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Race and the Chilean Miracle
Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Indigenous Rights
Patricia Richards
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013
The economic reforms imposed by Augusto Pinochet’s regime (1973–1990) are often credited with transforming Chile into a global economy and setting the stage for a peaceful transition to democracy, individual liberty, and the recognition of cultural diversity. The famed economist Milton Friedman would later describe the transition as the “Miracle of Chile.” Yet, as Patricia Richards reveals, beneath this veneer of progress lies a reality of social conflict and inequity that has been perpetuated by many of the same neoliberal programs.

In Race and the Chilean Miracle, Richards examines conflicts between Mapuche indigenous people and state and private actors over natural resources, territorial claims, and collective rights in the Araucanía region. Through ground-level fieldwork, extensive interviews with local Mapuche and Chileans, and analysis of contemporary race and governance theory, Richards exposes the ways that local, regional, and transnational realities are shaped by systemic racism in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism..

Richards demonstrates how state programs and policies run counter to Mapuche claims for autonomy and cultural recognition. The Mapuche, whose ancestral lands have been appropriated for timber and farming, have been branded as terrorists for their activism and sometimes-violent responses to state and private sector interventions. Through their interviews, many Mapuche cite the perpetuation of colonialism under the guise of development projects, multicultural policies, and assimilationist narratives. Many Chilean locals and political elites see the continued defiance of the Mapuche in their tenacious connection to the land, resistance to integration, and insistence on their rights as a people. These diametrically opposed worldviews form the basis of the racial dichotomy that continues to pervade Chilean society.

In her study, Richards traces systemic racism that follows both a top-down path (global, state, and regional) as well as a bottom-up one (local agencies and actors), detailing their historic roots. Richards also describes potential positive outcomes in the form of intercultural coalitions or indigenous autonomy. Her compelling analysis offers new perspectives on indigenous rights, race, and neoliberal multiculturalism in Latin America and globally.
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Race, Place, and Medicine
The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
Julyan G. Peard
Duke University Press, 1999
Race, Place, and Medicine examines the impact of a group of nineteenth-century Brazilian physicians who became known posthumously as the Bahian Tropicalista School of Medicine. Julyan G. Peard explores how this group of obscure clinicians became participants in an international debate as they helped change the scientific framework and practices of doctors in Brazil.
Peard shows how the Tropicalistas adapted Western medicine and challenged the Brazilian medical status quo in order to find new answers to the old question of whether the diseases of warm climates were distinct from those of temperate Europe. They carried out innovative research on parasitology, herpetology, and tropical disorders, providing evidence that countered European assumptions about Brazilian racial and cultural inferiority. In the face of European fatalism about health care in the tropics, the Tropicalistas forged a distinctive medicine based on their beliefs that public health would improve only if large social issues—such as slavery and abolition—were addressed and that the delivery of health care should encompass groups hitherto outside the doctors’ sphere, especially women. But the Tropicalistas’ agenda, which included biting social critiques and broad demands for the extension of health measures to all of Brazil’s people, was not sustained. Race, Place, and Medicine shows how imported models of tropical medicine—constructed by colonial nations for their own needs—downplayed the connection between socioeconomic factors and tropical disorders.
This study of a neglected episode in Latin American history will interest Brazilianists, as well as scholars of Latin American, medical, and scientific history.


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Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil
Michael Hanchard, ed.
Duke University Press, 1999
Bringing together U.S. and Brazilian scholars, as well as Afro-Brazilian political activists, Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil represents a significant advance in understanding the complexities of racial difference in contemporary Brazilian society. While previous scholarship on this subject has been largely confined to quantitative and statistical research, editor Michael Hanchard presents a qualitative perspective from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, and cultural theory.
The contributors to Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil examine such topics as the legacy of slavery and its abolition, the historical impact of social movements, race-related violence, and the role of Afro-Brazilian activists in negotiating the cultural politics surrounding the issue of Brazilian national identity. These essays also provide comparisons of racial discrimination in the United States and Brazil, as well as an analysis of residential segregation in urban centers and its affect on the mobilization of blacks and browns. With a focus on racialized constructions of class and gender and
sexuality, Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil reorients the direction of Brazilian studies, providing new insights into Brazilian culture, politics, and race relations.
This volume will be of importance to a wide cross section of scholars engaged with Brazil in particular, and Latin American studies in general. It will also appeal to those invested in the larger issues of political and social movements centered on the issue of race.

