles upon a bigger question: what has this quest for Alaska’s natural resources actually cost, and how much more is at stake?
This is a book about all the ways wild places teach us about ourselves. Rettig writes both playfully and honestly about how one place can be many things to many people—and how all of it can be true.
C.W. "Bill" Snedden, the publisher of America's farthest north daily newspaper, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, helped lead the battle of the Far North against the Deep South. Working behind the scenes with his protege, a young attorney named Ted Stevens, and a fellow Republican newspaperman, Secretary of Interior Fred Seaton, Snedden's "magnificent obsession" would open the door to development of the oil fields at Prudhoe Bay, inspire establishment of the Arctic Wildlife Range (now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), and add the forty-ninth star to the flag.
Fighting for the Forty-Ninth Star is the story of how the publisher of a little newspaper four thousand miles from Washington, D.C., helped convince Congress that Alaskans should be second-class citizens no more.
"Summers, I live at fishcamp. June through August, Mondays and Fridays, my partner and I catch and sell salmon that pass our beach on their way to spawning streams. The rest of the week, and parts of May and September, Ken and I mend nets, comb the rocky shoreline for useful poles and cottonwood bark, do a thousand camp chores and projects. We live quite happily in a tiny cabin at the top of the beach." --from Fishcamp
For the past eighteen summers, Nancy Lord and her partner Ken have made a living, and made a life, fishing for salmon off the west side of Cook Inlet on the southern coast of Alaska. In Fishcamp, Lord provides a nuanced and engrossing portrait of their days and months in camp at the inlet.
Beginning with their arrival by plane on a freshly thawed lake, she describes their joys and tribulations as spring gives way to summer and the long months of summer unfold. With poetic cadence and magical tone, Lord draws the reader into life at camp, sharing experiences that range from the mundane to the sublime: the mending of nets; the muscle-wrenching labor of the catch; the exquisite pleasure of an improvised hot-tub; the often unnoticed bounty of the inlet's flora and fauna. Interwoven throughout the descriptions of quotidian adventure are threads of the deeper history of the region -- stories and legends of the native Dena'ina; anecdotes about past and current inlet residents; discussions of the lives of their neighbors, both human and animal, who, like them, live with fish.
Fishcamp is Nancy Lord's eloquent paean to the place she calls home. In clear and richly textured prose, she captures the simple beauty of a life lived with nature, "a part" rather than "apart." As Lord explains, she shows us in Fishcamp "something about what even one place and its infinitely varied life contributes to the connections among us all and to the wholes we call 'world' and 'culture.'...Wherever our places are and whatever we do in them, perhaps we might all begin to pay more attention to the little and big things that do indeed connect in profound ways to all the rest, miles and eons and cultures apart."
Fishcamp is a remarkable combination of personal, cultural, and natural history from what will surely be recognized as one of the most talented new voices of our time.
In unprecedented detail, Leslie Choquette narrates the peopling of French Canada across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the lesser known colonial phase of French migration. Drawing on French and Canadian archives, she carefully traces the precise origins of individual immigrants, describing them by gender, class, occupation, region, religion, age, and date of departure. Her archival work is impressive: of the more than 30,000 emigrants who embarked for Quebec and the Maritimes during the French Regime, nearly 16,000 are chronicled here.
In considering the pattern of emigration in the context of migration history, Choquette shows that, in many ways, the movement toward Canada occurred as a byproduct of other, perennial movements, such as the rural exodus or interurban labor migrations. Overall, emigrants to Canada belonged to an outwardly turned and mobile sector of French society, and their migration took place during a phase of vigorous Atlantic expansion. They crossed the ocean to establish a subsistence economy and peasant society, traces of which lingered on into the twentieth century.
Because Choquette looks at the entire history of French migration to Canada—its social and economic aspects as well as its place in the larger history of migration—her work makes a remarkable contribution in the field of immigration history.
In 2005 Michael Ignatieff left his life as a writer and professor at Harvard University to enter the combative world of politics back home in Canada. By 2008, he was leader of the country’s Liberal Party and poised—should the governing Conservatives falter—to become Canada’s next Prime Minister. It never happened. Today, after a bruising electoral defeat, Ignatieff is back where he started, writing and teaching what he learned.
What did he take away from this crash course in political success and failure? Did a life of thinking about politics prepare him for the real thing? How did he handle it when his own history as a longtime expatriate became a major political issue? Are cynics right to despair about democratic politics? Are idealists right to hope? Ignatieff blends reflection and analysis to portray today’s democratic politics as ruthless, unpredictable, unforgiving, and hyper-adversarial.
Rough as it is, Ignatieff argues, democratic politics is a crucible for compromise, and many of the apparent vices of political life, from inconsistency to the fake smile, follow from the necessity of bridging differences in a pluralist society. A compelling account of modern politics as it really is, the book is also a celebration of the political life in all its wild, exuberant variety.
Each essay in its own way addresses the fragmentation of a cultural consensus that prevailed during the “golden age” of post–revolutionary prosperity, a time when the state was still successfully bolstering its power with narratives of modernization and shared community. Combining detailed case studies—both urban and rural—with larger discussions of political, economic, and cultural phenomena, the contributors take on such topics as the golden age of Mexican cinema, the death of Pedro Infante as a political spectacle, the 1951 “caravan of hunger,” professional wrestling, rock music, and soap operas.
Fragments of a Golden Age will fill a particular gap for students of modern Mexico, Latin American studies, cultural studies, political economy, and twentieth century history, as well as to others concerned with rethinking the cultural dimensions of nationalism, imperialism, and modernization.
Contributors. Steven J. Bachelor, Quetzil E. Castañeda, Seth Fein, Alison Greene, Omar Hernández, Jis & Trino, Gilbert M. Joseph, Heather Levi, Rubén Martínez, Emile McAnany, John Mraz, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Elena Poniatowska, Anne Rubenstein, Alex Saragoza, Arthur Schmidt, Mary Kay Vaughan, Eric Zolov
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Two gives comprehensive accounts of the religious ceremonies and days of feasting during the time of the Aztecs, including prayers, songs, and the duties and roles of Aztecs inside the temples during the ceremonies. This book also details the various tributes and sacrifices given to specific gods.
The continuities elucidated concern ancestral territorial claims that date back centuries and reflect the stable geographic locations occupied by core populations of indigenous language–speakers in or near their pre-Columbian territories since the Postclassical period, from the thirteenth to late fifteenth centuries. A common theme of this volume is the strong cohesive forces present, not only in the colonial construction of Christian village communities in Purhépecha and Nahuatl groups in Michoacán but also in the demographically less inclusive Huichol (Wixarika), Cora, and Tepehuan groups, whose territories were more extensive.
The authors review a cluster of related themes: settlement patterns of the last five centuries in central western Mexico, language distribution, ritual representation of territoriality, processes of collective identity, and the forms of participation and resistance during different phases of Mexican state formation. From such research, the question arises: does the village community constitute a unique level of organization of the experience of the original peoples of central western Mexico? The chapters address this question in rich and complex ways by first focusing on the past configurations and changes in lifeways during the transition from pre-Columbian to Spanish rule in tributary empires, then examining the long-term postcolonial process of Mexican independence that introduced the emerging theme of the communal sovereignty.
In Foundational Arts Michael K. Schuessler asserts that the literature of New Spain begins with missionary theater and its intimate relationship to mural painting. In particular, he examines the relationships between texts and visual images that emerged in Mexico at two Augustinian monasteries in Hidalgo, Mexico, during the century following the Spanish Conquest. The forced combination of the ideographical tradition of Nahuatl with Latin-based language alphabets led to a fascinating array of new cultural expressions.
Missionary theater was organized by ingenious friars with the intent to convert and catechize indigenous populations. Often performed in Nahuatl or other local languages, the actors combined Latin-based language texts with visual contexts that corresponded to indigenous ways of knowing: murals, architectural ornamentation, statuary, altars, and other modes of visual representation. By concentrating on the interrelationship between mural painting and missionary theater, Foundational Arts explores the artistic and ideological origins of Mexican plastic arts and literature.
