A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY63 start with N start with N
Nahua Horizons: Writing, Persuasion, and Futurities in Colonial Mexico investigates how Nahuas conceptualized their futures in the early colonial period. Scholar Ezekiel G. Stear delves deeply into canonical texts such as the Florentine Codex and the Crónica mexicayotl as well as understudied texts such as the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, the Tira de Tepechpan, and the Anales de Juan Bautista. The study does more than describe how Nahuas conceived of their own futures: it also shows their specific plans for moving into the coming years.
The book examines how Nahua writers in Central Mexico and other Mesoamerican voices in colonial Spanish America played an active, decisive role in shaping culture, using writing to persuade their communities to mold their own destinies, even amid colonial upheaval. This work opens up new directions for research and teaching, shifting inquiry from how Nahuas preserved cultural continuity to how they envisioned their roles as pathfinders toward times to come.
Nahua Horizons challenges the notion that the Spanish erased Nahua culture. The book emphasizes the ways people kept sovereignty over the futures they envisioned for themselves and their communities. Stear’s bold new approach follows the paths that Nahuas forged ahead into unknown times.
During the colonial period, Nahuatl became a means of empowerment, oppression, and indoctrination. In modern times, Nahuatl continues to serve as an ideological lightning rod for both the Mexican government and Indigenous communities. Contributors to this volume focus on Nahua intellectual production from the sixteenth century to the present; contact and the negotiation of meaning; adaptations of Christian lore that show how representations of creation, hell, and the Passion of Christ reflected Nahua perceptions and understandings; Nahua cultural expressions, including poetry, healing rituals, and even running; language and geography; Nahuatl place-names; and the transformation of Nahuatl speakers from antiquity to the present.
Showcasing how Nahuatl’s cultural resilience permanently shaped the region’s social geography, The Nahua engages the field’s interest in the nonhomogenous character of the language, with regional and subregional dialects and pronunciations that reflect the history of pre-Columbian migrations and modern-era influences. Bridging the study of Nahuatl as a “historical” Indigenous language tradition with the study of modern-day speakers and their experiences, this work is of significance to students, scholars, and speakers of the languages as well as those studying colonial New Spain, Indigenous resilience, or Indigenous linguistics.
2024 Honorable Mention — The Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Award – English, Empowering Latino Futures’ International Latino Book Awards
Exploring representations of Latinx people from Scarface to Narcos, this book examines how pop culture has framed Latin America as the villain in America’s long and ineffectual War on Drugs.
If there is an enemy in the War on Drugs, it is people of color. That is the lesson of forty years of cultural production in the United States. Popular culture, from Scarface and Miami Vice to Narcos and Better Call Saul, has continually positioned Latinos as an alien people who threaten the US body politic with drugs. Jason Ruiz explores the creation and endurance of this trope, its effects on Latin Americans and Latinx people, and its role in the cultural politics of the War on Drugs.
Even as the focus of drug anxiety has shifted over the years from cocaine to crack and from methamphetamines to opioids, and even as significant strides have been made in representational politics in many areas of pop culture, Latinx people remain an unshakeable fixture in stories narrating the production, distribution, and sale of narcotics. Narcomedia argues that such representations of Latinx people, regardless of the intentions of their creators, are best understood as a cultural front in the War on Drugs. Latinos and Latin Americans are not actually America’s drug problem, yet many Americans think otherwise—and that is in no small part because popular culture has largely refused to imagine the drug trade any other way.
One of the earliest chronicles of the Inca empire was written in the 1550s by Juan de Betanzos. Although scholars have long known of this work, only eighteen chapters were actually available until the 1980s when the remaining sixty-four chapters were discovered in the collection of the Fundación Bartolomé March in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
Narrative of the Incas presents the first complete English translation of the original manuscript of this key document. Although written by a Spaniard, it presents an authentic Inca worldview, drawn from the personal experiences and oral traditions told to Betanzos by his Inca wife, Doña Angelina, and other members of her aristocratic family who lived during the reigns of the last Inca rulers, Huayna Capac Huascar and Atahualpa. Betanzos wrote a history of the Inca empire that focuses on the major rulers and the contributions each one made to the growth of the empire and of Inca culture.
Filled with new insights into Inca politics, marriage, laws, the calendar, warfare, and other matters, Narrative of the Incas is essential reading for everyone interested in this ancient civilization.
The Inka Empire stretched over much of the length and breadth of the South American Andes, encompassed elaborately planned cities linked by a complex network of roads and messengers, and created astonishing works of architecture and artistry and a compelling mythology—all without the aid of a graphic writing system. Instead, the Inkas' records consisted of devices made of knotted and dyed strings—called khipu—on which they recorded information pertaining to the organization and history of their empire. Despite more than a century of research on these remarkable devices, the khipu remain largely undeciphered.
In this benchmark book, twelve international scholars tackle the most vexed question in khipu studies: how did the Inkas record and transmit narrative records by means of knotted strings? The authors approach the problem from a variety of angles. Several essays mine Spanish colonial sources for details about the kinds of narrative encoded in the khipu. Others look at the uses to which khipu were put before and after the Conquest, as well as their current use in some contemporary Andean communities. Still others analyze the formal characteristics of khipu and seek to explain how they encode various kinds of numerical and narrative data.
He asks not just why villagers revolted but how their discontent fit into the political drama of early national Mexico. Ducey shows how the war offered opportunities for villagers to settle scores with members of the local elite as peasants discovered new ways of imagining the state. They were far from being the isolated traditionalists who occasionally rebelled against political or economic change described in older scholarship. At least until the 1848-1850 Caste War, political disputes were more important than land.