Contributors
. Benedita da Silva, Nelson do Valle Silva, Ivanir dos Santos, Richard Graham, Michael Hanchard, Carlos Hasenbalg, Peggy A. Lovell, Michael Mitchell, Tereza Santos, Edward Telles, Howard Winant


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Rain Forest Literatures
Amazonian Texts And Latin American Culture
Lucia Sa
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

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Rainforest Cowboys
The Rise of Ranching and Cattle Culture in Western Amazonia
By Jeffrey Hoelle
University of Texas Press, 2015

This ambitious interdisciplinary study is the first to examine the interlinked economic uses and cultural practices and beliefs surrounding cattle in Western Amazonia, where cattle raising is at the center of debates about economic development and environ

Winner, Brazil Section Book Award, Latin American Studies Association, 2016

The opening of the Amazon to colonization in the 1970s brought cattle, land conflict, and widespread deforestation. In the remote state of Acre, Brazil, rubber tappers fought against migrant ranchers to preserve the forest they relied on, and in the process, these “forest guardians” showed the world that it was possible to unite forest livelihoods and environmental preservation. Nowadays, many rubber tappers and their children are turning away from the forest-based lifestyle they once sought to protect and are becoming cattle-raisers or even caubois (cowboys). Rainforest Cowboys is the first book to examine the social and cultural forces driving the expansion of Amazonian cattle raising in all of their complexity.

Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork, Jeffrey Hoelle shows how cattle raising is about much more than beef production or deforestation in Acre, even among “carnivorous” environmentalists, vilified ranchers, and urbanites with no land or cattle. He contextualizes the rise of ranching in relation to political economic structures and broader meanings to understand the spread of “cattle culture.” This cattle-centered vision of rural life builds on local experiences and influences from across the Americas and even resembles East African cultural practices. Written in a broadly accessible and interdisciplinary style, Rainforest Cowboys is essential reading for a global audience interested in understanding the economic and cultural features of cattle raising, deforestation, and the continuing tensions between conservation and development in the Amazon.

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Reading Inca History
Catherine Julien
University of Iowa Press, 2002

At the heart of this book is the controversy over whether Inca history can and should be read as history. Did the Incas narrate a true reflection of their past, and did the Spaniards capture these narratives in a way that can be meaningfully reconstructed? In Reading Inca History,Catherine Julien finds that the Incas did indeed create detectable life histories.

The two historical genres that contributed most to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish narratives about the Incas were an official account of Inca dynastic genealogy and a series of life histories of Inca rulers. Rather than take for granted that there was an Inca historical consciousness, Julien begins by establishing an Inca purpose for keeping this dynastic genealogy. She then compares Spanish narratives of the Inca past to identify the structure of underlying Inca genres and establish the dependency on oral sources. Once the genealogical genre can be identified, the life histories can also be detected.

By carefully studying the composition of Spanish narratives and their underlying sources, Julien provides an informed and convincing reading of these complex texts. By disentangling the sources of their meaning, she reaches across time, language, and cultural barriers to achieve a rewarding understanding of the dynamics of Inca and colonial political history.

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Reading the Illegible
Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial Hegemony in the Andes
Laura Leon Llerena
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Reading the Illegible examines the history of alphabetic writing in early colonial Peru, deconstructing the conventional notion of literacy as a weapon of the colonizer. This book develops the concept of legibility, which allows for an in-depth analysis of coexisting Andean and non-Native media. The book discusses the stories surrounding the creation of the Huarochirí Manuscript (c. 1598–1608), the only surviving book-length text written by Indigenous people in Quechua in the early colonial period. The manuscript has been deemed “untranslatable in all the usual senses,” but scholar Laura Leon Llerena argues that it offers an important window into the meaning of legibility.

The concept of legibility allows us to reconsider this unique manuscript within the intertwined histories of literacy, knowledge, and colonialism. Reading the Illegible shows that the anonymous author(s) of the Huarochirí Manuscript, along with two contemporaneous Andean-authored texts by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, rewrote the history of writing and the notion of Christianity by deploying the colonizers’ technology of alphabetic writing.

Reading the Illegible weaves together the story of the peoples, places, objects, and media that surrounded the creation of the anonymous Huarochirí Manuscript to demonstrate how Andean people endowed the European technology of writing with a new social role in the context of a multimedia society.
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Reading the Walls of Bogota
Graffiti, Street Art, and the Urban Imaginary of Violence
Alba Griffin
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
A cultural imaginary is a structuring space through which collective understandings of cultural and society phenomena are formed, reproduced, and accepted as the norm. Reading the Walls of Bogotá uses graffiti and street art to explore the urban imaginaries of violence in Bogotá, Colombia. These artistic forms are produced and received in different ways in different areas of the city and offer an insight into citizens’ everyday experiences and perceptions of violence from the political, to the personal, to that of structural inequality. Through graffiti, in which critiques of memory, space, politics, and aesthetics are embedded, artists and their viewers form vernacular theories through which they interpret the world and the spaces they inhabit. By focusing on creative expression, Alba Griffin shows how Bogotá’s residents respond to imaginaries of violence, how they critique the norms, how they appropriate space to challenge or negotiate violence, and how they push back against inequality. 
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Rebellion in the Backlands
Euclides da Cunha
University of Chicago Press, 1957
Euclides da Cunha's classic account of the brutal campaigns against religious mystic Antonio Conselheiro has been called the Bible of Brazilian nationality.