The ancient Aztecs dwelt at the center of a dazzling and complex cosmos. From this position they were acutely receptive to the demands of their gods. The Fifth Sun represents a dramatic overview of the Aztec conception of the universe and the gods who populated it—Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent; Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror; and Huitzilopochtli, the Southern Hummingbird. Burr Cartwright Brundage explores the myths behind these and others in the Aztec pantheon in a way that illuminates both the human and the divine in Aztec life.
The cult of human sacrifice is a pervasive theme in this study. It is a concept that permeated Aztec mythology and was the central preoccupation of the aggressive Aztec state. Another particularly interesting belief explored here is the “mask pool,” whereby gods could exchange regalia and, thus, identities.
This vivid and eminently readable study also covers the use of hallucinogens; cannibalism; the calendars of ancient Mexico; tlachtli, the life-and-death ball game; the flower wars; divine transfiguration; and the evolution of the war god of the Mexica. A splendid introduction to Aztec religion, The Fifth Sun also contains insights for specialists in ethnohistory, mythology, and religion.
Contributors present multiple lines of evidence demonstrating the process of social complexity and reconsider a number of traditionally accepted models and presumed tenets as a result of the wealth of empirical data that has been gathered over the past four decades. Their chapters approach complexity as a process rather than a state of being by exploring social aggregation, the emergence of ethnic affiliations, and aspects of regional and macroregional variability.
Framing Complexity in Formative Mesoamerica presents some of the most recent data—and the implications of that data—for understanding the development of complex societies as human beings moved into urban environments. The book is an especially important volume for researchers and students working in Mesoamerica, as well as archaeologists taking a comparative approach to questions of complexity.
Contributors: Jaime J. Awe, Sarah B. Barber, Jeffrey S. Brezezinski, M. Kathryn Brown, Ryan H. Collins, Kaitlin Crow, Lisa DeLance, Gary M. Feinman, Sara Dzul Gongora, Guy David Hepp, Arthur A. Joyce, Rodrigo Martin Morales, George Micheletti, Deborah L. Nichols, Terry G. Powis, Zoe J. Rawski, Prudence M. Rice, Michael P. Smyth, Katherine E. South, Jon Spenard, Travis W. Stanton, Wesley D. Stoner, Teresa Tremblay Wagner
Honorable Mention, 2021 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section
In the sixteenth century, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a team of indigenous grammarians, scribes, and painters completed decades of work on an extraordinary encyclopedic project titled General History of the Things of New Spain, known as the Florentine Codex (1575–1577). Now housed in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence and bound in three lavishly illustrated volumes, the codex is a remarkable product of cultural exchange in the early Americas.
In this edited volume, experts from multiple disciplines analyze the manuscript’s bilingual texts and more than 2,000 painted images and offer fascinating, new insights on its twelve books. The contributors examine the “three texts” of the codex—the original Nahuatl, its translation into Spanish, and its painted images. Together, these constitute complementary, as well as conflicting, voices of an extended dialogue that occurred in and around Mexico City. The volume chapters address a range of subjects, from Nahua sacred beliefs, moral discourse, and natural history to the Florentine artists’ models and the manuscript’s reception in Europe. The Florentine Codex ultimately yields new perspectives on the Nahua world several decades after the fall of the Aztec empire.
Covering all of Mesoamerica across all time periods, contributors include Patricia R. Anawalt, Alfredo López Austin, Anthony Aveni, Robert M. Carmack, David C. Grove, Richard D. Hansen, Leonardo López Luján, Kevin Terraciano, and more. Eloise Quiñones Keber provides a thorough biographical sketch, detailing Nicholson's academic and professional journey. Publication supported, in part, by The Patterson Foundation and several private donors.
Following their first contact in 1519, accounts of Aztecs identifying Spaniards as gods proliferated. But what exactly did the Aztecs mean by a “god” (teotl), and how could human beings become gods or take on godlike properties? This sophisticated, interdisciplinary study analyzes three concepts that are foundational to Aztec religion—teotl (god), teixiptla (localized embodiment of a god), and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles containing precious objects)—to shed new light on the Aztec understanding of how spiritual beings take on form and agency in the material world.
In The Fate of Earthly Things, Molly Bassett draws on ethnographic fieldwork, linguistic analyses, visual culture, and ritual studies to explore what ritual practices such as human sacrifice and the manufacture of deity embodiments (including humans who became gods), material effigies, and sacred bundles meant to the Aztecs. She analyzes the Aztec belief that wearing the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim during a sacred rite could transform a priest into an embodiment of a god or goddess, as well as how figurines and sacred bundles could become localized embodiments of gods. Without arguing for unbroken continuity between the Aztecs and modern speakers of Nahuatl, Bassett also describes contemporary rituals in which indigenous Mexicans who preserve costumbres (traditions) incorporate totiotzin (gods) made from paper into their daily lives. This research allows us to understand a religious imagination that found life in death and believed that deity embodiments became animate through the ritual binding of blood, skin, and bone.
The Olmec who anciently inhabited Mexico's southern Gulf Coast organized their once-egalitarian society into chiefdoms during the Formative period (1400 BC to AD 300). This increase in political complexity coincided with the development of village agriculture, which has led scholars to theorize that agricultural surpluses gave aspiring Olmec leaders control over vital resources and thus a power base on which to build authority and exact tribute.
In this book, Amber VanDerwarker conducts the first multidisciplinary analysis of subsistence patterns at two Olmec settlements to offer a fuller understanding of how the development of political complexity was tied to both agricultural practices and environmental factors. She uses plant and animal remains, as well as isotopic data, to trace the intensification of maize agriculture during the Late Formative period. She also examines how volcanic eruptions in the region affected subsistence practices and settlement patterns. Through these multiple sets of data, VanDerwarker presents convincing evidence that Olmec and epi-Olmec lifeways of farming, hunting, and fishing were driven by both political and environmental pressures and that the rise of institutionalized leadership must be understood within the ecological context in which it occurred.
His seventeenth-century writings have had a lasting effect on the understanding of Mexican culture and history from the colonial period to the present. But because Alva Ixtlilxochitl frequently used Tetzcocan oral traditions and pictorial codices of his ancestors’ heroic achievements, scholars have long said that his writings exhibit a Tetzcocan bias that distorts representations and understandings of Prehispanic Mexican history and culture.
Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and His Legacy is a collection of essays providing deeper perspective on the life, work, and legacy of Alva Ixtlilxochitl. The contributors revise and broaden previous understandings of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s racial and cultural identity, including his method of transcribing pictorial texts, his treatment of gender, and his influence on Mexican nationalism. Chapter authors coming from the fields of anthropology, history, linguistics, and literature offer valuable new perspectives on the complexities of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s life and his contributions to the history and scholarship of Mexico.
When Mexico first became a nation, its military and militias were two of the country’s few major institutions besides the Catholic Church. The army and local provincial militias functioned both as political pillars, providing institutional stability of a crude sort, and as springboards for the ambitions of individual officers. Military service provided upward social mobility, and it taught a variety of useful skills, such as mathematics and bookkeeping.
In the postcolonial era, however, militia units devoured state budgets, spending most of the national revenue and encouraging locales to incur debts to support them. Men with rifles provided the principal means for maintaining law and order, but they also constituted a breeding-ground for rowdiness and discontent. As these chapters make clear, understanding the history of state-making in Mexico requires coming to terms with its military past.
The founding of la Villa Rica de la Veracruz (the rich town of the True Cross) is prominently mentioned in histories of the conquest of Mexico, but scant primary documentation of the provocative act exists. During a research session at the Spanish archives, when John Schwaller discovered an early-sixteenth-century letter from Veracruz signed by the members of Cortés’s company, he knew he had found a trove of historical details. Providing an accessible, accurate translation of this pivotal correspondence, along with in-depth examinations of its context and significance, The First Letter from New Spain gives all readers access to the first document written from the mainland of North America by any European, and the only surviving original document from the first months of the conquest.