This region’s peasants were both remarkably diverse and politically astute. Villagers adapted colonial political culture and later republican ideas to fashion local institutions that fit their own needs. Over the course of a hundred years, peasant tactics and political discourse evolved in a constant dialogue with the changing political climate, shifting from rhetorical statements of loyalty to the king to proclamations of federalism and their rights as citizens. A Nation of Villages ably demonstrates that rural villagers were more aware of elite ideologies than urban rulers were of the villagers’ political ideas. This long-term analysis of one region illuminates how rural people helped shape the republican state.
The “problem” of photography in Mexico, Tejada shows, reveals cross-cultural episodes that are rife with contradictions, especially in the complex terms of cultural and sexual difference. Analyzing such topics as territory, sexuality, and social and ethnic relations in image making, Tejada delves into the work of key figures including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Marius de Zayas, and Julien Levy, as well as the Agustín Víctor Casasola Archive, the Boystown photographs, and contemporary Mexican and Latina photo-based artists.
From the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 to the U.S.–Mexico borderlands of today, Tejada traces the connective thread that photography has provided between Mexican and U.S. American intellectual and cultural production and, in doing so, defines both nations.
Evangelical Christianity is Mexico’s fastest-growing religious movement, with about ten million adherents today. Most belong to Protestant denominations introduced from the United States (e.g., Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists), but perhaps as many as 800,000 are members of homegrown, “native” evangelical sects. These native Mexican sects share much with the American denominations of which they are spinoffs. For instance, they are Trinitarian, Anabaptist, and Millenarian; they emphasize a personal relationship with God, totally rejecting intermediation by saints; and they insist that they are the only true Christians. Beyond that, each native sect has its distinctive characteristics.
This book focuses on two sharply contrastive native evangelical sects in Central Mexico: Amistad y Vida (Friendship and Life) and La Luz del Mundo (The Light of the World). The former, founded in 1982, now has perhaps 120,000 adherents nationwide. It is nonhierarchical, extremely egalitarian, and has no dogmatic directives. It is a cheerful religion that emphasizes charity, community service, and personal kindness as the path to salvation. It attracts new members, mainly from the urban middle class, through personal example rather than proselytizing. La Luz del Mundo, founded in 1926, now has about 350,000 members in Mexico and perhaps one million in the hemisphere. It is hierarchically organized and demands total devotion to the sect’s founder and his son, who are seen as direct links to Jesus on Earth. It is a proselytizing sect that recruits mainly among the urban poor by providing economic benefits within the congregations, but does no community service as such.
Based on ten years of fieldwork (1996–2006) and contextualized by nearly fifty years of anthropological study in the region, Native Evangelism in Central Mexico presents the first ethnography of Mexico’s native evangelical congregations.
The first century of Spanish colonization in Latin America witnessed the birth of cities that, while secondary to great metropolitan centers such as Mexico City and Lima, became important hubs for regional commerce. Santiago de Guatemala, the colonial capital of Central America, was one of these. A multiethnic and multicultural city from its beginning, Santiago grew into a vigorous trading center for agrarian goods such as cacao and cattle hides. With the wealth this commerce generated, Spaniards, natives, and African slaves built a city that any European of the period would have found familiar.
This book provides a more complete picture of society, culture, and economy in sixteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala than has ever before been drawn. Robinson Herrera uses previously unstudied primary sources, including testaments, promissory notes, and work contracts, to recreate the lives and economic activities of the non-elite sectors of society, including natives, African slaves, economically marginal Europeans, and people of mixed descent. His focus on these groups sheds light on the functioning of the economy at the lower levels and reveals how people of different ethnic groups formed alliances to create a vibrant local and regional economy based on credit. This portrait of Santiago also increases our understanding of how secondary Spanish American cities contributed vitally to the growth of the colonies.
This volume looks at how metropolitan ideas of nation employed by politicians, the media and education are produced, reproduced, and contested by people of the rural Andes—people who have long been regarded as ethnically and racially distinct from more culturally European urban citizens. Yet these peripheral “natives” are shown to be actively engaged with the idea of the nation in their own communities, forcing us to re-think the ways in which indigeneity is defined by its marginality.
The contributors examine the ways in which numerous identities—racial, generational, ethnic, regional, national, gender, and sexual—are both mutually informing and contradictory among subaltern Andean people who are more likely now to claim an allegiance to a nation than ever before. Although indians are less often confronted with crude assimilationist policies, they continue to face racism and discrimination as they struggle to assert an identity that is more than a mere refraction of the dominant culture. Yet despite the language of multiculturalism employed even in constitutional reform, any assertion of indian identity is likely to be resisted. By exploring topics as varied as nation-building in the 1930s or the chuqila dance, these authors expose a paradox in the relation between indians and the nation: that the nation can be claimed as a source of power and distinct identity while simultaneously making some types of national imaginings unattainable.
Whether dancing together or simply talking to one another, the people described in these essays are shown creating identity through processes that are inherently social and interactive. To sing, to eat, to weave . . . In the performance of these simple acts, bodies move in particular spaces and contexts and do so within certain understandings of gender, race and nation. Through its presentation of this rich variety of ethnographic and historical contexts, Natives Making Nation provides a finely nuanced view of contemporary Andean life.
A significant contribution to Renaissance Europe's thinking about the New World, Acosta's Natural and Moral History of the Indies reveals an effort to incorporate new information into a Christian, Renaissance worldview. He attempted to confirm for his European readers that a "new" continent did indeed exist and that human beings could and did live in equatorial climates. A keen observer and prescient thinker, Acosta hypothesized that Latin America's indigenous peoples migrated to the region from Asia, an idea put forth more than a century before Europeans learned of the Bering Strait. Acosta's work established a hierarchical classification of Amerindian peoples and thus contributed to what today is understood as the colonial difference in Renaissance European thinking.
