Winner, Charles Rufus Morey Award, 1993
The valley of Malinalco, Mexico, long renowned for its monolithic Aztec temples, is a microcosm of the historical changes that occurred in the centuries preceding and following the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. In particular, the garden frescoes uncovered in 1974 at the Augustinian monastery of Malinalco document the collision of the European search for Utopia with the reality of colonial life.
In this study, Jeanette F. Peterson examines the murals within the dual heritage of pre-Hispanic and European muralism to reveal how the wall paintings promoted the political and religious agendas of the Spanish conquerors while preserving a record of pre-Columbian rituals and imagery. She finds that the utopian themes portrayed at Malinalco and other Augustinian monasteries were integrated into a religious and political ideology that, in part, camouflaged the harsh realities of colonial policies toward the native population.
That the murals were ultimately whitewashed at the end of the sixteenth century suggests that the "spiritual conquest" failed. Peterson argues that the incorporation of native features ultimately worked to undermine the orthodoxy of the Christian message. She places the murals' imagery within the pre-Columbian tlacuilo (scribe-painter) tradition, traces a "Sahagún connection" between the Malinalco muralists and the native artists working at the Franciscan school of Tlatelolco, and explores mural painting as an artistic response to acculturation.
The book is beautifully illustrated with 137 black-and-white figures, including photographs and line drawings. For everyone interested in the encounter between European and Native American cultures, it will be essential reading.
In this volume, contributions from leading scholars in Maya literary studies examine Maya discourse from Classic period hieroglyphic inscriptions to contemporary spoken narratives, focusing on parallelism to unite the literature historically. Contributors take an ethnopoetic approach, examining literary and verbal arts from a historical perspective, acknowledging that poetic form is as important as narrative content in deciphering what these writings reveal about ancient and contemporary worldviews.
Encompassing a variety of literary motifs, including humor, folklore, incantation, mythology, and more specific forms of parallelism such as couplets, chiasms, kennings, and hyperbatons, Parallel Worlds is a rich journey through Maya culture and pre-Columbian literature that will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, ethnography, Latin American history, epigraphy, comparative literature, language studies, indigenous studies, and mythology.
Throughout Latin America and the rest of the Third World, profound social problems are growing in response to burgeoning populations and unstable economic and political systems. In Peru, terrorist acts by the Shining Path guerilla movement are the most visible manifestation of social discontent, but rapid economic and religious changes have touched the lives of almost everyone, radically altering traditional lifeways. In this twenty-year study of the community of Quinua in the Department of Ayacucho, William Mitchell looks at changes provoked by population growth within a severely limited ecological and economic setting, including increasing conversion to a cash economy and out-migration, the decline of the Catholic fiesta system and the rise of Protestantism, and growing poverty and revolution.
When Mitchell first began his field studies in Quinua in 1966, farming was still the Quinueños' principal means of livelihood. But while the population was increasing rapidly, the amount of arable land in the community remained the same, creating increased food shortfalls. At the same time, government controls on food prices and subsidies of cheap food imports drove down the value of rural farm production. These ecological and economic factors forced many people to enter the nonfarm economy to feed themselves.
Using a materialist approach, Mitchell charts the new economic strategies that Quinueños use to confront the harsh pressures of their lives, including ceramic production, wage labor, petty commerce, and migration to cash work on the coat and in the eastern tropical forests. In addition, he shows how the growing conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism is also an economic strategy, since Protestant ideology offers acceptable reasons for redirecting the money that used to be spent on elaborate religious festivals to household needs and education.
The twenty-year span of this study makes it especially valuable for students of social change. Mitchell's unique, interdisciplinary approach, considering ecological, economic, and population factors simultaneously, offers a model that can be widely applied in many Third World areas. Additionally, the inclusion of an entire chapter of family histories reveals how economic and ecological forces are played out at the individual level.
For more than a decade the Mexico City–based artist, architect, and cultural agent Pedro Reyes has been turning existing social problems into opportunities for effecting tangible change through collective imagination. By breaking open failed models and retooling them with space to project alternatives, Reyes’s art enables productive diversions of otherwise destructive forces. Ad Usum: To Be Used is the second volume in the series Focus on Latin American Art and Agency, which is dedicated to contemporary cultural agents, a term that is perhaps best understood through the words of Reyes himself: “changing our individual habits has no degree of effectiveness” as “progress is only significant if you start to multiply by 10, by 100, by 1,000.” Rather than merely illustrate his work, this collection of images, interviews, and critical essays is intended as an apparatus for multiplying the possibilities when art becomes a resource for the common good.
This full-color illustrated survey of Reyes’s projects includes critical essays by José Luis Falconi, Robin Greeley, Johan Hartle, Adam Kleinman, and Doris Sommer, as well as interviews between the artist and such seminal thinkers as Lauren Berlant, Michael Hardt, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Antanas Mockus.