The timing of Cortés’s Good Friday landing, immediately before the initial assault on the Aztec Empire, enhances the significance of this work. Though the expedition was conducted under the authority of Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba, the letter reflects an attempt to break ties with Velázquez and form a strategic alliance with Carlos V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. Brimming with details about the events surrounding Veracruz’s inception and accompanied by mini-biographies of 318 signers of the document—socially competitive men who risked charges of treason by renouncing Velázquez—The First Letter from New Spain gives evidence of entrepreneurship and other overlooked traits that fueled the conquest.
Armstrong-Fumero's translation allows readers to develop a more nuanced understanding of this foundational work, which is often misrepresented in contemporary critical analyses. As much about national identity as anthropology, this text gives Anglophone readers access to a particular set of topics that have been mentioned extensively in secondary literature but are rarely discussed with a sense of their original context. Forjando Patria also reveals the many textual ambiguities that can lend themselves to different interpretations.
The book highlights the history and development of Mexican anthropology and archaeology at a time when scholars in the United States are increasingly recognizing the importance of cross-cultural collaboration with their Mexican colleagues. It will be of interest to anthropologists and archaeologists studying the region, as well as those involved in the history of the discipline.
"His superb writing style and the timelessness of his subject (the natural world and the interaction of human beings with it) make this every bit as enjoyable today as it was in the 1960's."—Books of the Southwest
"Well-written and fascinating."—Journal of Arid Environments
The Republic of the Rio Grande had a brief and tenuous existence (1838–1840) before most of it was reabsorbed by Mexico and the remainder annexed by the United States, yet this region that straddles the Rio Grande has retained its distinctive cultural identity to the present day. Born on one side of the Rio Grande and raised on the other, Beatriz de la Garza is a product of this region. Her birthplace and its people are the subjects of this work, which fuses family memoir and borderlands history.
From the Republic of the Rio Grande brings new insights and information to the study of transnational cultures by drawing from family papers supplemented by other original sources, local chronicles, and scholarly works. De la Garza has fashioned a history of this area from the perspective of individuals involved in the events recounted. The book is composed of nine sections spanning some two hundred years, beginning in the mid-1700s. Each section covers not only a chronological period but also a particular theme relating to the history of the region. De la Garza takes a personal approach, opening most sections with an individual observation or experience that leads to the central motif, whether this is the shared identity of the inhabitants, their pride in their biculturalism and bilingualism, or their deep attachment to the land of their ancestors.
For generations, scholars used (and misused) the Account as the sole eyewitness insight into an ancient civilization. It is credited to the sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan, monastic inquisitor, and bishop Diego de Landa, whose legacy is complex and contested. His extensive writings on Maya culture and history were lost in the seventeenth century, save for the fragment that is the Account, discovered in the nineteenth century, and accorded near-biblical status in the twentieth as the first “ethnography” of the Maya. However, the Account is not authored by Landa alone; it is a compilation of excerpts, many from writings by other Spaniards—a significant revelation made here for the first time.
This new translation accurately reflects the style and vocabulary of the original manuscript. It is augmented by a monograph—comprising an introductory chapter, seven essays, and hundreds of notes—that describes, explains, and analyzes the life and times of Diego de Landa, the Account, and the role it has played in the development of modern Maya studies. The Friar and the Maya is an innovative presentation on an important and previously misunderstood primary source.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, despite its inland location, Xalapa became an important Atlantic community as it came to represent both a haven and a place of fortification for residents of Veracruz. Yellow fever, foreign invasion, and domestic discord drove thousands of residents of Veracruz, as well as foreign travelers, to seek refuge in Xalapa. At the same time, these adverse circumstances prompted the Mexican government to use Xalapa as a bulwark against threats originating in the Atlantic.
The influence of the Atlantic world thus stretched far into central Mexico, thanks to both the instability of the coastal region and the desire of government officials to “protect” central Mexico from volatile Atlantic imports. The boundaries established at Xalapa, however, encouraged goods, information, and people to collect in the city and thereby immerse the population in the developments of the Atlantic sphere. Thus, in seeking to protect the center of the country, government authorities more firmly situated Xalapa in the Atlantic world. This connection would be trumped by national affiliation only when native residents of Xalapa became more comfortable with their participation in the Mexican public sphere later in the nineteenth century.
The interdisciplinary and comparative nature of this study will make it appeal to those studying Atlantic history, including historians of Britain, the United States, Latin America, and Africa, as well as those studying communication, print culture, and postal history more broadly.
O’Hara focuses on interactions between church authorities and parishioners from the late-colonial era into the early-national period, first in Mexico City and later in the surrounding countryside. Paying particular attention to disputes regarding caste status, the category of “Indian,” and the ownership of property, he demonstrates that religious collectivities from neighborhood parishes to informal devotions served as complex but effective means of political organization for plebeians and peasants. At the same time, longstanding religious practices and ideas made colonial social identities linger into the decades following independence, well after republican leaders formally abolished the caste system that classified individuals according to racial and ethnic criteria. These institutional and cultural legacies would be profound, since they raised fundamental questions about political inclusion and exclusion precisely when Mexico was trying to envision and realize new forms of political community. The modes of belonging and organizing created by colonialism provided openings for popular mobilization, but they were always stalked by their origins as tools of hierarchy and marginalization.
Telling the story of Latin America’s engagement with global empires from 1800 to today, From Frontiers to Football is as much a narrative of repeated cycles, continued dependency, and thwarted dreams as it is a tale of imperial designs overthrown, colonial armies defeated, and other successes that have inspired colonized peoples across the globe. Brown restores a cultural history to the continent, giving as much attention to pop singer Shakira and retired footballer Pelé as he does to coffee producers, copper miners, government policies, and covert imperialism. Latin America, Brown shows, is no longer a frontier or periphery, but rather is at the forefront of innovation and a global center for social, cultural, and economic activities. Clear and readable, From Frontiers to Football presents a compelling introduction to the history of Latin America’s interactions with the world over the last two centuries.
During the 1930s, the United States began to look more favorably on its southern neighbors. Latin America offered expanded markets to an economy crippled by the Great Depression, while threats of war abroad nurtured in many Americans isolationist tendencies and a desire for improved hemispheric relations.
One of these Americans was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the primary author of America's Good Neighbor Policy. In this thought-provoking book, Fredrick Pike takes a wide-ranging look at FDR's motives for pursuing the Good Neighbor Policy, at how he implemented it, and at how its themes have played out up to the mid-1990s.
Pike's investigation goes far beyond standard studies of foreign and economic policy. He explores how FDR's personality and Eleanor Roosevelt's social activism made them uniquely simpático to Latin Americans. He also demonstrates how Latin culture flowed north to influence U.S. literature, film, and opera. The book will be essential reading for everyone interested in hemispheric relations.
The definitive account of transpacific Asian movement through the Spanish empire—from Manila to Acapulco and beyond—and its implications for the history of race and colonization in the Americas.
Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons enjoyed a near-complete monopoly on transpacific trade between Spain’s Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish trading ships also facilitated the earliest migrations and displacements of Asian peoples to the Americas. Hailing from Gujarat, Nagasaki, and many places in between, both free and enslaved Asians boarded the galleons and made the treacherous transpacific journey each year. Once in Mexico, they became “chinos” within the New Spanish caste system.
Diego Javier Luis chronicles this first sustained wave of Asian mobility to the early Americas. Uncovering how and why Asian peoples crossed the Pacific, he sheds new light on the daily lives of those who disembarked at Acapulco. There, the term “chino” officially racialized diverse ethnolinguistic populations into a single caste, vulnerable to New Spanish policies of colonial control. Yet Asians resisted these strictures, often by forging new connections across ethnic groups. Social adaptation and cultural convergence, Luis argues, defined Asian experiences in the Spanish Americas from the colonial invasions of the sixteenth century to the first cries for Mexican independence in the nineteenth.