The paleoecological history of the Americas is as complex as the region is broad: stretching from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, the New World features some of the most extraordinary vegetation on the planet. But until now it has lacked a complete natural history. Alan Graham remedies that with A Natural History of the New World. With plants as his scientific muse, Graham traces the evolution of ecosystems, beginning in the Late Cretaceous period (about 100 million years ago) and ending in the present, charting their responses to changes in geology and climate.
By highlighting plant communities’ roles in the environmental history of the Americas, Graham offers an overdue balance to natural histories that focus exclusively on animals. Plants are important in evolution’s splendid drama. Not only are they conspicuous and conveniently stationary components of the Earth’s ecosystems, but their extensive fossil record allows for a thorough reconstruction of the planet’s paleoenvironments. What’s more, plants provide oxygen, function as food and fuel, and provide habitat and shelter; in short, theirs is a history that can speak to many other areas of evolution.
A Natural History of the New World is an ambitious and unprecedented synthesis written by one of the world’s leading scholars of botany and geology.
In this reflective account of life in the tropics, Alexander Skutch offers readers both his observations and his interpretations of what he has experienced. In the many chapters about birds and their behavior, he describes a dove that defends its nest with rare courage, castlebuilders who create elaborate nests of interlaced twigs, oropendolas that cluster long woven pouches in high treetops, and an exceptionally graceful hummingbird who fails to pay for its nectar by pollinating the flowers that yield it. Skutch also describes curious plants and their flowers, including a birthwort that holds its pollinating flies captive and fern fronds that twine high up trunks in the rain forest.
With penetrating clarity, Skutch considers the significance of all this restless activity: he examines the origins of beauty and our ability to appreciate it, the foundations of tropical splendor, the factors that help us feel close to nature or alienated from it, and the possibility of consciousness and emotion in animals. He also addresses the quandary of the biologist contemplating painful experiments on animals rather than learning by direct observation, and he asserts that our capacity to care for the world around us is the truest criterion of our evolutionary advancement.
Skutch brings a thoughtful, unequaled voice to the description of the world he has grown to know and understand, a world considered forbidding by most northerners and still largely unexplored.
In this original study, Gabriel Horowitz examines the work of select nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American writers through the lens of contemporary theoretical debates about nature, postcoloniality, and national identity. In the work of José Martí, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Jorge Luis Borges, Augusto Roa Bastos, Cesar Aira, and others, he traces historical constructions of nature in regional intellectual traditions and texts as they inform political culture on the broader global stage. By investigating national literary discourses from Cuba, Argentina, and Paraguay, he identifies a common narrative thread that imagines the utopian wilderness of the New World as a symbolic site of independence from Spain. In these texts, Horowitz argues, an expressed desire to return to the nation’s foundational nature contributed to a movement away from political and social engagement and toward a “biopolitical state,” in which nature, traditionally seen as pre-political, conversely becomes its center.
In this account of the naval aspect of Hernando Cortés's invasion of the Aztec Empire, C. Harvey Gardiner has added another dimension to the drama of Spanish conquest of the New World and to Cortés himself as a military strategist. The use of ships, in the climactic moment of the Spanish-Aztec clash, which brought about the fall of Tenochtitlán and consequently of all of Mexico, though discussed briefly in former English-language accounts of the struggle, had never before been detailed and brought into a perspective that reveals its true significance. Gardiner, on the basis of previously unexploited sixteenth-century source materials, has written a historical revision that is as colorful as it is authoritative.
Four centuries before the term was coined, Cortés, in the key years of 1520–1521, used the technique of "total war." He was able to do so victoriously primarily because of his courage in taking a gamble and his brilliance in tactical planning, but these qualities might well have signified nothing without the fortunate presence in his forces of a master shipwright, Martin López.
As the exciting story unrolls, Cortés, López, and the many other participants in the venture of creating and using a navy in the midst of the New World mountains and forests are seen as real personalities, not embalmed historical stereotypes, and the indigenous defenders are revealed as complex human beings facing huge odds. Much of the tale is told in the actual words of the protagonists; Gardiner has probed letters, court records, and other contemporary documents. He has also compared this naval feat of the Spaniards with other maritime events from ancient times to the present.
Naval Power in the Conquest of Mexico as a book was itself the result of an interesting combination of circumstances. C. Harvey Gardiner, as teacher, scholar, and writer, had long been interested in Latin American history generally and Mexican history in particular. During World War II, from 1942 to 1946, he served with the U.S. Navy. As he relates: "One day in early autumn 1945, while loafing on the bow of a naval vessel knifing its way southward in the Pacific a few degrees north of the Equator, my thoughts turned to the naval side of the just-ended conflict, and in time the question emerged, 'I wonder how the little ships and the little men will fare in the eventual record?' Then, because I was eager to return to my civilian life of pursuit of Latin American themes, the concomitant question came: 'I wonder what little fighting ships and minor men of early Latin America have been consigned to the oblivion of historical neglect?' As I began later to rummage my way from Columbus toward modem times, I seized upon the Mexican Conquest as the prime period with pay dirt for the researcher in quest of the answer to that latter question."