Women have always been the muses who inspire the creativity of men, but how do women become the creators of art themselves? This was the challenge faced by Latin American women who aspired to write in the 1920s and 1930s. Though women's roles were opening up during this time, women writers were not automatically welcomed by the Latin American literary avant-gardes, whose male members viewed women's participation in tertulias (literary gatherings) and publications as uncommon and even forbidding. How did Latin American women writers, celebrated by male writers as the "New Eve" but distrusted as fellow creators, find their intellectual homes and fashion their artistic missions?
In this innovative book, Vicky Unruh explores how women writers of the vanguard period often gained access to literary life as public performers. Using a novel, interdisciplinary synthesis of performance theory, she shows how Latin American women's work in theatre, poetry declamation, song, dance, oration, witty display, and bold journalistic self-portraiture helped them craft their public personas as writers and shaped their singular forms of analytical thought, cultural critique, and literary style. Concentrating on eleven writers from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, Unruh demonstrates that, as these women identified themselves as instigators of change rather than as passive muses, they unleashed penetrating critiques of projects for social and artistic modernization in Latin America.
The Spanish colonial period in South America saw artists develop the subgenre of official portraiture, or portraits of key individuals in the continent’s viceregal governments. Although these portraits appeared to illustrate a narrative of imperial splendor and absolutist governance, they instead became a visual record of the local history that emerged during the colonial occupation.
Using the official portrait collections accumulated between 1542 and 1830 in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá as a lens, Pictured Politics explores how official portraiture originated and evolved to become an essential component in the construction of Ibero-American political relationships. Through the surviving portraits and archival evidence—including political treatises, travel accounts, and early periodicals—Emily Engel demonstrates that these official portraits not only belie a singular interpretation as tools of imperial domination but also visualize the continent's multilayered history of colonial occupation. The first stand alone analysis of South American portraiture, Pictured Politics brings to light the historical relevance of political portraits in crafting the history of South American colonialism.
Thomas McGann Memorial Prize, Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies, 2017
Runner-up, Humanities Book Prize, Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association, 2018
In the wake of Mexico’s revolution, artists played a fundamental role in constructing a national identity centered on working people and were hailed for their contributions to modern art. Picturing the Proletariat examines three aspects of this artistic legacy: the parallel paths of organized labor and artists’ collectives, the relations among these groups and the state, and visual narratives of the worker. Showcasing forgotten works and neglected media, John Lear explores how artists and labor unions participated in a cycle of revolutionary transformation from 1908 through the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940). Lear shows how middle-class artists, radicalized by the revolution and the Communist Party, fortified the legacy of the prerevolutionary print artisan José Guadalupe Posada by incorporating modernist, avant-garde, and nationalist elements in ways that supported and challenged unions and the state. By 1940, the state undermined the autonomy of radical artists and unions, while preserving the image of both as partners of the “institutionalized revolution.”
This interdisciplinary book explores the gendered representations of workers; the interplay of prints, photographs, and murals in journals, in posters, and on walls; the role of labor leaders; and the discursive impact of the Spanish Civil War. It considers “los tres grandes”—Rivera, Siquieros, and Orozco—while featuring lesser-known artists and their collectives, including Saturnino Herrán, Leopoldo Méndez, Santos Balmori, and the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (LEAR). The result is a new perspective on the art and politics of the revolution.
How Dominicans contribute to Major League Baseball and what they receive in return.
From Juan Marichal and Pedro Martínez to Albert Pujols and Juan Soto, Dominicans have long been among Major League Baseball’s best. How did this small Caribbean nation become a hothouse of baseball talent? To many fans, the answer is both obvious and disconcerting: pro teams use their riches to develop talent abroad, creating opportunities for superhuman athletes and corrupt officials, while the rest of the population sees little benefit.
Yet this interpretation of history is incomplete. April Yoder traces how baseball has empowered Dominicans in their struggles for democracy and social justice. While the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo saw the sport as a means of cementing its power at home and abroad, the Dominican people fashioned an emancipated civic sphere by seeing their potential for democratic success in their compatriots’ baseball success. Later, Dominicans articulated demands for democracy, economic opportunity, and civil rights through successful calls for public support of amateur and professional baseball. Today, Dominicans continue to demand that incentives for the baseball industry foster human as well as economic development. A revelatory and innovative history, Pitching Democracy restores agency to the Dominican people and honors their true love of the game.