"Euclides da Cunha went on the campaigns [against Conselheiro] as a journalist and what he returned with and published in 1902 is still unsurpassed in Latin American literature. Cunha is a talent as grand, spacious, entangled with knowledge, curiosity, and bafflement as the country itself. . . . On every page there is a heart of idea, speculation, dramatic observation that tells of a creative mission undertaken, the identity of the nation, and also the creation of a pure and eloquent prose style."—Elizabeth Hardwick, Bartleby in Manhattan
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Rebirth of the Paraguayan Republic
The First Colorado Era, 1878-1904
Harris Gaylord Warren
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985
A scholarly study of Paraguay in the decades dominated by the Colorados, immediately following the Allied occupation of the country after the disastrous War of the Triple Alliance, when half of Paraguay's population died. This period of rebirth saw the formal organization of Paraguay's major political parties, the Colorados and the Liberals, and the dominance of the Colorados until the Liberal revolution of 1904.
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Reckoning
The Ends of War in Guatemala
Diane M. Nelson
Duke University Press, 2009
Following the 1996 treaty ending decades of civil war, how are Guatemalans reckoning with genocide, especially since almost everyone contributed in some way to the violence? Meaning “to count, figure up” and “to settle rewards and punishments,” reckoning promises accounting and accountability. Yet as Diane M. Nelson shows, the means by which the war was waged, especially as they related to race and gender, unsettled the very premises of knowing and being. Symptomatic are the stories of duplicity pervasive in postwar Guatemala, as the left, the Mayan people, and the state were each said to have “two faces.” Drawing on more than twenty years of research in Guatemala, Nelson explores how postwar struggles to reckon with traumatic experience illuminate the assumptions of identity more generally.

Nelson brings together stories of human rights activism, Mayan identity struggles, coerced participation in massacres, and popular entertainment—including traditional dances, horror films, and carnivals—with analyses of mass-grave exhumations, official apologies, and reparations. She discusses the stereotype of the Two-Faced Indian as colonial discourse revivified by anti-guerrilla counterinsurgency and by the claims of duplicity leveled against the Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú, and she explores how duplicity may in turn function as a survival strategy for some. Nelson examines suspicions that state power is also two-faced, from the left’s fears of a clandestine para-state behind the democratic façade, to the right’s conviction that NGOs threaten Guatemalan sovereignty. Her comparison of antimalaria and antisubversive campaigns suggests biopolitical ways that the state is two-faced, simultaneously giving and taking life. Reckoning is a view from the ground up of how Guatemalans are finding creative ways forward, turning ledger books, technoscience, and even gory horror movies into tools for making sense of violence, loss, and the future.

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Reckoning with Pinochet
The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006
Steve J. Stern
Duke University Press, 2010
Reckoning with Pinochet is the first comprehensive account of how Chile came to terms with General Augusto Pinochet’s legacy of human rights atrocities. An icon among Latin America’s “dirty war” dictators, Pinochet had ruled with extreme violence while building a loyal social base. Hero to some and criminal to others, the general cast a long shadow over Chile’s future. Steve J. Stern recounts the full history of Chile’s democratic reckoning, from the negotiations in 1989 to chart a post-dictatorship transition; through Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998; the thirtieth anniversary, in 2003, of the coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende; and Pinochet’s death in 2006. He shows how transnational events and networks shaped Chile’s battles over memory, and how the Chilean case contributed to shifts in the world culture of human rights.

Stern’s analysis integrates policymaking by elites, grassroots efforts by human rights victims and activists, and inside accounts of the truth commissions and courts where top-down and bottom-up initiatives met. Interpreting solemn presidential speeches, raucous street protests, interviews, journalism, humor, cinema, and other sources, he describes the slow, imperfect, but surprisingly forceful advance of efforts to revive democratic values through public memory struggles, despite the power still wielded by the military and a conservative social base including the investor class. Over time, resourceful civil-society activists and select state actors won hard-fought, if limited, gains. As a result, Chileans were able to face the unwelcome past more honestly, launch the world’s first truth commission to examine torture, ensnare high-level perpetrators in the web of criminal justice, and build a public culture of human rights. Stern provides an important conceptualization of collective memory in the wake of national trauma in this magisterial work of history.