Employing a cross-cultural approach, Lesser examines a variety of acculturating responses by minority groups, from insisting on their own whiteness to becoming ultra-nationalists and even entering secret societies that insisted Japan had won World War II. He discusses how various minority groups engaged in similar, and successful, strategies of integration even as they faced immense discrimination and prejudice. Some believed that their ethnic heritage was too high a price to pay for the “privilege” of being white and created alternative categories for themselves, such as Syrian-Lebanese, Japanese-Brazilian, and so on. By giving voice to the role ethnic minorities have played in weaving a broader definition of national identity, this book challenges the notion that elite discourse is hegemonic and provides the first comprehensive look at Brazilian worlds often ignored by scholars.
Based on extensive research, Negotiating National Identity will be valuable to scholars and students in Brazilian and Latin American studies, as well as those in the fields of immigrant history, ethnic studies, and race relations.
The Latin/o America examined here stretches from Patagonia to New York City, bridging the political and geographical divides between U.S. Latinos and Latin Americans. Moving from Nuyorican casitas in the South Bronx, to subversive street performances in Buenos Aires, to border art from San Diego/Tijuana, this volume negotiates the borders that bring Americans together and keep them apart, while at the same time debating the use of the contested term "Latino/a." In the emerging dialogue, contributors reenvision an inclusive "América," a Latin/o America that does not pit nationality against ethnicity—in other words, a shared space, and a home to all Latin/o Americans.
Negotiating Performance opens up the field of Latin/o American theater and performance criticism by looking at performance work by Mayans, women, gays, lesbians, and other marginalized groups. In so doing, this volume will interest a wide audience of students and scholars in feminist and gender studies, theater and performance studies, and Latin American and Latino cultural studies.
Contributors. Judith Bettelheim, Sue-Ellen Case, Juan Flores, Jean Franco, Donald H. Frischmann, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Jorge Huerta, Tiffany Ana López, Jacqueline Lazú, María Teresa Marrero, Cherríe Moraga, Kirsten F. Nigro, Patrick O’Connor, Jorge Salessi, Alberto Sandoval, Cynthia Steele, Diana Taylor, Juan Villegas, Marguerite Waller
Bringing together work by Mexican and North American historians, this collection is a crucially important and rare contribution to the field. Negotiation within Domination is a valuable resource for native peoples as they seek to redefine and revitalize their identities and assert their rights relating to language and religion, ownership of lands and natural resources, rights of self-determination and self-government, and protection of cultural and intellectual property. It will be of interest primarily to specialists in the field of colonial studies and historians and ethnohistorians of New Spain.
Contributors: R. Jovita Baber, José Manuel A. Chávez-Gómez, Susan Kellogg, Edward W. Osowski, María de los Ángeles Romero Frizzi, Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Cuauhtémoc Velasco Ávila, Yanna P. Yannakakis
Carl Degler’s 1971 Pulitzer-Prize-winning study of comparative slavery in Brazil and the United States is reissued in the Wisconsin paperback edition, making it accessible for all students of American and Latin American history and sociology.
Until Degler’s groundbreaking work, scholars were puzzled by the differing courses of slavery and race relations in the two countries. Brazil never developed a system of rigid segregation, such as appeared in the United States, and blacks in Brazil were able to gain economically and retain far more of their African culture. Rejecting the theory of Giberto Freyre and Frank Tannenbaum—that Brazilian slavery was more humane—Degler instead points to a combination of demographic, economic, and cultural factors as the real reason for the differences.
“In the early 1970s when studies in social history were beginning to blossom on the North American scene, Carl Degler’s prize-winning contribution was a thoughtful provocative essay in comparative history. Its thoughtfulness has not diminished with the years. Indeed, it is as topical today as when it was first published. The Brazilian experience with rapid industrialization and its attempt to restore democratic government indicates that the issues which Degler treated in the early 1970s are more pertinent than ever today.”—Franklin W. Knight, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University.
In Neither Hee Nor Any of His Companie Did Return Againe: Failed Colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America, 1492–1865, historians David MacDonald and Raine Waters examine the European, and later American, failures to establish permanent settlements in the region. Beginning with Columbus’s ill-conceived ventures, the authors discuss the efforts, from German claims in Venezuela and Scottish attempts in Panama to defeated Confederates fleeing to Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere. For each colony, the primary source information is contextualized and evaluated. Along the way, the authors determine commonalities across these ill-fated colonies as well as underscore the fact that while Indigenous peoples of the region often vigorously resisted predatory European colonization, their numbers were decimated by relentless warfare, slave raids, and European diseases. As Indian populations declined, colonists imported African slaves in large numbers. The brutal treatment of slaves resulted in those who escaped creating their own settlements that existed in a state of endemic warfare with European colonists. An important contribution to Atlantic World studies, this volume reveals the fine line between colonies that thrived and those that failed.
During the Cold War, left-wing Latin American artists, writers, and scholars worked as diplomats, advised rulers, opposed dictators, and even led nations. Their competing visions of social democracy and their pursuit of justice, peace, and freedom led them to organizations sponsored by the governments of the Cold War powers: the Soviet-backed World Peace Council, the U.S.-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom, and, after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the homegrown Casa de las Américas.
Neither Peace nor Freedom delves into the entwined histories of these organizations and the aspirations and dilemmas of intellectuals who participated in them, from Diego Rivera and Pablo Neruda to Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Patrick Iber corrects the view that such individuals were merely pawns of the competing superpowers. Movements for democracy and social justice sprung up among pro-Communist and anti-Communist factions, and Casa de las Américas promoted a brand of revolutionary nationalism that was beholden to neither the Soviet Union nor the United States.
But ultimately, intellectuals from Latin America could not break free from the Cold War’s rigid binaries. With the Soviet Union demanding fealty from Latin American communists, the United States zealously supporting their repression, and Fidel Castro pushing for regional armed revolution, advocates of social democracy found little room to promote their ideals without compromising them. Cold War politics had offered utopian dreams, but intellectuals could get neither the peace nor the freedom they sought.