Contributors. Carlos J. Alonso, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, John Beverley, Debra A. Castillo, Arcadio Diaz-Quiñones, Juan Flores, Mary M. Gaylord, José Limón, Josefina Ludmer, Francine Masiello, Antonio Mazzotti, Walter D. Mignolo, Sylvia Molloy, Mary Louise Pratt, Vincente Rafael, Julio Ramos, Susana Rotker, Roberto Schwarz, Diana Taylor, Nancy Vogeley
Winner, Association for Latin American Art-Arvey Foundation Book Award, 2022
More than a thousand years ago on the north coast of Peru, Indigenous Moche artists created a large and significant corpus of sexually explicit ceramic works of art. They depicted a diversity of sex organs and sex acts, and an array of solitary and interconnected human and nonhuman bodies. To the modern eye, these Moche “sex pots,” as Mary Weismantel calls them, are lively and provocative but also enigmatic creations whose import to their original owners seems impossible to grasp.
In Playing with Things, Weismantel shows that there is much to be learned from these ancient artifacts, not merely as inert objects from a long-dead past but as vibrant Indigenous things, alive in their own inhuman temporality. From a new materialist perspective, she fills the gaps left by other analyses of the sex pots in pre-Columbian studies, where sexuality remains marginalized, and in sexuality studies, where non-Western art is largely absent. Taking a decolonial approach toward an archaeology of sexuality and breaking with long-dominant iconographic traditions, this book explores how the pots "play jokes," "make babies," "give power," and "hold water,” considering the sex pots as actual ceramic bodies that interact with fleshly bodies, now and in the ancient past. A beautifully written study that will be welcomed by students as well as specialists, Playing with Things is a model for archaeological and art historical engagement with the liberating power of queer theory and Indigenous studies.
Too often literary criticism is academic exercise rather than creative act. For the multifaceted Julio Ortega—respected poet, dramatist, and novelist in his own right—the act of criticism becomes profoundly creative, his incisive readings of the text far transcending the pedantry that may falsely pass for imagination, intelligence, and rigor. Nearly every Spanish-American writer of consequence, from Paz to Fuentes, Cortázar to Lezama Lima, has extolled Ortega’s criticism as not merely a reflection but an essential part of the renaissance that took place in Spanish-American letters during the late twentieth century.
Poetics of Change brings together Ortega’s most penetrating and insightful analyses of the fiction of Borges, Fuentes, García Márquez, Carpentier, Rulfo, Cabrera Infante, and others responsible for great writing from Spanish America. Ortega concerns himself most with the semantic innovations of these masters of the modern narrative and their play with form, language, and the traditional boundaries of genre. Mapping their creative territory, he finds that the poetics of Spanish-American writing is that of a dynamically changing genre that has set exploration at its very heart.
Detailed and rife with social and cultural implications, Poetry and Violence is a compelling commentary on violence as both human experience and communicative action.
“I undertook the greatest departure from myself: creation, wanting to illuminate words.” So wrote Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in 1924 at the start of a long and brilliant career that was to bring him international renown—and, in 1971, two years before his death, the Nobel Prize in Literature. This work, intended for the general reader as well as the specialist, explores the sensitive complexities of the varied, sometimes contradictory, and always exciting writings produced during fifty years. Neruda’s output throughout his long literary life was phenomenal, and certain volumes have already become modern-day classics; it is these that René de Costa concentrates on. After describing the reception of each book at the time of publication, he evaluates its importance among Neruda’s oeuvre and, through the use of carefully selected Spanish verses, all translated into English, makes the reader aware of the range and aesthetic significance of the poet’s work.
Midway through his career as poet-diplomat, Neruda joined the Communist Party and became a poet-politician, a fact that far too often has colored the reception of his literary efforts. Here, for perhaps the first time, is a book that rises above such tendentious criticism to give an impartial view of the poet’s political and nonpolitical writings. The discerning reader is left with a heightened respect for and appreciation of the man who believed that “Poetry is like bread, and it must be shared…by everyone in our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of man.”
Here is a benchmark study of voter attitudes in a Latin American country. This volume is based on extensive survey research conducted during the Venezuelan elections of 1973. The methods employed by Baloyra and Martz to poll an "unpollable" society successfully challenge previously established paradigms.
The authors interviewed a representative sample of over 1,500 voters to determine relationships between class, status, community, context, religion, ideology, and partisanship on the one hand and political attitudes and preferences on the other. They found that the Venezuelan electorate is defined by a series of contradictory tendencies, and they place their conclusions in the context of contemporary political science literature regarding class and party, ideology and party, and inequality and participation.
The historic and increasing interdependence of the Latin American and U.S. economies makes an understanding of the political economies of Latin American nations particularly timely and important. After World War II, many nations initially implemented import substituting industrialization policies. Their outcomes, and the shift in policies, are related to the domestic policies and world economic conditions that led to government deficits, inflation, foreign borrowing, debt renegotiation, and renewed emphasis on common markets and other devices to stimulate trade and investment.