The First Asians in the Americas speaks to an important era in the construction of race, vividly unfolding what it meant to be “chino” in the early modern Spanish empire. In so doing, it demonstrates the significance of colonial Latin America to Asian diasporic history and reveals the fundamental role of transpacific connections to the development of colonial societies in the Americas.
Investigations of Maya architecture have been among the chief vehicles for contemplating a great art tradition, the hieroglyphic writing system, and evaluating issues of comparative sociology. The powerful attraction of Maya architecture as an evocation of lost worlds, as a medium for the carved glyph and idol, and as a yardstick for measuring evolutionary complexity, makes it appropriate that attention be given to the buildings themselves, rather than simply treating them as media for the investigation of other issues, as valuable as these might be. The articles in this volume are of special value and importance in making architecture itself the focus of attention. At the same time that they give appropriate attention to the great architectural achievements of the Maya, they do not ignore the often evanescent residences of commoners. Rather than privileging cross-cultural comparisons or the anthropology of prehistoric peoples, however, structures remain at the forefront. In this, we reaffirm Maya architecture as one of the world’s great building traditions, allow for meaningful interdisciplinary exchange between archaeology, art history, and anthropology, and provide new ways of appreciating Maya culture, from a unique perspective.
The contributions presented here will surely mark a significant stage in the study of Maya architecture and the society that built it. These articles represent the advances that have been achieved in our understandings of the past, point toward avenues for further studies, and note the distance we have yet to travel in fully appreciating and understanding this ancient American culture and its material remains.
These original papers present new, cutting-edge research focusing on the social changes leading up to the spread of divine kingship across the lowlands in the first part of the Early Classic. The contributors continue avenues of inquiry such as the timing of the Classic Maya collapse across the southern lowlands, the nature of Maya warfare, the notion of usurpation and “stranger-kings” in the Classic period, the social relationships between the ruler and elite of the Classic period Yaxchilán polity, and struggles for sociopolitical dominance among the later Classic period polities of Chichén Itzá, Cobá, and the Puuc kingdoms.
Many of the interpretations and approaches in A Forest of Kings have withstood the test of time, while others have not; a complete understanding of the Classic Maya world is still developing. In A Forest of History recent discoveries are considered in the context of prior scholarship, illustrating both the progress the field has made in the past quarter century and the myriad questions that remain. The volume will be a significant contribution to the literature for students, scholars, and general readers interested in Mesoamerican and Maya archaeology.
Contributors:
Wendy Ashmore, Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase, Wilberth Cruz Alvarado, Arthur A. Demarest, Keith Eppich, David A. Freidel, Charles W. Golden, Stanley P. Guenter, Annabeth Headrick, Aline Magnoni, Joyce Marcus, Marilyn A. Masson, Damaris Menéndez, Susan Milbrath, Olivia C. Navarro-Farr, José Osorio León, Carlos Peraza Lope, Juan Carlos Pérez Calderón, Griselda Pérez Robles, Francisco Pérez Ruíz, Michelle Rich, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Andrew K. Scherer, Karl A. Taube
For the preconquest Maya, sexuality was a part of ritual discourse and performance, and all sex acts were understood in terms of their power to create, maintain, and destroy society. As postconquest Maya adapted to life under colonial rule, they neither fully abandoned these views nor completely adopted the formulation of sexuality prescribed by Spanish Catholicism. Instead, they evolved hybridized notions of sexual desire, represented in the figure of the Virgin Mary as a sexual goddess, whose sex acts embodied both creative and destructive components.
This highly innovative book decodes the process through which this colonization of Yucatan Maya sexual desire occurred. Pete Sigal frames the discussion around a series of texts, including the Books of Chilam Balam and the Ritual of the Bacabs, that were written by seventeenth and eighteenth century Maya nobles to elucidate the history, religion, and philosophy of the Yucatecan Maya communities. Drawing on the insights of philology, discourse analysis, and deconstruction, he analyzes the sexual fantasies, fears, and desires that are presented, often unintentionally, in the "margins" of these texts and shows how they illuminate issues of colonialism, power, ritual, and gender.
A mixture of Africans, Mestizos, East Indians, Europeans, Syrians, Lebanese, Mayans, and Chinese; Belize has grown into a heterogenous mosaic of a strong and brave country which is no bigger than Cambridge, Massachusetts. Studying the influences of British domination and Spanish intimidation up to the recent movements for self-government and independence, Setzekorn presents to the reader an accounting of Belizean social and political vicissitudes—a long and tortuous, yet coherent, struggle for national and cultural identity.
In the sixteenth century, Q’eqchi’ Maya leader Aj Poop B’atz’ changed the course of Q’eqchi’ history by welcoming Spanish invaders to his community in peace to protect his people from almost certain violence. Today, he is revered as a powerful symbol of Q’eqchi’ identity. Aj Poop B’atz’ is only one of many indigenous heroes who has been recognized by Maya in Mexico and Guatemala throughout centuries of subjugation, oppression, and state-sponsored violence.
Faces of Resistance: Maya Heroes, Power, and Identity explores the importance of heroes through the analyses of heroic figures, some controversial and alternative, from the Maya area. Contributors examine stories of hero figures as a primary way through which Maya preserve public memory, fortify their identities, and legitimize their place in their country’s historical and political landscape. Leading anthropologists, linguists, historians, and others incorporate ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archival material into their chapters, resulting in a uniquely interdisciplinary book for scholars as well as students.
The essays offer the first critical survey of the broad significance of these figures and their stories and the ways that they have been appropriated by national governments to impose repressive political agendas. Related themes include the role of heroic figures in the Maya resurgence movement in Guatemala, contemporary Maya concepts of “hero,” and why some assert that all contemporary Maya are heroes.
Based on long-term ethnographic and archival research, From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama considers the intersection of tourism, multiculturalism, and nation building. Carla Guerrón Montero analyzes the ways in which tourism becomes a vehicle for the development of specific kinds of institutional multiculturalism and nation-building projects in a country that prides itself on being multiethnic and racially democratic.
The narrative centers on Panamanian Afro-Antilleans who arrived in Panama in the nineteenth century from the Greater and Leeward Antilles as a labor force for infrastructural projects and settled in Panama City, Colón, and the Bocas del Toro Archipelago. The volume discusses how Afro-Antilleans, particularly in Bocas del Toro, have struggled since their arrival to become part of Panama’s narrative of nationhood and traces their evolution from plantation workers for the United Fruit Company to tourism workers. Guerrón Montero notes that in the current climate of official tolerance, they have seized the moment to improve their status within Panamanian society, while also continuing to identify with their Caribbean heritage in ways that conflict with their national identity.
Pawn of the U.S. government. Right-hand man to the mob. Iron-fisted dictator. For decades, public understanding of the pre-Revolutionary Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista has been limited to these stereotypes. While on some level they all contain an element of truth, these superficial characterizations barely scratch the surface of the complex and compelling career of this important political figure.
Second only to Fidel Castro, Batista is the most controversial leader in modern Cuban history. And yet, until now, there has been no objective biography written about him. Existing biographical literature is predominantly polemical and either borders on hero worship or launches a series of attacks aimed at denigrating his entire legacy.
In this book, the first of two volumes, Frank Argote-Freyre provides a full and balanced portrait of this historically shadowed figure. He describes Batista's rise to power as part of a revolutionary movement and the intrigues and dangers that surrounded him. Drawing on an extensive review of Cuban newspapers, government records, memos, oral history interviews, and a selection of Batista's personal documents, Argote-Freyre moves beyond simplistic caricatures to uncover the real man-one with strengths and weaknesses and with a career marked by accomplishments as well as failures.
This volume focuses on Batista's role as a revolutionary leader from 1933 to 1934 and his image as a "strongman" in the years between 1934 and 1939. Argote-Freyre also uses Batista as an interpretive prism to review an entire era that is usually ignored by scholars-the Republican period of Cuban history. Bringing together global and local events, he considers the significance and relationship of the worldwide economic depression, the beginnings of World War II, and in Cuba, the Revolution of 1933, the expansion of the middle class, and the gradual development of democratic institutions.