There is no full-time neo-Indian. Both indigenous and non-indigenous practitioners assume Indian identities only when deemed spiritually significant. In their daily lives, they are average members of modern society, dressing in Western clothing, working at middle-class jobs, and retaining their traditional religious identities. As a result of this part-time status the neo-Indians are often overlooked as a subject of study, making this book the first anthropological analysis of the movement.
Galinier and Molinié present and analyze four decades of ethnographic research focusing on Mexico and Peru, the two major areas of the movement’s genesis. They examine the use of public space, describe the neo-Indian ceremonies, provide analysis of the ceremonies’ symbolism, and explore the close relationship between the neo-Indian religion and tourism. The Neo-Indians will be of great interest to ethnographers, anthropologists, and scholars of Latin American history, religion, and cultural studies.
Because bird communities are good indicators of habitat type and condition, and because extensive bird surveys can be done quickly, bird communities are critical to rapid evaluations of an ecosystem's biological value and integrity. The authors analyze the bird species of major habitats from a conservation perspective, and develop specific guidelines to illustrate how governments, conservation organizations, and wildlife managers can use this ecological information to anchor conservation strategies on sound biological reality.
"Students of ecology and wildlife management, as well as conservationists, will benefit from this book . . . . Governmental and conservation agencies should use this book when making critical decisions about where to focus their efforts as they work to preserve the environment in fragile regions of the world." —Edward I. Saiff, Science Books & Films
In this completely revised and updated second edition:
A total of 226 species are treated in full (206 were included in the first edition).
All species accounts retained from the first edition have been updated to include the most recent research.
All 195 maps showing the distribution and geographic range of each species have been revised to reflect the most current information.
Twenty-nine beautiful color plates illustrate more than 220 species (including significant color variants between males and females or adults and young). Seven black-and-white plates contain more than 60 images of individual species, mainly bats.
A compact disc of mammal vocalizations—crucial to identifying nocturnal and otherwise cryptic animals that sometimes may be heard rather than seen—will be available for purchase separately.
Praise for the first edition:
"If you can't go to the Central and South American rain forests to see firsthand their threatened ecosystems, here is the next best thing."—Washington Post Book World
"A large amount of information is presented concisely and in a way that is easy to use."—Choice
"The presentation and wealth of information contained in this field guide is outstanding and will satisfy the needs of both the 'tourist' and 'researcher' traveling to the Neotropics."—Canadian Field-Naturalist
New Approaches to Latin American History incorporates methods and concepts from the social sciences without abandoning a distinctively historical approach. A collection of original essays by distinguished younger scholars, it proposes original concepts and methods for analyzing crucial problems in Latin American history.
Using as examples such subjects as salvery, dictatorship, immigration, and the relationship between land ownership and political power, the contributors show how approaches and techniques from psychology, political science, economics. and sociology can be applied to historical studies. The papers attempt to explain the thematic and substantive importance of the particular problems at hand; describe and evaluate standard approaches to them; propose original hypotheses; suggest methods for testing the hypotheses; or indicate major methodological or conceptual difficulties that have so far hampered such work.
Despite their diversity of content, the papers show strong underlying unities. First, they all point to the need for placing institutions and actions in a broad societal context. The authurs present an implicit, cumulative argument against the excessive isolation of historical phenomena. Second, they demonstrate the utility of interdisciplinary research. Third, they issue an implicit call for rigorous comparative analysis. The propositions formulated in these essays can best tested and modified in comparative fashion.
Ultimately this book deals with the exposition of a research style: a style based on systematic doubt, an awareness of the need for conceptual rigor, and a willingness to try new methodologies. For this reason it is of interest to historians in every field as well as to students of Latin America.
Contributors. Helga Baitenmann, Marcus J. M. de Carvalho, Guillermo de la Peña, John Gledhill, Matthew Gutmann, Maria Gabriela Hita, Alan Knight, Ilka Boaventura Leite, Jean Meyer, John Monteiro, Luis Nicolau Parés, Patricia R. Pessar, Patience A. Schell, Robert Slenes, Juan Pedro Viqueira, Margarita Zárate
Contributors. Alfredo Ávila, Roberto Breña, Sarah C. Chambers, Jordana Dym, Carolyn Fick, Erick Langer, Adam Rothman, David Sartorius, Kirsten Schultz, John Tutino
Situating Peronism within the broad arc of twentieth-century Argentine cultural change, the contributors focus on the interplay of cultural traditions, official policies, commercial imperatives, and popular perceptions. They describe how the Perón regime’s rhetoric and representations helped to produce new ideas of national and collective identity. At the same time, they show how Argentines pursued their interests through their engagement with the Peronist project, and, in so doing, pushed the regime in new directions. While the volume’s emphasis is on the first Perón presidency, one contributor explores the origins of the regime and two others consider Peronism’s transformations in subsequent years. The essays address topics including mass culture and melodrama, folk music, pageants, social respectability, architecture, and the intense emotional investment inspired by Peronism. They examine the experiences of women, indigenous groups, middle-class anti-Peronists, internal migrants, academics, and workers. By illuminating the connections between the state and popular consciousness, The New Cultural History of Peronism exposes the contradictions and ambivalences that have characterized Argentine populism.
Contributors: Anahi Ballent, Oscar Chamosa, María Damilakou, Eduardo Elena, Matthew B. Karush, Diana Lenton, Mirta Zaida Lobato, Natalia Milanesio, Mariano Ben Plotkin, César Seveso, Lizel Tornay
New Global Cities in Latin America and Asia: Welcome to the Twenty-First Century proposes new visions of global cities and regions historically considered “secondary” in the international context. The arguments are not only based on material progress made by these metropolises, but also on the growing social difficulties experienced (e.g., organized crime, drug trafficking, slums, economic inequalities). The book illustrates the growth of cities according to these problems arising from the modernity of the new century, comparing Latin American and Asian cities.