In The Political Economy of Latin America in the Postwar Period, important policy measures are evaluated, such as indexation of prices and contracts; special provisions for financing the government through the Central Bank; stabilization; and deregulation of the economy.
The introduction presents trends in Latin American growth and the factors that influence them. This is followed by parallel studies of the economic development of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru from 1945 to the mid-1990s. Noted experts bring their considerable experience to analyzing the content and impact of the economic theories that guided policymaking and their effects on output, income, and quality of life.
In this first overview of the Brazilian republican state based on extensive primary source material, Steven Topik demonstrates that well before the disruption of the export economy in 1929, the Brazilian state was one of the most interventionist in Latin America. This study counters the previous general belief that before 1930 Brazil was dominated by an export oligarchy comprised of European and North American capitalists and that only later did the state become prominent in the country’s economic development.
Topik examines the state’s performance during the First Republic (1889–1930) in four sectors—finance, the coffee trade, railroads, and industry. By looking at the controversies in these areas, he explains how domestic interclass and international struggles shaped policy and notes the degree to which the state acted relatively independently of civil society.
Topik’s primary concern is the actions of state officials and whether their decisions reflected the demands of the ruling class. He shows that conflicting interests of fractions of the ruling class and foreign investors gradually led to far greater state participation than any of the participants originally desired, and that the structure of the economy and of society—not the intentions of the actors—best explains the state’s economic presence.
Are the Mexican people the children of Moctezuma or the children of Cortés? This question, long the central problem of Mexican historians, Justo Sierra answered by saying, "The Mexicans are the sons of the two peoples, of the two races … to this we owe our soul."
Because Sierra recognized the dual parentage, he was able to view his country's history as an evolutionary process. Formed in both the indigenous past and the colonial past, the Mexican people, after three hundred years of slow and painful gestation, were finally born with the arrival of Independence. They came of age when the Reform, the Republic, and the nation achieved a single identity.
This classical synthesis, written on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, gave direction to the generation that furnished the Revolution's intellectual leaders. Although the author was Secretary of Public Instruction in the dictatorial regime of Porfirio Díaz, he was the first historian to show sympathy for the plight of the masses, and his book ends with the warning that political evolution has lost its way unless the result is freedom.
As Edmundo O'Gorman points out in an important essay on Mexican historiography, written especially for this edition, Sierra was also the first to write a history of his nation in a sincere endeavor to get at the truth, instead of shaping his account to prove a thesis or to preach some political faith. And yet, his work "owes its originality and its lasting merit to his vigorous interpretation of Mexico's history in the light of his convictions, of his keen insight, even of his fears." Though the chapters on the pre-Columbian Indian have been rendered obsolete by later archeological discoveries, the rest of the history is still valid and needs only to be brought up to date.
Before the Pinochet coup in 1973, Chile had a lengthy history of constitutionalism. Early in the republican era the aristocracy established order in the political system; a century later the emergent middle sectors infused politics with wider democratic practices and, relative to most of Latin America, a level of pluralism came to characterize group politics.
Despite the distinctive advantages that embellished Chile’s political system, however, certain unfulfilled promises still marred the actual picture in the early 1960s. As the lower economic strata of society were continually passed over by most of the social reforms and economic advances that bettered the general outlook of the nation, their frustrations were brought out into the open and their votes were appealed to by reformist and radical political parties anxious to break the political hegemony of moderates and conservatives.
Thus, the 1960s stood out as a high-water mark in the confrontation between, on the one side, those desirous of maintaining the status quo, or at most admitting to prescriptive change, and, on the other, progressive elements demanding deep structural alterations in the entire social fabric. This study seeks to analyze the sources of alienation, the styles and objectives of the participants in the confrontation, and the relative ability of groups to gain satisfaction of their claims upon the political system. Ben G. Burnett delineates this dialogue between order and change as it inexorably pushed toward a showdown in the presidential elections of 1964 and the congressional elections of 1965.
Between 1980 and 1994, Peru endured a bloody internal armed conflict, with some 69,000 people killed in clashes involving two insurgent movements, state forces, and local armed groups. In 2003, a government-sponsored “Truth and Reconciliation Committee” reported that the conflict lasted longer, affected broader swaths of the national territory, and inflicted higher costs in both human and economic terms than any other conflict in Peru’s history. Of those killed, 75 percent were speakers of an indigenous language, and almost 40 percent were among the poorest and most rural members of Peruvian society. These unequal impacts of the violence on the Peruvian people revealed deep and historical disparities within the country.
This collection of original essays by leading international experts on Peruvian politics, society, and institutions explores the political and institutional consequences of Peru’s internal armed conflict in the long 1980s. The essays are grouped into sections that cover the conflict itself in historical, comparative, and theoretical perspectives; its consequences for Peru’s political institutions; its effects on political parties across the ideological spectrum; and its impact on public opinion and civil society. This research provides the first systematic and nuanced investigation of the extent to which recent and contemporary Peruvian politics, civil society, and institutions have been shaped by the country’s 1980s violence.