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Reclaiming the Discarded
Life and Labor on Rio's Garbage Dump
Kathleen M. Millar
Duke University Press, 2018
In Reclaiming the Discarded Kathleen M. Millar offers an evocative ethnography of Jardim Gramacho, a sprawling garbage dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where roughly two thousand self-employed workers known as catadores collect recyclable materials. While the figure of the scavenger sifting through garbage seems iconic of wageless life today, Millar shows how the work of reclaiming recyclables is more than a survival strategy or an informal labor practice. Rather, the stories of catadores show how this work is inseparable from conceptions of the good life and from human struggles to realize these visions within precarious conditions of urban poverty. By approaching the work of catadores as highly generative, Millar calls into question the category of informality, common conceptions of garbage, and the continued normativity of wage labor. In so doing, she illuminates how waste lies at the heart of relations of inequality and projects of social transformation.
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Reconsidering the Chavín Phenomenon in the Twenty-First Century
Richard L. Burger and Jason Nesbitt
Harvard University Press

The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Chavín de Huántar holds an iconic place in the archaeology of pre-Columbian Peru and is crucial to understanding the emergence of Andean civilization during the early first millennium BCE. Best known for its elaborate religious architecture and distinctive stone sculpture, Chavín de Huántar was the center of a much wider Andean world and the synchronicity of widespread socioeconomic changes coupled with intrusive Chavín material culture and iconography at distant centers suggests that Chavín de Huántar influenced a vast region through the expansion of religious ideology and intensified long-distance interaction.

Reconsidering the Chavín Phenomenon in the Twenty-First Century builds upon a surge of archaeological research over the last twenty years, bringing together the work of scholars researching Chavín de Huántar and its neighbors on the coast, highlands, and ceja de selva. This volume offers a cohesive vision of the Chavín Phenomenon at both the local and interregional level, one which recognizes the high degree of socioeconomic and cultural diversity that existed and the active role of centers outside the Chavín heartland in shaping the radical transformations that occurred within the Chavín Interaction Sphere between 1000 and 400 BCE.

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Region Out of Place
The Brazilian Northeast and the World, 1924-1968
Courtney J. Campbell
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020

The Brazilian Northeast has long been a marginalized region with a complex relationship to national identity. It is often portrayed as impoverished, backward, and rebellious, yet traditional and culturally authentic. Brazil is known for its strong national identity, but national identities do not preclude strong regional identities. In Region Out of Place, Courtney J. Campbell examines how groups within the region have asserted their identity, relevance, and uniqueness through interactions that transcend national borders. From migration to labor mobilization, from wartime dating to beauty pageants, from literacy movements to representations of banditry in film, Campbell explores how the development of regional cultural identity is a modern, internationally embedded conversation that circulated among Brazilians of every social class. Part of a region-based nationalism that reflects the anxiety that conflicting desires for modernity, progress, and cultural authenticity provoked in the twentieth century, this identity was forged by residents who continually stepped out of their expected roles, taking their region’s concerns to an international stage.

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Regional Archaeology in the Inca Heartland
The Hanan Cuzco Surveys
Edited by R. Alan Covey
University of Michigan Press, 2014

The Cuzco region of highland Peru was the heartland of the Inca empire, the largest native state to develop in the Americas. Archaeologists have studied Inca monumental architecture for more than a century, but it is only in recent decades that regional survey work has systematically sought to reconstruct patterns of settlement, subsistence, and social organization in the region. This monograph presents the results of regional surveys conducted (from 2000 to 2008) to the north and west of the city of Cuzco, a region of approximately 1200 square kilometers that was investigated using the same field methodology as other systematic surveys in the Cuzco region. The study region, referred to as Hanan Cuzco in this volume, encompasses considerable environmental variations, ranging from warm valley-bottom lands to snow-capped mountains. The chapters in this volume present settlement pattern data from all periods of pre-Columbian occupation—from the arrival of the first hunter-gatherers to the transformation of valley-bottom fields by the last Inca emperors. A chapter on the colonial period discusses how Spanish colonial practices transformed an imperial landscape into a peripheral one. Together, the chapters in this volume contribute to the archaeological understanding of several central issues in Andean prehistory.