This book analyzes the complex relationships within cities through an interdisciplinary approach, complementing other research and challenging orthodox views on global cities. At the same time, the book provides new theoretical and methodological tools to understand the progress of “Third World” cities and the way of understanding “globality” in the 21st century by confronting the traditional views with which global cities were appreciated since the 1980s. Pablo Baisotti brings together researchers from various fields who provide new interpretative keys to certain cities in Latin America and Asia.
Gustafson shows that bilingual education is an issue that extends far beyond the classroom. Public schools are at the center of a broader battle over territory, power, and knowledge as indigenous movements across Latin America actively defend their languages and knowledge systems. In attempting to decolonize nation-states, the indigenous movements are challenging deep-rooted colonial racism and neoliberal reforms intended to mold public education to serve the market. Meanwhile, market reformers nominally embrace cultural pluralism while implementing political and economic policies that exacerbate inequality. Juxtaposing Guarani life, language, and activism with intimate portraits of reform politics among academics, bureaucrats, and others in and beyond La Paz, Gustafson illuminates the issues, strategic dilemmas, and imperfect alliances behind bilingual intercultural education.
During the 1967 festival of Latin American Cinema in Viña del Mar, Chile, a group of filmmakers who wanted to use film as an instrument of social awareness and change formed the New Latin American Cinema. Nearly three decades later, the New Cinema has produced an impressive body of films, critical essays, and manifestos that uses social theory to inform filmmaking practices.
This book explores the institutional and aesthetic foundations of the New Latin American Cinema. Zuzana Pick maps out six areas of inquiry—history, authorship, gender, popular cinema, ethnicity, and exile—and explores them through detailed discussions of nearly twenty films and their makers, including Camila (María Luisa Bemberg), The Guns (Ruy Guerra), and Frida (Paul Leduc). These investigations document how the New Latin American Cinema has used film as a tool to change society, to transform national expressions, to support international differences, and to assert regional autonomy.
Recent critically and commercially acclaimed Latin American films such as XXY, Contracorriente, and Plan B create an affective and bodily connection with viewers that elicits in them an emotive and empathic relationship with queer identities. Referring to these films as New Maricón Cinema, Vinodh Venkatesh argues that they represent a distinct break from what he terms Maricón Cinema, or a cinema that deals with sex and gender difference through an ethically and visually disaffected position, exemplified in films such as Fresa y chocolate, No se lo digas a nadie, and El lugar sin límites.
Covering feature films from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, the United States, and Venezuela, New Maricón Cinema is the first study to contextualize and analyze recent homo-/trans-/intersexed-themed cinema in Latin America within a broader historical and aesthetic genealogy. Working with theories of affect, circulation, and orientations, Venkatesh examines key scenes in the work of auteurs such as Marco Berger, Javier Fuentes-León, and Julia Solomonoff and in films including Antes que anochezca and Y tu mamá también to show how their use of an affective poetics situates and regenerates viewers in an ethically productive cinematic space. He further demonstrates that New Maricón Cinema has encouraged the production of “gay friendly” commercial films for popular audiences, which reflects wider sociocultural changes regarding gender difference and civil rights that are occurring in Latin America.
In our globalizing world, the movement of people and resources has accelerated, giving rise to transnational connections and interdependencies. New Patterns for Mexico examines novel and emerging patterns of United States giving to Mexico and its impact on equitable development. Last year alone, Mexican migrants living in the United States sent billions of dollars back to families and relatives living in Mexico. Most of these funds were for private consumption, but more and more diaspora resources support social and philanthropic endeavors in their country of origin. This bilingual volume asks: What are these new patterns of diaspora giving and how do they affect equitable development in Mexico?
Through its Global Philanthropy Program, the Global Equity Initiative of Harvard University aims to advance knowledge about global philanthropy and the role of private philanthropic investments in furthering global equity. This volume, one in a series on diaspora giving, builds upon the earlier work of Diaspora Philanthropy: Perspectives on India and China and continues the Program's research series on the relationship between diaspora engagement and equitable development.
This volume brings together essays on the nature of political organization of the Moche, a complex pre-Inca society that existed on the north coast of Peru from c. 100 to 800 CE. Since the discovery of the royal tombs of Sipán in 1987, the Moche have become one of the best-known pre-Hispanic cultures of the Americas and the focus of a number of archaeological projects. But the nature of Moche political organization is still debated. Some scholars view the Moche as a monolithic state, others see a clear distinction between a northern and southern Moche polity, and yet others argue that the most accurate model is one in which each valley contained an independent polity. In a presentation of new data and new perspectives, the authors debate these competing theories.
Based on a set of papers presented by sixteen international scholars at the Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Studies symposium held in Lima, Peru, in 2004, this volume marks an important point in the development of Moche archaeology and will be a landmark work in Pre-Columbian studies.
In June 1990, Ecuador saw the first major indigenous rebellion within its borders since the colonial era. For weeks, indigenous protesters participated in marches, staged demonstrations, seized government offices, and blockaded roads. Since this insurrection, indigenous movements have become increasingly important in the fight against Latin American Neoliberalism.
Roberta Rice's New Politics of Protest seeks to analyze when, where, and why indigenous protests against free-market reforms have occurred in Latin America. Comparing cases in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, this book details the emergence of indigenous movements under and against Neoliberal governments. Rice uses original field research and interviews with indigenous leaders to examine long-term patterns of indigenous political activism and overturn accepted theories on the role of the Indian in democracy.