The student massacre at Tlatelolco in Mexico City on October 2, 1968, marked the beginning of an era of rapid social change in Mexico. In this illuminating study, Cynthia Steele explores how the writers of the next two decades responded to the massacre and to the social crisis it signaled in terms of political change and gender identity.
The department of Puno in southern Peru is an area oriented to livestock and agricultural production, peopled by an Indian peasant mass and a dominant minority of culturally Westernized mestizos. A small but growing hybrid group, the cholos, bridged the cultural gap and collaborated with dissident merchant elements within the mestizo group to challenge the economic, social, and political order of the altiplano (high plateau) system. Politics in the Altiplano analyzes the sources of conflict and political change in the plural society as it underwent socioeconomic development through a period of recurring natural disasters.
In the period under study (1956–1966), a prolonged drought precipitated a series of crises. The mismanagement of American aid, sent to the suffering peasants, became a national cause célèbre. As migration to Peru’s coastal cities reached large-scale proportions, several peasant movements were launched in the department. To rechannel local discontent, an autonomous development corporation was created for Puno by the Peruvian Congress. This, plus the institution of local elections in 1963, provided ample opportunity for the coalition of dissident mestizos, cholos, and peasants to pursue their “revolutionary” goals.
A rivalry between two major towns, Puno (the department’s capital) and Juliaca (the commercial center), furthered the conflict between conservative mestizos and the peasant-cholo movement. Juliaca’s attempt to secede from the department in November 1965 set off a series of violent strikes and counterstrikes in both cities. Intervention from the national level by government troops put an end to the crisis for the time being. But the continued need for land reform in the department, combined with institutionalized means for political participation, kept the peasants mobilized and the atmosphere of conflict alive.
The population of Brazil increased tenfold, from 10 to over 100 million, between 1880 and 1980, nearly half of this increase occurring since the end of World War II. The Politics of Population in Brazil examines the attitudes toward population planning of Brazilian government officials and other elites—bishops, politicians, labor leaders, and business owners—in comparison with mass public opinion. The authors' findings that elites seriously underestimate the desire for family planning services, while the public views birth control as a basic issue, represent an important contribution on a timely issue.
A major reason for this disparity is that the elites tend to define the issue as a matter of national power and collective growth, and the public sees it as a bread-and-butter question affecting the daily lives of families. McDonough and DeSouza document not only the real gulf between elite and mass opinion but also the propensity of the elites to exaggerate this gap through their stereotyping of public opinion as conservative and disinterested in family planning.
Despite these differences, the authors demonstrate that population planning is less conflict ridden than many other controversies in Brazilian politics and probably more amenable to piecemeal bargaining than some earlier studies suggest. In part, this is because attitudes on the issue are not closely identified with opinions regarding left-versus-right disputes. In addition, for the public in general, religious sentiment affects attitudes toward family planning only indirectly. This separation, which reflects the historical lack of penetration of Brazilian society on the part of the church, further attenuates the issue's potential for galvanizing deep-seated antagonisms. As the authors note, this situation stands in contrast to the fierce debates that moral issues have generated in Spain and Ireland.
The study is noteworthy not only for its original approach—the incorporation of mass and elite data and the departure from the standard concerns with fertility determinants in population—but also for its sophisticated methodology and lucid presentation.
In the 1960s, when students everywhere were coming alive politically, and when the Latin American student activist in particular became as archetypal of radicalism as the Latin American dictator was of repression, Puerto Rican students remained strangely silent. With the exception of FUPI, a radical student group with only a small following, student political behavior conformed to that of Puerto Rican society in general—center to conservative.
Historically, Puerto Rico has been economically and politically dominated first by Spain and then by the United States. But unlike other colonial dependencies in Latin America, Puerto Rico has never rebelled. Puerto Rican politics centers on the status issue—independence, statehood, or association for the island. But no legendary victories, no heroic defeats offer a battle cry for nationalists, leftists, and independistas. Overwhelming foreign influence in the Church, the schools, the economy, and eventually the mass media deprived the island of any strong indigenous institutions that might foster nationalism. Militancy lies outside the mainstream of Puerto Rican tradition.
Against this historical and cultural backdrop, Arthur Liebman closely examines the social background and political activity of students at the Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico. Based on personal interviews with students, faculty, and administrators, as well as on a survey of the student body, his study reveals the strength of political inheritance among university students in Puerto Rico. The student left is small and weak largely because the left of the parents’ generation is small and weak. To date, Puerto Rican students have been the children of their parents and of their society.