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Regional Archaeology in the Valle de la Plata, Colombia/Arqueología Regional en el Valle de la Plata, Colombia
Edited by Robert D. Drennan
University of Michigan Press, 1985
In this volume, Robert D. Drennan presents a preliminary report on his survey and excavation in the mountainous area of western Colombia in 1984. Regional Archaeology in the Valle de la Plata contains a thorough description of the region’s landscape, including geology, soils, and modern flora, as well as details and illustrations of ceramic artifacts.
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The Religion of Life
Eugenics, Race, and Catholicism in Chile
Sarah Walsh
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

The Religion of Life examines the interconnections and relationship between Catholicism and eugenics in early twentieth-century Chile. Specifically, it demonstrates that the popularity of eugenic science was not diminished by the influence of Catholicism there. In fact, both eugenics and Catholicism worked together to construct the concept of a unique Chilean race, la raza chilena. A major factor that facilitated this conceptual overlap was a generalized belief among historical actors that male and female gender roles were biologically determined and therefore essential to a functioning society. As the first English-language study of eugenics in Chile, The Religion of Life surveys a wide variety of different materials (periodicals, newspapers, medical theses, and monographs) produced by Catholic and secular intellectuals from the first half of the twentieth century. What emerges from this examination is not only a more complex rendering of the relationship between religion and science but also the development of White supremacist logics in a Latin American context.

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Remembering Pinochet's Chile
On the Eve of London 1998
Steve J. Stern
Duke University Press, 2004
During the two years just before the 1998 arrest in London of General Augusto Pinochet, the historian Steve J. Stern had been in Chile collecting oral histories of life under Pinochet as part of an investigation into the form and meaning of memories of state-sponsored atrocities. In this compelling work, Stern shares the recollections of individual Chileans and draws on their stories to provide a framework for understanding memory struggles in history.


“A thoughtful, nuanced study of how Chileans remember the traumatic 1973 coup by Augusto Pinochet against Salvador Allende and the nearly two decades of military government that followed. . . . In light of the recent revelations of American human rights abuses of Iraqi prisoners, [Stern’s] insights into the legacies of torture and abuse in the Chilean prisons of the 1970s certainly have contemporary significance for any society that undergoes a national trauma.”—Publishers Weekly

“This outstanding work of scholarship sets a benchmark in the history of state terror, trauma, and memory in Latin America.”—Thomas Miller Klubock, American Historical Review

“This is a book of uncommon depth and introspection. . . . Steve J. Stern has not only advanced the memory of the horrors of the military dictatorship; he has assured the place of Pinochet’s legacy of atrocity in our collective conscience.”—Peter Kornbluh, author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability

“Steve J. Stern’s book elegantly recounts the conflicted recent history of Chile. He has found a deft solution to the knotty problem of evenhandedness in representing points of view so divergent they defy even the most careful attempts to portray the facts of the Pinochet period. He weaves a tapestry of memory in which narratives of horror and rupture commingle with the sincere perceptions of Chileans who remember Pinochet’s rule as salvation. The facts are there, but more important is the understanding we gain by knowing how ordinary Chileans—Pinochet’s supporters and his victims—work through their unresolved past.”—John Dinges, author of The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents

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Remembering the Hacienda
Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador
By Barry J. Lyons
University of Texas Press, 2006

From the colonial period through the mid-twentieth century, haciendas dominated the Latin American countryside. In the Ecuadorian Andes, Runa—Quichua-speaking indigenous people—worked on these large agrarian estates as virtual serfs. In Remembering the Hacienda: Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador, Barry Lyons probes the workings of power on haciendas and explores the hacienda's contemporary legacy.

Lyons lived for three years in a Runa village and conducted in-depth interviews with elderly former hacienda laborers. He combines their wrenching accounts with archival evidence to paint an astonishing portrait of daily life on haciendas. Lyons also develops an innovative analysis of hacienda discipline and authority relations. Remembering the Hacienda explains the role of religion as well as the reshaping of Runa culture and identity under the impact of land reform and liberation theology.

This beautifully written book is a major contribution to the understanding of social control and domination. It will be valuable reading for a broad audience in anthropology, history, Latin American studies, and religious studies.