A useful and engaging study, The New Politics of Protest seeks to determine when indigenous movements become viable political parties. It covers the most recent rounds of protest to demonstrate how a weak and unresponsive government is more likely to experience revolts against unpopular reforms. This influential work will be of interest to scholars of Latin American politics and indigenous studies as well as anyone studying oppressed peoples who have organized nationwide strikes and protests, blocked economic reforms, toppled corrupt leaders, and even captured presidencies.
From the late fifteenth century to the present day, countless explorers, conquerors, and other agents of empire have laid siege to the New World, plundering and pilfering its most precious artifacts and treasures. Today, these natural and cultural products—which are key to conceptualizing a history of Latin America—are scattered in museums around the world.
With contributions from a renowned set of scholars, New World Objects of Knowledge delves into the hidden histories of forty of the New World’s most iconic artifacts, from the Inca mummy to Darwin’s hummingbirds. This volume is richly illustrated with photos and sketches from the archives and museums hosting these objects. Each artifact is accompanied by a comprehensive essay covering its dynamic, often global, history and itinerary. This volume will be an indispensable catalog of New World objects and how they have helped shape our modern world.
Contributors. Andrea Bachner, Luciano Damián Bolinaga, Nellie Chu, Rachel Cypher, Mingwei Huang, T. Tu Huynh, Yu-lin Lee, Ng Kim Chew, Lisa Rofel, Carlos Rojas, Shuang Shen, Derek Sheridan, Nicolai Volland
This volume of seven essays on the 1987 Nicaraguan constitution does not accept a priori the judgment that Latin American constitutions are as fragile as egg shells, easily broken and discarded if found to be inconvenient to the interests of the rulers. Rather, they are viewed as being central to understanding political life in contemporary Nicaragua.
The perspectives of the analysts and their conclusions are not consensual. They prohibit glib and facile general conclusions. Some find the constitution to be nothing more than a façade for arbitrary and capricious rule; others that the document reflects clear commitments to the democratic rule of law. Thus far the implementation of the constitution has resulted in the peaceful transition of power from the Sandinistas to the National Opposition Union.
Nicaragua’s Mosquito Shore provides a general history of eastern Nicaragua from the time of the first British entry in 1633 to the present. The territory is populated chiefly by Mosquito Indians, who speak their own language and some Mosquito.
Offering a political epistemology of collective mourning
Focusing on forms of improper burial in Turkey and Latin America, Ege Selin Islekel argues that a political technology of mourning is fundamental to contemporary politics. This technology of necrosovereignty shapes not only individuals’ and populations’ lives but also their epistemic and political afterlives. Local practices of mourning, however, contain resistant capacities, opening alternative ways of knowing, remembering, and assembling. “Nightmare knowledges,” Islekel posits, are resistant modes of knowing tied up with grief that challenge the contemporary politics of death and those politics’ archival boundaries. Seen in mothers’ movements across the globe, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina to the Saturday Mothers of Turkey, nightmare knowledges produce counterarchives that mobilize traditionally ignored epistemic categories.
Nightmare Remains forges a new dialogue between post-Foucauldian political theory and decolonial thought and brings a fresh critical perspective to the theoretical discourse of enforced disappearances.
Drawing on fieldwork conducted over the course of a decade, Orin Starn chronicles the historical conditions that led to the formation of the rondas, the social and geographical expansion of the movement, and its gradual decline in the 1990s. Throughout this anecdotal yet deeply analytical account, the author relies on interviews with ronda participants, villagers, and Peru’s regional and national leaders to explore the role of women, the involvement of nongovernmental organizations, and struggles for leadership within the rondas. Starn moves easily from global to local contexts and from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, presenting this movement in a straightforward manner that makes it accessible to both specialists and nonspecialists.
An engagingly written story of village mobilization, Nightwatch is also a meditation on the nature of fieldwork, the representation of subaltern people, the relationship between resistance and power, and what it means to be politically active at the end of the century. It will appeal widely to scholars and students of anthropology, Latin American studies, cultural studies, history, subaltern studies, and those interested in the politics of social movements.
Wilson models a practice of reading that honors the disruptive possibilities offered by an ever-present awareness of that which lies, irretrievable, beyond the horizon of vanishing itself. In doing so, he engages with historical accounts detailing maroon activities in early New Spain, contemporary coverage of the push to make legible Afro-Mexican identities, the electronic archives of the Obama presidency, and the work of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Octavio Paz, Ivan Van Sertima, Miguel Covarrubias, Steven Spielberg, and Colson Whitehead, among others.
The book opens with key themes that will help students and scholars understand the century, such as the civilization and barbarism binary, urbanism, the divide between conservatives and liberals, and transculturation. In the chapters that follow, Conway weaves transnational trends together with brief case studies and compelling snapshots that help us understand the period. How much did books and photographs cost in the nineteenth century? What was the dominant style in painting? What kinds of ballroom dancing were popular? Richly illustrated with striking photographs and lithographs, this is a book that invites the reader to rediscover a past age that is not quite past, still resonating into the present.
What form does the crisis of modernity take in Latin America when societies are politically demobilized and there is no revolutionary agenda in sight? How does postmodern criticism reflect on enlightenment and utopia in a region marked by incomplete modernization, new waves of privatization, great masses of excluded peoples, and profound sociocultural heterogeneity? In No Apocalypse, No Integration Martín Hopenhayn examines the social and philosophical implications of the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of leftist and state-sponsored social planning in Latin America.