Within a university that emphasizes practicality, the nonmilitant majority of the students study education, business, engineering, and medicine, being trained to participate in and to reap the rewards of the status quo. Student leftists, in the minority, generally study history, economics, sociology, and law—fields that open wider perspectives on their society and its problems and offer no immediate guarantee of its benefits. Brighter, less religious, and more dissatisfied with their role as a student, the student leftists stand apart from their cohort at the University of Puerto Rico. Like their adult counterparts, they are an anomaly in an acquisitive, relatively conservative society.
Between 1890 and 1930, the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, experienced a liberal revolution and a worker's movement—key elements in shaping the Ecuadorian national identity. In this book, O. Hugo Benavides examines these and other pivotal features in shaping Guayaquilean identity and immigrant identity formation in general in transnational communities such as those found in New York City.
Turn-of-the-century Ecuador witnessed an intriguing combination of transformations: the formation of a national citizenship; extension of the popular vote to members of a traditional underclass of Indians and those of African descent; provisions for union organizing while entering into world market capitalist relations; and a separation of church and state that led to the legalization of secular divorces. Assessing how these phenomena created a unique cultural history for Guayaquileans, Benavides reveals not only a specific cultural history but also a process of developing ethnic attachment in general. He also incorporates a study of works by Medardo Angel Silva, the Afro-Ecuadorian poet whose singular literature embodies the effects of Modernism's arrival in a locale steeped in contradictions of race, class, and sexuality.
Also comprising one of the first case studies of Raymond Williams's hypothesis on the relationship between structures of feeling and hegemony, this is an illuminating illustration of the powerful relationships between historically informed memories and contemporary national life.
During the period of Aztec expansion and empire (ca. 1325–1525), scribes of high social standing used a pictographic writing system to paint hundreds of manuscripts detailing myriad aspects of life, including historical, calendric, and religious information. Following the Spanish conquest, native and mestizo tlacuiloque (artist-scribes) of the sixteenth century continued to use pre-Hispanic pictorial writing systems to record information about native culture. Three of these manuscripts—Codex Boturini, Codex Azcatitlan, and Codex Aubin—document the origin and migration of the Mexica people, one of several indigenous groups often collectively referred to as “Aztec.”
In Portraying the Aztec Past, Angela Herren Rajagopalan offers a thorough study of these closely linked manuscripts, articulating their narrative and formal connections and examining differences in format, style, and communicative strategies. Through analyses that focus on the materials, stylistic traits, facture, and narrative qualities of the codices, she places these annals in their historical and social contexts. Her work adds to our understanding of the production and function of these manuscripts and explores how Mexica identity is presented and framed after the conquest.
Long before the concept of “globalization,” the Portuguese constructed a vast empire that extended into Africa, India, Brazil, and mid-Atlantic territories, as well as parts of China, Southeast Asia, and Japan. Using this empire as its starting point and spanning seven centuries and four continents, The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora examines literary and artistic works about the ensuing diaspora, or the dispersion of people within the Portuguese-speaking world, resulting from colonization, the slave trade, adventure seeking, religious conversion, political exile, forced labor, war, economic migration, and tourism.
Based on a broad array of written and visual materials, including historiography, letters, memoirs, plays, poetry, fiction, cartographic imagery, paintings, photographs, and films, The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora is the first detailed analysis of the different and sometimes conflicting cultural productions of the imperial diaspora in its heyday and an important context for understanding the more complex and broader-based culture of population travel and displacement from the former colonies to present-day “homelands.” The topics that Darlene J. Sadlier discusses include exploration and settlement by the Portuguese in different parts of the empire; the Black Atlantic slave trade; nineteenth-century travel and Orientalist imaginings; the colonial wars; and the return of populations to Portugal following African independence. A wide-ranging study of the art and literature of these and other diasporic movements, this book is a major contribution to the growing field of Lusophone studies.
In January 1995, fighting broke out between Ecuadorian and Peruvian military forces in a remote section of the Amazon. It took more than three years and the interplay of multiple actors and factors to achieve a definitive peace agreement, thus ending what had been the region's oldest unresolved border dispute. This conflict and its resolution provide insights about other unresolved and/or disputed land and sea boundaries which involve almost every country in the Western Hemisphere.
Drawing on extensive field research at the time of the dispute and during its aftermath, including interviews with high-ranking diplomats and military officials, Power, Institutions, and Leadership in War and Peace is the first book-length study to relate this complex border dispute and its resolution to broader theories of conflict. The findings emphasize an emerging leadership approach in which individuals are not mere captives of power and institutions. In addition, the authors illuminate an overlap in national and international arenas in shaping effective articulation, perception, and selection of policy.
In the “new” democratic Latin America that emerged in the late 1970s through the early 1990s, historical memory remains influential in shaping the context of disputes, in spite of presumed U.S. post–Cold War influence. This study offers important, broader perspectives on a hemisphere still rife with boundary disputes as a rising number of people and products (including arms) pass through these borderlands.