Fulgencio Batista and most of Cuba's past prior to the Revolution of 1959 has been lost in the historical mists. Cuba had a rich and fascinating history before the Marxist Revolution and the reign of Fidel Castro. This captivating and long-overdue book uncovers it.
This book makes a timely intervention into the question of Castro's historical role and contribution. The author argues that Castro's doctrine of armed struggle is the logical development of his idea of the ethical liberation fighter. At its core is an unremitting emphasis on the ethical use of violence.
While most studies of intercultural contact focus on the impact of the intrusive power on the native culture, this book examines the effects of the colonization process on the Spaniards in the New World during the 16th century. The site of Puerto Real on the north coast of Haiti serves as a case study. Based on the results of excavations at both Puerto Real and St. Augustine, Florida, this study suggests that the introduction of New World and African cultural elements into Spanish colonial culture began almost at contact. The model of acculturative processes, developed in St. Augustine and tested at Puerto Real, can serve to guide future Spanish colonial research. It can also be applied to non-Hispanic colonial sites in the New World. Did the French and British adapt to their new environments in a manner similar to the Spanish? Work done at Puerto Real demonstrates the utility of archaeology in the study of the effects of culture contact.
Numerous firsthand narratives of these events survived, but their invaluable insights into the period have long languished in obscurity—until now. In Facing Racial Revolution, Jeremy D. Popkin unearths these documents and presents excerpts from more than a dozen accounts written by white colonists trying to come to grips with a world that had suddenly disintegrated. These dramatic writings give us our most direct portrayal of the actions of the revolutionaries, vividly depicting encounters with the uprising’s leaders—Toussaint Louverture, Boukman, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines—as well as putting faces on many of the anonymous participants in this epochal moment. Popkin’s expert commentary on each selection provides the necessary background about the authors and the incidents they describe, while also addressing the complex question of the witnesses’ reliability and urging the reader to consider the implications of the narrators’ perspectives.
Along with the American and French revolutions, the birth of Haiti helped shape the modern world. The powerful, moving, and sometimes troubling testimonies collected in Facing Racial Revolution significantly expand our understanding of this momentous event.
Jan S. Adams analyzes the factors shaping Gorbachev's foreign policy in Central America by surveying Soviet political views old and new, by describing Gorbachev's bold restructuring of the Soviet foreign policy establishment, and by assessing the implications of his policy of perestroika. A series of country studies demonstrates how changes in Soviet policies and domestic and economic circumstances contributed to significant shifts in the internal conditions and external relations of the Central American and Caribbean nations. Adams discusses in detail such topics as the reduction of Soviet military and economic aid to the region and pressures exerted by Moscow on client states to effect the settlement of regional conflicts by political rather than military means.
The author concludes by speculating about which trends in foreign policy by Russia and other Soviet-successor states toward Central America and the Caribbean may persist in the post-Soviet period, discussing as the implications of these changes for future U.S. policy in the region.
Roberts examines the liminal and transitional space of slave escape in order to develop a theory of freedom as marronage, which contends that freedom is fundamentally located within this space—that it is a form of perpetual flight. He engages a stunning variety of writers, including Hannah Arendt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Rastafari, among others, to develop a compelling lens through which to interpret the quandaries of slavery, freedom, and politics that still confront us today. The result is a sophisticated, interdisciplinary work that unsettles the ways we think about freedom by always casting it in the light of its critical opposite.
Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry, and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis, Khan argues for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean. Case studies explored range from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth-century Jamaica, to early twentieth-century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the attempted government coup in 1990 by the Jamaat al-Muslimeen in Trinidad, as well as the island’s calypso music, to contemporary judicial cases concerning Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the “fullaman,” a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.
Exploring the multiple social, ecological, cultural, and ontological dimensions of food in the Andean past, the contributors of Foodways of the Ancient Andes offer diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches that reveal the richness, sophistication, and ingenuity of Andean peoples. The volume spans time periods and localities in the Andean region to reveal how food is intertwined with multiple aspects of the human experience, from production and consumption to ideology and sociopolitical organization. It illustrates the Andean peoples’ resilience in the face of challenges brought about by food scarcity and environmental change. Chapters dissect the intersection of food, power, and status in early states and empires; examine the impact of food during times of conflict and instability; and illuminate how sacred and high-status foods contributed to the building of the Inka Empire.
Featuring forty-six contributors from ten countries, the chapters employ new analytical methods, integrating different food data and interdisciplinary research to show that food can provide not only simple nutrition but also a multitude of strategies, social and political relationships, and ontologies that are otherwise invisible in the archaeological record.
Contributors
Aleksa K. Alaica
Sonia Alconini
Marta Alfonso-Durruty
Sarah I. Baitzel
Véronique Bélisle
Carolina Belmar
Carrie Anne Berryman
Matthew E. Biwer
Deborah E. Blom
Tamara L. Bray
Matthew T. Brown
Maria C. Bruno
José M. Capriles
Katherine L. Chiou
Susan D. deFrance
Lucia M. Diaz
Richard P. Evershed
Maureen E. Folk
Alexandra Greenwald
Chris Harrod
Christine A. Hastorf
Iain Kendall
Kelly J. Knudson
BrieAnna S. Langlie
Cecilia Lemp
Petrus le Roux
Marcos Martinez
Anahí Maturana-Fernández
Weston C. McCool
Melanie J. Miller
Nicole Misarti
Flavia Morello
Patricia Quiñonez Cuzcano
Omar Reyes
Arturo F. Rivera Infante
Manuel San Román
Francisca Santana-Sagredo
Beth K. Scaffidi
Augusto Tessone
Andrés Troncoso
Tiffiny A. Tung
Mauricio Uribe
Natasha P. Vang
Sadie L. Weber
Kurt M. Wilson
Michelle E. Young
Once there was a Quechua folktale. It begins with a trickster fox's penis with a will of its own and ends with a daughter returning to parents who cannot recognize her until she recounts the uncanny adventures that have befallen her since she ran away from home. Following the strange twists and turnings of this tale, Catherine J. Allen weaves a narrative of Quechua storytelling and story listening that links these arts to others—fabric weaving, in particular—and thereby illuminates enduring Andean strategies for communicating deeply felt cultural values.
In this masterful work of literary nonfiction, Allen draws out the connections between two prominent markers of ethnic identity in Andean nations—indigenous language and woven cloth—and makes a convincing case that the connection between language and cloth affects virtually all aspects of expressive culture, including the performing arts. As she explores how a skilled storyteller interweaves traditional tales and stock characters into new stories, just as a skilled weaver combines traditional motifs and colors into new patterns, she demonstrates how Andean storytelling and weaving both embody the same kinds of relationships, the same ideas about how opposites should meet up with each other. By identifying these pervasive patterns, Allen opens up the Quechua cultural world that unites story tellers and listeners, as listeners hear echoes and traces of other stories, layering over each other in a kind of aural palimpsest.
She was a friend, lover, and confidante of charismatic Spanish American independence hero Simón Bolívar and, after her death, a nationalist icon in her own right. Yet authors generally have chosen either to romanticize Manuela Sáenz or to discount her altogether. For Glory and Bolivar: The Remarkable of Life of Manuela Sáenz, by contrast, offers a comprehensive and clear-eyed biography of her. Based on unprecedented archival research, it paints a vivid portrait of the Quito-born "Libertadora," revealing both an exceptional figure and a flesh-and-blood person whose life broadly reflected the experiences of women during Spanish America's turbulent Age of Revolution.
Already married at the time of her meeting with the famous Liberator, Sáenz abandoned her husband in order to become not only Bolívar's romantic companion, but also his official archivist, a member of his inner circle, and one of his most loyal followers. She played a central role in Spanish South America's independence drama and eventually in developments leading to the consolidation of new nations. Pamela Murray, for the first time, closely examines Sáenz's political trajectory including her vital, often-overlooked years in exile. She exposes the myths that still surround her. She offers, in short, a nuanced and much-needed historical perspective, one that balances recognition of Sáenz's uniqueness with awareness of the broader forces that shaped this dynamic nineteenth-century woman.
Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas sought to end fifty years of war and won President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet Colombian society rejected it in a polarizing referendum, amid an emotive disinformation campaign. Gwen Burnyeat joined the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government institution responsible for peace negotiations, to observe and participate in an innovative “peace pedagogy” strategy to explain the agreement to Colombian society. Burnyeat’s multi-scale ethnography reveals the challenges government officials experienced communicating with skeptical audiences and translating the peace process for public opinion. She argues that the fatal flaw in the peace process lay in government-society relations, enmeshed in culturally liberal logics and shaped by the politics of international donors. The Face of Peace offers the Colombian case as a mirror to the global crisis of liberalism, shattering the fantasy of rationality that haunts liberal responses to “post-truth” politics.
Fighting Monsters in the Abyss offers a deeply insightful analysis of the efforts by the second administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2006–2010) to resolve a decades-long Marxist insurgency in one of Latin America’s most important nations. Continuing work from his prior books about earlier Colombian presidents and yet written as a stand-alone study, Colombia expert Harvey F. Kline illuminates the surprising successes and setbacks in Uribe’s response to this existential threat.
In State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 1986–1994, Kline documented and explained the limited successes of Presidents Virgilio Barco and César Gaviria in putting down the revolutionaries while also confronting challenges from drug dealers and paramilitary groups. The following president Andrés Pastrana then boldly changed course and attempted resolution through negotiations, an effort whose failure Kline examines in Chronicle of a Failure Foretold. In his third book, Showing Teeth to the Dragons, Kline shows how in his first term President Álvaro Uribe Vélez more successfully quelled the insurrection through a combination of negotiated demobilization of paramilitary groups and using US backing to mount more effective military campaigns.
Kline opens Fighting Monsters in the Abyss with a recap of Colombia’s complex political history, the development of Marxist rebels and paramilitary groups and their respective relationships to the narcotics trade, and the attempts of successive Colombian presidents to resolve the crisis. Kline next examines the ability of the Colombian government to reimpose rule in rebel-controlled territories as well as the challenges of administering justice. He recounts the difficulties in the enforcement of the landmark Law of Justice and Peace as well as two significant government scandals, that of the “false positives” (“falsos positivos”) in which innocent civilians were killed by the military to inflate the body counts of dead insurgents and a second scandal related to illegal wiretapping.
In tracing Uribe’s choices, strategies, successes, and failures, Kline also uses the example of Colombia to explore a dimension quite unique in the literature about state building: what happens when some members of a government resort to breaking rules or betraying their societies’ values in well-intentioned efforts to build a stronger state?
Forbes Burnham: The Life and Times of the Comrade Leader is the first political biography of this complex and influential figure. It charts how the political party he founded, the People’s National Congress, combined nationalist rhetoric, socialist policies, and Pan-Africanist philosophies. It also explores how, in a country already deeply divided between the descendants of African slaves and Indian indentured servants, Burnham consolidated political power by intensifying ethnic polarizations. Drawing from historical archives as well as new interviews with the people who knew Burnham best, sociologist Linden F. Lewis examines how his dictatorial tendencies coexisted with his progressive convictions. Forbes Burnham is a compelling study of the nature of postcolonial leadership and its pitfalls.
First-Time's unique style of presentation preserves the integrity of both its oral and documentary sources, uniting them in a profound meditation on the roles of history and memory. This second edition includes a new preface by the author, discussing First-Time's impact and recounting the continuing struggles of the Saramaka people.
Building upon ethnographic description and interpretation, Viveiros de Castro addresses the central aspect of the Arawete's concept of divinity—consumption—showing how its cannibalistic expression differs radically from traditional representations of other Amazonian societies. He situates the Araweté in contemporary anthropology as a people whose vision of the world is complex, tragic, and dynamic, and whose society commands our attention for its extraordinary openness to exteriority and transformation. For the Araweté the person is always in transition, an outlook expressed in the mythology of their gods, whose cannibalistic ways they imitate. From the Enemy's Point of View argues that current concepts of society as a discrete, bounded entity which maintains a difference between "interior" and "exterior" are wholly inappropriate in this and in many other Amazonian societies.
In these chapters, Turner carries out one of the richest and most sustained analysis of a single myth ever conducted. Turner places the “Fire of the Jaguar” myth in the full context of Kayapo society and culture and shows how it became both an origin tale and model for the work of socialization, which is the primary form of productive labor in Kayapo society. A posthumous tribute to Turner’s theoretical erudition, ethnographic rigor, and respect for Amazonian indigenous lifeworlds, this book brings this fascinating Kayapo myth alive for new generations of anthropologists. Accompanied with some of Turner’s related pieces on Kayapo cosmology, this book is at once a richly literary work and an illuminating meditation on the process of creativity itself.
The Falling Sky is a remarkable first-person account of the life story and cosmo-ecological thought of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon. Representing a people whose very existence is in jeopardy, Davi Kopenawa paints an unforgettable picture of Yanomami culture, past and present, in the heart of the rainforest--a world where ancient indigenous knowledge and shamanic traditions cope with the global geopolitics of an insatiable natural resources extraction industry.
In richly evocative language, Kopenawa recounts his initiation and experience as a shaman, as well as his first encounters with outsiders: government officials, missionaries, road workers, cattle ranchers, and gold prospectors. He vividly describes the ensuing cultural repression, environmental devastation, and deaths resulting from epidemics and violence. To counter these threats, Davi Kopenawa became a global ambassador for his endangered people. The Falling Sky follows him from his native village in the Northern Amazon to Brazilian cities and finally on transatlantic flights bound for European and American capitals. These travels constitute a shamanic critique of Western industrial society, whose endless material greed, mass violence, and ecological blindness contrast sharply with Yanomami cultural values.
Bruce Albert, a close friend since the 1970s, superbly captures Kopenawa's intense, poetic voice. This collaborative work provides a unique reading experience that is at the same time a coming-of-age story, a historical account, and a shamanic philosophy, but most of all an impassioned plea to respect native rights and preserve the Amazon rainforest.
The 10th anniversary edition
A Guardian Best Book about Deforestation
A New Scientist Best Book of the Year
A Taipei Times Best Book of the Year
“A perfectly grounded account of what it is like to live an indigenous life in communion with one’s personal spirits. We are losing worlds upon worlds.”
—Louise Erdrich, New York Times Book Review
“The Yanomami of the Amazon, like all the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, have experienced the end of what was once their world. Yet they have survived and somehow succeeded in making sense of a wounded existence. They have a lot to teach us.”
—Amitav Ghosh, The Guardian
“A literary treasure…a must for anyone who wants to understand more of the diverse beauty and wonder of existence.”
—New Scientist
A now classic account of the life and thought of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami, The Falling Sky paints an unforgettable picture of an indigenous culture living in harmony with the Amazon forest and its creatures, and its devastating encounter with the global mining industry. In richly evocative language, Kopenawa recounts his initiation as a shaman and first experience of outsiders: missionaries, cattle ranchers, government officials, and gold prospectors seeking to extract the riches of the Amazon.
A coming-of-age story entwined with a rare first-person articulation of shamanic philosophy, this impassioned plea to respect indigenous peoples’ rights is a powerful rebuke to the accelerating depredation of the Amazon and other natural treasures threatened by climate change and development.
Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won explores the ways Afro-Brazilians in two major cities adapted to the new conditions of life after the abolition of slavery and how they confronted limitations placed on their new freedom. The book sets forth new ways of understanding why the abolition of slavery did not yield equitable fruits of citizenship, not only in Brazil, but throughout the Americas and the Caribbean.