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Representing the Barrios
Culture, Politics, and Urban Poverty in Twentieth-Century Caracas
Rebecca Jarman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
Against a backdrop of rapid urbanization and the  growth of a global economy powered by carbon, Rebecca Jarman argues that in Venezuela, urban poverty has become one of the most important resources in national culture and statecraft. Attracting the attentions of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians from within and beyond the limits of Caracas, the barrios are fetishized in the cultural domain as sites of rampant sex, crime, revolution, disease, and violence. The appeal of the urban poor in entertainment is replicated in the policies of autocratic leaders who, operating within an extractivist matrix that prizes the acquisition of land and capital, have sought to expand their reach into these densely populated territories.  Sometimes yielding to commodification, the barrios also have resisted exploitation by exceeding the terms of their representation in hegemonic culture and politics. Whether troubling the narratives that profit from poverty or undermining class-based stereotypes with experimental aesthetics, the barrio as a shifting set of coordinates consistently evades appropriations of disenfranchisement.  Mapping the recurrent tensions, anxieties, conflicts, aspirations, and blind spots that characterize depictions of the barrios, Rebecca Jarman elaborates a dynamic cultural analysis of the history of poverty in the Venezuelan capital. 
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front cover of Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America
Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America
From Resisting Neoliberalism to the Second Incorporation
Eduardo Silva
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Neoliberalism changed the face of Latin America and left average citizens struggling to cope in many ways. Popular sectors were especially hard hit as wages declined and unemployment increased. The backlash to neoliberalism in the form of popular protest and electoral mobilization opened space for leftist governments to emerge. The turn to left governments raised popular expectations for a second wave of incorporation. Although a growing literature has analyzed many aspects of left governments, there is no study of how the redefinition of the organized popular sectors, their allies, and their struggles have reshaped the political arena to include their interests—until now. This volume examines the role played in the second wave of incorporation by political parties, trade unions, and social movements in five cases: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela.  The cases shed new light on a subject critical to understanding the change in the distribution of political power related to popular sectors and their interests—a key issue in the study of postneoliberalism.
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Resisting Brazil's Military Regime
An Account of the Battles of Sobral Pinto
By John W. F. Dulles
University of Texas Press, 2007

Praised by his many admirers as a "courageous and fearless" defender of human rights, Heráclito Fontoura Sobral Pinto (1893-1991) was the most consistently forceful opponent of the regime of Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas. John W. F. Dulles chronicled Sobral's battles with the Vargas government in Sobral Pinto, "The Conscience of Brazil": Leading the Attack against Vargas (1930-1945), which History: Reviews of New Books called "a must-read for anyone wanting to understand twentieth-century Brazil."

In this second and final volume of his biography of Sobral Pinto, Professor Dulles completes the story of the fiery crusader's fight for democracy, morality, and justice, particularly for the downtrodden. Drawing on Sobral's vast correspondence, Dulles offers an extensive account of Sobral's opposition to the military regime that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. He describes how Sobral Pinto defended those who had been politically influential before April, 1964, as well as other victims of the regime, including Communists, once-powerful labor leaders, priests, militant journalists, and students. Because Sobral Pinto participated in so many of the struggles against the military regime, his experiences provide vivid new insights into this important period in recent Brazilian history. They also shed light on developments in the Catholic Church (Sobral, a devout Catholic, vigorously opposed liberation theology), as well as on Sobral's key role in preserving Brazil's commission for defending human rights.

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Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru
Moises Arce
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014
Natural resource extraction has fueled protest movements in Latin America and existing research has drawn considerable scholarly attention to the politics of antimarket contention at the national level, particularly in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina. Despite its residents reporting the third-highest level of protest participation in the region, Peru has been largely ignored in these discussions.

In this groundbreaking study, Moisés Arce exposes a longstanding climate of popular contention in Peru. Looking beneath the surface to the subnational, regional, and local level as inception points, he rigorously dissects the political conditions that set the stage for protest. Focusing on natural resource extraction and its key role in the political economy of Peru and other developing countries, Arce reveals a wide disparity in the incidence, forms, and consequences of collective action.

Through empirical analysis of protest events over thirty-one years, extensive personal interviews with policymakers and societal actors, and individual case studies of major protest episodes, Arce follows the ebb and flow of Peruvian protests over time and space to show the territorial unevenness of democracy, resource extraction, and antimarket contentions. Employing political process theory, Arce builds an interactive framework that views the moderating role of democracy, the quality of institutional representation as embodied in political parties, and most critically, the level of political party competition as determinants in the variation of protest and subsequent government response. Overall, he finds that both the fluidity and fragmentation of political parties at the subnational level impair the mechanisms of accountability and responsiveness often attributed to party competition. Thus, as political fragmentation increases, political opportunities expand, and contention rises. These dynamics in turn shape the long-term development of the state.

Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru will inform students and scholars of globalization, market transitions, political science, contentious politics and Latin America generally, as a comparative analysis relating natural resource extraction to democratic processes both regionally and internationally.
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Resource Radicals
From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador
Thea Riofrancos
Duke University Press, 2020
In 2007, the left came to power in Ecuador. In the years that followed, the “twenty-first-century socialist” government and a coalition of grassroots activists came to blows over the extraction of natural resources. Each side declared the other a perversion of leftism and the principles of socioeconomic equality, popular empowerment, and anti-imperialism. In Resource Radicals, Thea Riofrancos unpacks the conflict between these two leftisms: on the one hand, the administration's resource nationalism and focus on economic development; and on the other, the anti-extractivism of grassroots activists who condemned the government's disregard for nature and indigenous communities. In this archival and ethnographic study, Riofrancos expands the study of resource politics by decentering state resource policy and locating it in a field of political struggle populated by actors with conflicting visions of resource extraction. She demonstrates how Ecuador's commodity-dependent economy and history of indigenous uprisings offer a unique opportunity to understand development, democracy, and the ecological foundations of global capitalism.
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front cover of Restructuring Domination
Restructuring Domination
Industrialists and the State in Ecuador
Catherine M Conaghan
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
The industrial development of Ecuador has made fortunes for some, but has largely bypassed the general population. Armed by its new power, the bourgeoisie has captured sate mechanisms for its own advancement, leading to the paradox of a “democratic authoritarianism.” In this study, Catherine M. Conaghan views the crucial differences between the social and economic changes in newly developed Latin American nations and those of the southern cone.  Using Ecuador as her case study, she shows how industrial growth has given birth to an exclusive, ingrown bourgeoisie that is highly dependent on the state and foreign capital and is increasingly alienated from the peasants and urban poor.
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front cover of RETHINKING HISTORY
RETHINKING HISTORY
Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past
Edited by Jonathan D. Hill
University of Illinois Press, 2000
Rethinking History and Myth explores narrative and ritual expressions of mythic and historical modes of consciousness among indigenous peoples of the Andean, Amazonian, and intermediate lowland regions of South America. Focusing on indigenous perspectives of South American interaction with Western colonial and national societies, the authors trace the interrelationships between myth and history to demonstrate how these peoples have developed a dynamic interpretive framework that enables them to understand their past.
 
Examining specific cultural and linguistic traditions that shape the social consciousness of native South Americans, the authors show that historical and mythic consciousness work together in forming new symbolic strategies that allow indigenous peoples to understand their societies as at least partially autonomous groups within national and global power structures. This complex process is used to interpret the history of interethnic relations, allowing both individuals and groups to change themselves and alter their own circumstances.
 
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Rethinking the Inka
Community, Landscape, and Empire in the Southern Andes
Edited by Frances M. Hayashida, Andrés Troncoso, and Diego Salazar
University of Texas Press, 2022

2023 Book Award, Society for American Archaeology

A dramatic reappraisal of the Inka Empire through the lens of Qullasuyu.


The Inka conquered an immense area extending across five modern nations, yet most English-language publications on the Inka focus on governance in the area of modern Peru. This volume expands the range of scholarship available in English by collecting new and notable research on Qullasuyu, the largest of the four quarters of the empire, which extended south from Cuzco into contemporary Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile.

From the study of Qullasuyu arise fresh theoretical perspectives that both complement and challenge what we think we know about the Inka. While existing scholarship emphasizes the political and economic rationales underlying state action, Rethinking the Inka turns to the conquered themselves and reassesses imperial motivations. The book’s chapters, incorporating more than two hundred photographs, explore relations between powerful local lords and their Inka rulers; the roles of nonhumans in the social and political life of the empire; local landscapes remade under Inka rule; and the appropriation and reinterpretation by locals of Inka objects, infrastructure, practices, and symbols. Written by some of South America’s leading archaeologists, Rethinking the Inka is poised to be a landmark book in the field.

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Revolt of the Saints
Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy
John F. Collins
Duke University Press, 2015
In 1985 the Pelourinho neighborhood in Salvador, Brazil was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Over the next decades, over 4,000 residents who failed to meet the state's definition of "proper Afro-Brazilianness" were expelled to make way for hotels, boutiques, NGOs, and other attractions. In Revolt of the Saints, John F. Collins explores the contested removal of the inhabitants of Brazil’s first capital and best-known site for Afro-Brazilian history, arguing that the neighborhood’s most recent reconstruction, begun in 1992 and supposedly intended to celebrate the Pelourinho's working-class citizens and their culture, revolves around gendered and racialized forms of making Brazil modern. He situates this focus on national origins and the commodification of residents' most intimate practices within a longer history of government and elite attempts to "improve" the citizenry’s racial stock even as these efforts take new form today. In this novel analysis of the overlaps of race, space, and history, Collins thus draws on state-citizen negotiations of everyday life to detail how residents’ responses to the attempt to market Afro-Brazilian culture and reimagine the nation’s foundations both illuminate and contribute to recent shifts in Brazil’s racial politics.
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A Revolution Aborted
The Lessons of Grenada
Jorge Heine
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991
Twelve essays address the political and cultural features of the Grenada experience, in light of the 1979 uprising that toppled Prime Minister Eric Gairy, and the subsequent U.S. invasion of 1983. The contributors discuss theoretical issues that go to the heart of dilemmas faced by many small, developing societies.
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A Revolution for Our Rights
Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880-1952
Laura Gotkowitz
Duke University Press, 2008
A Revolution for Our Rights is a critical reassessment of the causes and significance of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. Historians have tended to view the revolution as the result of class-based movements that accompanied the rise of peasant leagues, mineworker unions, and reformist political projects in the 1930s. Laura Gotkowitz argues that the revolution had deeper roots in the indigenous struggles for land and justice that swept through Bolivia during the first half of the twentieth century. Challenging conventional wisdom, she demonstrates that rural indigenous activists fundamentally reshaped the military populist projects of the 1930s and 1940s. In so doing, she chronicles a hidden rural revolution—before the revolution of 1952—that fused appeals for equality with demands for a radical reconfiguration of political power, landholding, and rights.