With the failure of utopian movements that promised social change, the rupture of the link between the production of knowledge and practical intervention, and the defeat of modernization and development policy established after World War II, Latin American intellectuals and militants have been left at an impasse without a vital program of action. Hopenhayn analyzes these crises from a theoretical perspective and calls upon Latin American intellectuals to reevaluate their objects of study, their political reality, and their society’s cultural production, as well as to seek within their own history the elements for a new collective discourse. Challenging the notion that strict adherence to a single paradigm of action can rescue intellectual and cultural movements, Hopenhayn advocates a course of epistemological pluralism, arguing that such an approach values respect for difference and for cultural and theoretical diversity and heterodoxy.
This essay collection will appeal to readers of sociology, public policy, philosophy, cultural theory, and Latin American history and culture, as well as to those with an interest in Latin America’s current transition.
"Tom Diaz has worn out some shoe leather, much like a good detective, in gathering facts, not myths or urban legends. As a result he has produced an accurate and comprehensive look at a grave and present danger to our society."
---From the foreword by Chris Swecker, former Assistant Director of the FBI and former head of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division
No Boundaries is a disturbing account of what many consider the "next Mafia"---Latino crime gangs. Like the Mafia, these gangs operate an international network, consider violence a routine matter, and defy U.S. law enforcement at every level. Also, the gangs spawn kingpins such as the notorious Nelson Martinez Varela Comandari, who nearly became the first "Latin godfather" in the United States.
Focusing on the Los Angeles–based Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the 18th Street Gang, and the Chicago-based Latin Kings, Tom Diaz describes how neighborhood gangs evolved into extremely brutal, sophisticated criminal enterprises and how local and federal authorities have struggled to suppress them. As he makes clear, the problem of transnational Latino gangs involves complex national and international issues, such as racial tensions, immigration policy, conflict in Latin America, and world economic pressures.
Tom Diaz is a lawyer, author, and public speaker who conducts research on gun policy and violence for the Violence Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank. He has covered national security affairs for the Washington Times and served as counsel to the U.S. House Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice from 1993 to 1997.
Cover photograph: Tegucigalpa, Honduras: A policeman passes by a graffiti of the Mara Salvatrucha "MS-13" (juvenile gang) at the entrance of the unit where members of the gang are kept imprisoned in the National Penitentiary in Tamara, 30 km north of Tegucigalpa, February 1, 2006. © Elmer Martinez/AFP/Getty Images
Most of Cartagena's privateers were people of color and descendants of slaves who benefited from the relative freedom and flexibility of life at sea, but also faced kidnapping, enslavement, and brutality. Many came from Haiti and Guadeloupe; some had been directly involved in the Haitian Revolution. While their manpower proved crucial in the early Anti-Spanish struggles, Afro-Caribbean privateers were also perceived as a threat, suspected of holding questionable loyalties, disorderly tendencies, and too strong a commitment to political and social privileges for people of color. Based on handwritten and printed sources in Spanish, English, and French, this book tells the story of Cartagena's multinational and multicultural seafarers, revealing the Trans-Atlantic and maritime dimensions of South American independence.
Contrary to received wisdom, this book shows that most citizens cast blank or spoiled votes in presidential elections on purpose. By participating in invalid vote campaigns, citizens can voice their concerns about low-quality candidates while also expressing a preference for high-quality democracy. Campaigns promoting blank and spoiled votes come about more often, and succeed at higher rates, when incumbent politicians undermine the quality of elections. Surprisingly, invalid vote campaigns can shore up the quality of democracy in the short term. None of the Above shows that swings in blank and spoiled vote rates can serve as a warning about the trajectory of a country’s democracy.
With Non-literary Fiction, Esther Gabara examines how contemporary art produced across the Americas has reacted to the rising tide of neoliberal regimes, focusing on the crucial role of fiction in daily politics. Gabara argues that these fictions depart from familiar literary narrative structures and emerge in the new mediums and practices that have revolutionized contemporary art. Each chapter details how fiction is created through visual art forms—in performance and body art, posters, mail art, found objects, and installations. For Gabara, these fictions comprise a type of art that asks viewers to collaborate in the creation of the work and helps them to withstand the brutal restrictions imposed by dominant neoliberal regimes.
During repressive regimes of the 1960s and 1970s and free trade agreements of the 1990s, artists and critics consistently said no to economic privatization, political deregulation, and reactionary social logic as they rejected inherited notions of visual, literary, and political representation. Through close analyses of artworks and writings by leading figures of these two generations, including Indigenous thinkers, Gabara shows how negation allows for the creation of fiction outside textual forms of literature.
By studying the history of religious practices that legitimate such authority, Philip Coyle shows that a contradiction exists between ceremonially based forms of political authority and the bureaucratic and military modes of power that have been deployed by outside governments in their attempts to administer the region. He then shows how the legitimacy of traditional authority is renewed or undermined through the performance of ceremonies.
Coyle explores linkages between long-term political and economic processes and changes in Náyari ceremonial life from Spanish contact to the present day. As a participant-observer of Náyari ceremonies over a ten-year period, he gained an understanding of the history of their ceremonialism and its connections to practically every other aspect of Náyari life. His descriptions of the Holy Week Festival, mitote ceremonies, and other public performances show how struggles over political legitimacy are intimately tied to the meanings of the ceremonies. With its rich ethnographic descriptions, provocative analyses, and clear links between data and theory, Coyle's study marks a major contribution to the ethnography of the Indians of western Mexico and Latin America more generally. It also provides unusual insight into the violence raging across the Mexican countryside and helps us understand the significance of indigenous people in a globalizing world.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2025
The University of Chicago Press