Afro-Brazilians in Sao Paulo and Salvador lived out their new freedom in ways that raise issues common to the entire Afro-Atlantic diaspora. In Sao Paulo, they initiated a vocal struggle for inclusion in the creation of the nation's first black civil rights organization and political party, and they appropriated a discriminatory identity that isolated blacks. In contrast, African identity prevaled over black identity in Salvador, where social protest was oriented toward protecting the right of cultural pluralism.
Of all the eras and issues studied in Afro-Brazilian history, post-abolition social and political action has been the most neglected. Butler provides many details of this period for the first time in English and supplements published sources with original oral histories, Afro-Brazilian newspapers, and new state archival documents currently being catalogued in Bahia. Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won sets the Afro-Brazilian experience in a national context as well as situating it within the Afro-Atlantic diaspora through a series of explicit parallels, particularly with Cuba and Jamaica.
Until the 1960s, the Ayoreo people of Paraguay's Chaco region had remained uncontacted by the world. But as development encroached on their territory, the Ayoreo began to experience rapid cultural change. Paola Canova looks at one aspect of this change in Frontier Intimacies: the sexual practices of Ayoreo women, specifically the curajodie, or single women who exchange sex for money or material goods with non-Ayoreo men, often Mennonite settlers.
Weaving personal anecdotes into her extensive research, Canova shows how the advancement of economic and missionary frontiers has reconfigured gender roles, sexual ethics, and notions of desire in the region. Ayoreo women, she shows, have reappropriated their sexual practices, approaching intimate liaisons on their own terms and seeing the involvement of money not as morally problematic but as constitutive of sexual encounters. By using their sexuality to construct an intimate frontier operating according to their own logics, Canova reveals, Ayoreo women expose the fractured workings of frontier capitalism in spaces of rapid transformation. Inviting broader examination of the ways in which contemporary frontier economies are constructed and experienced, Frontier Intimacies brings a captivating new perspective to the economic development of the Chaco region.
Verdesio read the key texts relating to the struggles for possession of River Plate's northern shore -- present-day Uruguay. He probes them for traces of conflicts in meaning and the agency of Amerindians, gauchos, Africans, and women -- the subjected peoples that the texts try to silence. The narrators, speaking for their culture, assume the role of knowing subject, repressing all other voices, epistemologies, and acts of resistance. Verdesio's tasks are to listen for those that the Europeans represented as an unintelligible Other, to draw them into the foreground, and to decolonize their histories.
By unpacking these texts, Verdesio shows that from the European point of view, the colonial encounter draws the New World into historical time and ushers in a new concept of knowledge. For the first time, the historian's role is to discover, to interpret eyewitness testimonies and first-hand experience, to write 'a new history of admirable things.' Even in this reconstruction of historical truth, Old World ideology drives the narratives, whose chief purpose is to justify conquest. Forgotten Conquests lays bare the discursive strategies that generated the founding texts of Latin American history and engulfed its subjected peoples in silence for 500 years.
Domingo F. Sarmiento's classic 1845 essay Facundo, Civilizacion y Barbarie opened an inquiry into the nature of Argentinian culture that continues to the present day. In this elegantly written study, Diana Sorensen Goodrich explores the varied, and often conflicting, readings that Facundo has received since its publication and shows how these readings have contributed to the making and remaking of the Argentine nation and its culture.
Goodrich's analysis sheds new light on the intersection between canon formation and nation-building. While much has been written about Facundo as a primary text in Latin American letters, this is the first study that locates it within the problematics of canon formation and the cultural, social, and political contexts in which conflicting interpretations are constructed.
This new approach to Facundo illuminates the interactions among institutions, cultural ideologies, and political life. This book will be important reading for everyone interested in questions of national identity and the institutionalization of a national tradition.
Drawing upon extensive interviews and document analysis, Hindery argues that many of the structural conditions created by neoliberal policies—including partial privatization of the oil and gas sector—still persist under Morales. Tactics employed by both Morales and his neoliberal predecessors utilize the rhetoric of environmental protection and Indigenous rights to justify oil, gas, mining, and road development in Indigenous territories and sensitive ecoregions.
Indigenous peoples, while mindful of gains made during Morales’s tenure, are increasingly dissatisfied with the administration’s development model, particularly when it infringes upon their right to self-determination. From Enron to Evo demonstrates their dynamic and pragmatic strategies to cope with development and adversity, while also advancing their own aims.
Offering a critique of both free-market piracy and the dilemmas of resource nationalism, this is a groundbreaking book for scholars, policy-makers, and advocates concerned with Indigenous politics, social movements, environmental justice, and resistance in an era of expanding resource development.
From the Mines to the Streets draws on the life of Félix Muruchi to depict the greater forces at play in Bolivia and elsewhere in South America during the last half of the twentieth century. It traces Félix from his birth in an indigenous family in 1946, just after the abolition of bonded labor, through the next sixty years of Bolivia's turbulent history. As a teenager, Félix followed his father into the tin mines before serving a compulsory year in the military, during which he witnessed the 1964 coup d'état that plunged the country into eighteen years of military rule. He returned to work in the mines, where he quickly rose to become a union leader. The reward for his activism was imprisonment, torture, and exile. After he came home, he participated actively in the struggles against neoliberal governments, which led in 2006—the year of his sixtieth birthday—to the inauguration of Evo Morales as Bolivia's first indigenous president.
The authors weave Muruchi's compelling recollections with contextual commentary that elucidates Bolivian history. The combination of an unforgettable life story and in-depth text boxes makes this a gripping, effective account, destined to become a classic sourcebook.
One of the most fascinating books on pre-Columbian and early colonial Peru was written by a Peruvian Indian named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. This book, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, covers pre-Inca times, various aspects of Inca culture, the Spanish conquest, and colonial times up to around 1615 when the manuscript was finished. Now housed in the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark, and viewable online at www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/en/frontpage.htm, the original manuscript has 1,189 pages accompanied by 398 full-page drawings that constitute the most accurate graphic depiction of Inca and colonial Peruvian material culture ever done.
Working from the original manuscript and consulting with fellow Quechua- and Spanish-language experts, Roland Hamilton here provides the most complete and authoritative English translation of approximately the first third of The First New Chronicle and Good Government. The sections included in this volume (pages 1–369 of the manuscript) cover the history of Peru from the earliest times and the lives of each of the Inca rulers and their wives, as well as a wealth of information about ordinances, age grades, the calendar, idols, sorcerers, burials, punishments, jails, songs, palaces, roads, storage houses, and government officials. One hundred forty-six of Guaman Poma's detailed illustrations amplify the text.
Working within an innovative and panoramic historical and linguistic framework, Thurner examines the paradoxes of a resurgent Andean peasant republicanism during the mid-1800s and provides a critical revision of the meaning of republican Peru’s bloodiest peasant insurgency, the Atusparia Uprising of 1885. Displacing ahistorical and nationalist readings of Inka or Andean continuity, and undermining the long-held notion that the colonial legacy is the dominant historical force shaping contemporary Andean reality, Thurner suggests that in Peru, the postcolonial legacy of Latin America’s nation-founding nineteenth century transfigured, and ultimately reinvented, the colonial legacy in its own image.
The Fabric of Resistance: Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru documents the impact of Spanish colonial institutions of labor on identity and social cohesion in Peru. Through archaeological and historical lines of evidence, Di Hu examines the long-term social conditions that enabled the large-scale rebellions in the late Spanish colonial period in Peru. Hu argues that ordinary people from different backgrounds pushed back against the top-down identity categories imposed by the Spanish colonial government and in the process created a cosmopolitan social landscape that later facilitated broader rebellion.
Hu’s case study is Pomacocha, the site of an important Spanish colonial hacienda (agricultural estate) and obraje (textile workshop). At its height, the latter had more than one hundred working families and sold textiles all over the Andes. Through analysis of this site, Hu explores three main long-term causes of rebellions against Spanish oppression. First, the Spanish colonial economy provided motivation and the social spaces for intercaste (indigenous, African, and mestizo) mixing at textile workshops. Second, new hybrid cultural practices and political solidarity arose there that facilitated the creation of new rebellious identities. Third, the maturation in the eighteenth century of popular folklore that reflected the harsh nature of Spanish labor institutions helped workers from diverse backgrounds gain a systemic understanding of exploitation.