The final installment in the definitive series of catalogues of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection, Pre-Columbian Art from Central America and Colombia at Dumbarton Oaks examines a comprehensive and expertly curated collection of jade and gold objects from Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia. This lavish catalogue provides over two hundred detailed and illustrated descriptions of objects that span approximately two millennia. Illustrated in detail with hundreds of high-quality photographs in full color and with stunning clarity, these breathtaking works of art reveal the ingenuity, skill, and vision of Indigenous artists and artisans.
With a dozen accompanying chapters by thirty contributors from the United States, Europe, and Latin America, this landmark publication describes the objects in the context of a history of the collection, production techniques, technical analyses, iconographic interpretations, and evaluations of material from specific archaeological sites. Pre-Columbian Art from Central America and Colombia at Dumbarton Oaks is a major watershed in the archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area, representing an essential contribution to scholarship on fascinating cultures from an area located between Mesoamerica and the Andes, with ties to the Antilles and Amazonia, in the center of the Americas.
Archaeologists, art historians, ethnohistorians, and ethnographers have long been captivated by the expressive material culture of the prehispanic indigenous peoples in the lands between Mesoamerica and the Andes. Interconnected communities of practice that were active from central Honduras in the north to coastal Ecuador in the south, with networks of interaction that included the Antilles and Amazonia, made this area essential for understanding long-term culture change.
Pre-Columbian Central America, Colombia, and Ecuador: Toward an Integrated Approach presents twenty chapters on current research in this central area of Latin America. Over two dozen specialists have contributed to this lavishly illustrated book, on topics ranging from historical and theoretical perspectives to analytical studies, reports on recent excavations, and evaluations of material such as ceramics, stone sculpture, gold artifacts, and ceremonial seats from various contexts in Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador. Edited by Colin McEwan and John W. Hoopes, this book is an essential addition to the library of any scholar fascinated by the diverse indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Although primitivism has received renewed attention in recent years, studies linking it with Latin America have been rare. This volume examines primitivism and its implications for contemporary debates on Latin American culture, literature, and arts, showing how Latin American subjects employ a Western construct to "return the gaze" of the outside world and redefine themselves in relation to modernity.
Examining such subjects as Julio Cortázar and Frida Kahlo and such topics as folk art and cinema, the volume brings together for the first time the views of scholars who are currently engaging the task of cultural studies from the standpoint of primitivism. These varied contributions include analyses of Latin American art in relation to social issues, popular culture, and official cultural policy; essays in cultural criticism touching on ethnic identity, racial politics, women's issues, and conflictive modernity; and analytical studies of primitivism's impact on narrative theory and practice, film, theater, and poetry.
This collection contributes offers a new perspective on a variety of significant debates in Latin American cultural studies and shows that the term primitive does not apply to these cultures as much as to our understanding of them.
CONTENTSBrazil has developed a distinctive response to the injustices inflicted by the country’s race relations regime. Despite the mixed racial background of most Brazilians, the state recognizes people’s racial classification according to a simple official scheme in which those self-assigned as black, together with “brown” and “indigenous” (preto-pardo-indigena), can qualify for specially allocated resources, most controversially quota places at public universities. Although this quota system has been somewhat successful, many other issues that disproportionately affect the country’s black population remain unresolved, and systemic policies to reduce structural inequality remain off the agenda.
In The Prism of Race, David Lehmann explores, theoretically and practically, issues of race, the state, social movements, and civil society, and then goes beyond these themes to ask whether Brazilian politics will forever circumvent the severe problems facing the society by co-optation and by tinkering with unjust structures. Lehmann disrupts the paradigm of current scholarly thought on Brazil, placing affirmative action disputes in their political and class context, bringing back the concept of state corporatism, and questioning the strength and independence of Brazilian civil society.
A universal test of great writers is the quality of their response to the human dilemma. Prophet in the Wilderness traces the development of that response in the works of the Argentine writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, from the first ambitious poems to its definitive expression in the essays and short stories.
His theme is progressive disillusionment, in history and in personal experience, both of which are interpreted in his work as accumulations of error. Modern civilization, he believes, has created many more problems than it has solved. Like Schopenhauer, Freud, and Spengler, the three thinkers who influenced him most, Martínez Estrada found in real events and circumstances all the symbols of disenchantment. Many today have begun to share this disenchantment, for since the publication of X-Ray of the Pampa in 1933 the real world has become more and more like his symbolic world.
Prophet in the Wilderness examines Martínez Estrada's foremost concern: the world as a complex reality to be discovered behind the image of one's own most intimate community. For him, the community assumed many forms: Buenos Aires, the enigmatic metropolis; the cathedral in his story "The Deluge"; the innumerable family of Marta Riquelme; Argentina itself in his masterpiece, X-Ray of the Pampa.
Martínez Estrada is the great solitary of Hispanic American literature, independent of all fashions and trends. With Borges, he had become by 1950 one of the two most discussed writers in Argentina.
Recipient of the Hubert Herring Memorial Award from the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies for the best unpublished manuscript of 1973, Prose Fiction of the Cuban Revolution is an in-depth study of works by Cubans, Cuban exiles, and other Latin American writers. Combining historical and critical approaches, Seymour Menton classifies and analyzes over two hundred novels and volumes of short stories, revealing the extent to which Cuban literature reflects the reality of the Revolution.
Menton establishes four periods—1959–1960, 1961–1965,1966–1970, and 1971–1973—that reflect the changing policies of the revolutionary government toward the arts. Using these periods as a chronological guideline, he defines four distinct literary generations, records the facts about their works, establishes coordinates, and formulates a system of literary and historical classification. He then makes an aesthetic analysis of the best of Cuban fiction, emphasizing the novels of major writers, including Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces, and José Lezama Lima's Paradiso. He also discusses the works of a large number of lesser-known writers, which must be considered in arriving at an accurate historical tableau.
Menton's exploration of the short story combines a thematic and stylistic analysis of nineteen anthologies with a close study of six authors: Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Calvert Casey, Humberto Arenal, Antonio Benítez, Jesús Díaz Rodríguez, and Norberto Fuentes. Several chapters are devoted to the increasing number of novels and short stories written by Cuban exiles as well as to the eighteen novels and one short story written about the Revolution by non-Cubans, such as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Luisa Josefina Hernández, and Pedro Juan Soto.
In studying literary works to reveal the intrinsic consciousness of a historical period, Menton presents not only his own views but also those of Cuban literary critics. In addition, he clarifies the various changes in the official attitude toward literature and the arts in Cuba, using the revolutionary processes of several other countries as comparative examples.
A member of Mexico's privileged upper class, yet still subordinated because of her gender, Rosario Castellanos became one of Latin America's most influential feminist social critics. Joanna O'Connell here offers the first book-length study of all Castellanos' prose writings, focusing specifically on how Castellanos' experiences as a Mexican woman led her to an ethic of solidarity with the oppressed peoples of her home state of Chiapas.
O'Connell provides an original and detailed analysis of Castellanos' first venture into feminist cultural analysis in her essay Sobre cultura feminina (1950) and traces her moral and intellectual trajectory as feminist and social critic. An overview of Mexican indigenismo establishes the context for individual chapters on Castellanos' narratives of ethnic conflict (the novels Balún Canán and Oficio de tinieblas and the short stories of Ciudad Real). In further chapters O'Connell reads Los convidados de agosto,Album de familia, and Castellanos' four collections of essays as developments of her feminist social analysis.
Mexico and the United States each have a constitution and a federal system of government. This fact has led many historians to assume that the Mexican system of government, established in the 1820s, is an imitation of the U.S. model. But it is not.
First published in Spanish in 1955 and now translated by the author and amplified with new material, this interpretation of the independence movement tells the true story of Mexico's transition from colonial status to federal state. Benson traces the Mexican government's beginning to events in Spain in 1808–1810, when provincial juntas, or deputations, were established to oppose Napoleon's French rule and govern the provinces of Spain and its New World dominions during the Spanish monarch's imprisonment.
It was the provincial deputation, not the United States federal system, that provided the model for the state legislative bodies that were eventually formed after Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. This finding—the result of years of painstaking archival research—strongly confirms the independence of Mexico's political development from U.S. influence. Its importance to a study of Mexican history cannot be overstated.
Public reading programs are flourishing in many Latin American cities in the new millennium. They defy the conception of reading as solitary and private by literally taking literature to the streets to create new communities of readers. From institutional and official to informal and spontaneous, the reading programs all use public space, distribute creative writing to a mass public, foster collective rather than individual reading, and provide access to literature in unconventional arenas.
The first international study of contemporary print culture in the Americas, Public Pages reveals how recent cultural policy and collective literary reading intervene in public space to promote social integration in cities in Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Chile. Marcy Schwartz looks at broad institutional programs such as UNESCO World Book Capital campaigns and the distribution of free books on public transportation, as well as local initiatives that produce handmade books out of recycled materials (known as cartoneras) and display banned books at former military detention centers. She maps the connection between literary reading and the development of cultural citizenship in Latin America, with municipalities, cultural centers, and groups of ordinary citizens harnessing reading as an activity both social and literary. Along with other strategies for reclaiming democracy after decades of authoritarian regimes and political violence, as well as responding to neoliberal economic policies, these acts of reading collectively in public settings invite civic participation and affirm local belonging.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press