This study provides a fresh archaeological and historical perspectives on the largest and most cosmopolitan indigenous-led rebellions of the Americas. Hu interweaves analyses of society at multiple scales including fine-grained perspectives of social networks, demography, and intimate details of material life in the textile workshop. She examines a wide range of data sources including artifacts, food remains, architectural plans, account books, censuses, court documents, contracts, maps, and land title disputes.
Alberto Fujimori ascended to the presidency of Peru in 1990, boldly promising to remake the country. Ten years later, he hastily sent his resignation from exile in Japan, leaving behind a trail of lies, deceit, and corruption. While piecing together the shards of Fujimori’s presidency, prosecutors uncovered a vast criminal conspiracy fueled by political ambition and personal greed.
The Fujimori regime managed to maintain a facade of democracy while systematically eviscerating democratic institutions and the rule of law through legal subterfuge, intimidation, and outright bribery. The architect of this strategy was Fujimori’s notorious intelligence advisor, Vladimiro Montesinos. With great skill, Fujimori and Montesinos created the appearance of a democratic public sphere but ensured it would work only to suit their personal motives. The press was allowed to operate, but information exchange was under strict control. The more government officials tampered with the free flow of ideas, the more they inadvertently exposed the ills they were trying to cover up. And that proved to be their downfall.
Merging penetrating analysis and a journalist’s flair for narrative, Catherine Conaghan reveals the thin line between democracy and dictatorship, and shows how public institutions can both empower dictators and bring them down.
The indigenous population of the Ecuadorian Andes made substantial political gains during the 1990s in the wake of a dynamic wave of local activism. The movement renegotiated land development laws, elected indigenous candidates to national office, and successfully fought for the constitutional redefinition of Ecuador as a nation of many cultures. Fighting Like a Community argues that these remarkable achievements paradoxically grew out of the deep differences—in language, class, education, and location—that began to divide native society in the 1960s.
Drawing on fifteen years of fieldwork, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld explores these differences and the conflicts they engendered in a variety of communities. From protestors confronting the military during a national strike to a migrant family fighting to get a relative released from prison, Colloredo-Mansfeld recounts dramatic events and private struggles alike to demonstrate how indigenous power in Ecuador is energized by disagreements over values and priorities, eloquently contending that the plurality of Andean communities, not their unity, has been the key to their political success.
Blending ethnography with a fascinating personal story, A Future for Amazonia is an account of a political movement that arose in the early 1990s in response to decades of attacks on the lands and peoples of eastern Ecuador, one of the world’s most culturally and biologically diverse places. After generations of ruin at the hands of colonizing farmers, transnational oil companies, and Colombian armed factions, the indigenous Cofán people and their rain forest territory faced imminent jeopardy. In a surprising turn of events, the Cofán chose Randy Borman, a man of Euro-American descent, to lead their efforts to overcome the crisis that confronted them.
Drawing on three years of ethnographic research, A Future for Amazonia begins by tracing the contours of Cofán society and Borman’s place within it. Borman, a blue-eyed, white-skinned child of North American missionary-linguists, was raised in a Cofán community and gradually came to share the identity of his adoptive nation. He became a global media phenomenon and forged creative partnerships between Cofán communities, conservationist organizations, Western scientists, and the Ecuadorian state. The result was a collective mobilization that transformed the Cofán nation in unprecedented ways, providing them with political power, scientific expertise, and a new role as ambitious caretakers of more than one million acres of forest. Challenging simplistic notions of identity, indigeneity, and inevitable ecological destruction, A Future for Amazonia charts an inspiring course for environmental politics in the twenty-first century.
National Geographic has been called a window on the world and a passport to adventure. Each month an estimated forty million people in 190 countries open its pages and are transported to exotic realms that delight the eye and mind. Such widespread renown gives the magazine's writers an almost magical access to people and happenings, as doors that are closed to the rest of the journalistic world open wide.
Thomas Y. Canby was fortunate to be a NationalGeographic writer and science editor from 1961 to 1991, a time during which the Society's ventures and size grew by leaps and bounds and the resources available to staff were seemingly limitless. In From Botswana to the Bering Sea, he gives readers an on-the-ground look at the life of a National Geographic field staffer and an insider's view of the fascinating dynamics within the magazine's editorial chambers.
Canby's assignments dealt largely with issues of global concern, and his travels took him to the farthest reaches of the planet. This book gives the reader the visas and tickets to share in Canby's experiences -- from a Filipino rice harvest capped by a feast of deep-fried rats, to impoverished villages of Asia and Africa gripped by the world's most widespread famine, to seal hunting and dog sledding with Eskimos in the Canadian high Arctic. Readers match wits with paranoid guardians of the secret Soviet space program; skirt land mines in the flaming oil fields of Kuwait; and dodge death while scuba diving to an archaeological site in a Florida sinkhole. The book also gives insight into the magazine's inner workings: how article subjects are chosen; how writers are assigned and interact; how prolonged trips to impossibly remote destinations are planned; how staffers operate in the field.
Working for National Geographic has been called "the best job in the world." From Botswana to the Bering Sea describes that unique job, and answers from first-hand knowledge the question Canby and his colleagues are so often asked: "So, what is it like to work for National Geographic?"
For the first time in English, a key work of critical geography
Originally published in 1978 in Portuguese, For a New Geography is a milestone in the history of critical geography, and it marked the emergence of its author, Milton Santos (1926–2001), as a major interpreter of geographical thought, a prominent Afro-Brazilian public intellectual, and one of the foremost global theorists of space.
Published in the midst of a crisis in geographical thought, For a New Geography functioned as a bridge between geography’s past and its future. In advancing his vision of a geography of action and liberation, Santos begins by turning to the roots of modern geography and its colonial legacies. Moving from a critique of the shortcomings of geography from the field’s foundations as a modern science to the outline of a new field of critical geography, he sets forth both an ontology of space and a methodology for geography. In so doing, he introduces novel theoretical categories to the analysis of space. It is, in short, both a critique of the Northern, Anglo-centric discipline from within and a systematic critique of its flaws and assumptions from outside.
Critical geography has developed in the past four decades into a heterogenous and creative field of enquiry. Though accruing a set of theoretical touchstones in the process, it has become detached from a longer and broader history of geographical thought. For a New Geography reconciles these divergent histories. Arriving in English at a time of renewed interest in alternative geographical traditions and the history of radical geography, it takes its place in the canonical works of critical geography.
A Wired Most Fascinating Book of the Year
“An important book that reminds us that navigation remains one of our most underappreciated arts.”
—Tristan Gooley, author of The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs
“If you want to understand what rats can teach us about better-planned cities, why walking into a different room can help you find your car keys, or how your brain’s grid, border, and speed cells combine to give us a sense of direction, this book has all the answers.”
—The Scotsman
How is it that some of us can walk unfamiliar streets without losing our way, while the rest of us struggle even with a GPS? Navigating in uncharted territory is a remarkable feat if you stop to think about it. In this beguiling mix of science and storytelling, Michael Bond explores how we do it: how our brains make the “cognitive maps” that keep us orientated and how that anchors our sense of wellbeing. Children are instinctive explorers, developing a spatial understanding as they roam. And yet today few of us make use of the wayfinding skills that we inherited from our nomadic ancestors.
Bond tells stories of the lost and found—sailors, orienteering champions, early aviators—and explores why being lost can be such a devastating experience. He considers how our understanding of the world around us affects our psychology and helps us see how our reliance on technology may be changing who we are.
“Bond concludes that, by setting aside our GPS devices, by redesigning parts of our cities and play areas, and sometimes just by letting ourselves get lost, we can indeed revivify our ability to find our way, to the benefit of our inner world no less than the outer one.”
—Science
“A thoughtful argument about how our ability to find our way is integral to our nature.”
—Sunday Times
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