Gotkowitz combines an emphasis on national political debates and congresses with a sharply focused analysis of Indian communities and large estates in the department of Cochabamba. The fragmented nature of Cochabamba’s Indian communities and the pioneering significance of its peasant unions make it a propitious vantage point for exploring contests over competing visions of the nation, justice, and rights. Scrutinizing state authorities’ efforts to impose the law in what was considered a lawless countryside, Gotkowitz shows how, time and again, indigenous activists shrewdly exploited the ambiguous status of the state’s pro-Indian laws to press their demands for land and justice. Bolivian indigenous and social movements have captured worldwide attention during the past several years. By describing indigenous mobilization in the decades preceding the revolution of 1952, A Revolution for Our Rights illuminates a crucial chapter in the long history behind present-day struggles in Bolivia and contributes to an understanding of indigenous politics in modern Latin America more broadly.

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A Revolution in Fragments
Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia
Mark Goodale
Duke University Press, 2019
The years between 2006 and 2015, during which Evo Morales became Bolivia's first indigenous president, have been described as a time of democratic and cultural revolution, world renewal (Pachakuti), reconstituted neoliberalism, or simply “the process of change.” In A Revolution in Fragments Mark Goodale unpacks these various analytical and ideological frameworks to reveal the fragmentary and contested nature of Bolivia's radical experiments in pluralism, ethnic politics, and socioeconomic planning. Privileging the voices of social movement leaders, students, indigenous intellectuals, women's rights activists, and many others, Goodale uses contemporary Bolivia as an ideal case study with which to theorize the role that political agency, identity, and economic equality play within movements for justice and structural change.
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Revolution in the Andes
The Age of Túpac Amaru
Sergio Serulnikov
Duke University Press, 2013
Revolution in the Andes is an in-depth history of the Túpac Amaru insurrection, the largest and most threatening indigenous challenge to Spanish rule in the Andean world after the Conquest. Between 1780 and 1782, insurgent armies were organized throughout the Andean region. Some of the oldest and most populous cities in this region—including Cusco, La Paz, Puno, and Oruro—were besieged, assaulted, or occupied. Huge swaths of the countryside fell under control of the rebel forces. While essentially an indigenous movement, the rebellion sometimes attracted mestizo and Creole support for ousting the Spanish and restoring rule of the Andes to the land's ancestral owners. Sergio Serulnikov chronicles the uprisings and the ensuing war between rebel forces and royalist armies, emphasizing that the insurrection was comprised of several regional movements with varied ideological outlooks, social makeup, leadership structures, and expectations of change.
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The Revolution in Venezuela
Social and Political Change under Chávez
Thomas Ponniah
Harvard University Press, 2011

Is Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution under Hugo Chávez truly revolutionary? Most books and articles tend to view the Chávez government in an either-or fashion. Some see the president as the shining knight of twenty-first-century socialism, while others see him as an avenging Stalinist strongman. Despite passion on both sides, the Chávez government does not fall easily into a seamless fable of emancipatory or authoritarian history, as these essays make clear.

A range of distinguished authors consider the nature of social change in contemporary Venezuela and explore a number of themes that help elucidate the sources of the nation’s political polarization. The chapters range from Fernando Coronil’s “Bolivarian Revolution,” which examines the relationship between the state’s social body (its population) and its natural body (its oil reserves), to an insightful look at women’s rights by Cathy A. Rakowski and Gioconda Espina. This volume shows that, while the future of the national process is unclear, the principles elaborated by the Chávez government are helping articulate a new Latin American left.

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Revolution on the Pampas
A Social History of Argentine Wheat, 1860–1910
By James R. Scobie
University of Texas Press, 1964

On the Argentine pampas, between the years 1860 and 1910, a dramatic social and agricultural revolution took place. The haunts of wild cattle, native peoples, and gauchos were transformed into cultivated fields and rich pastures. A land that had produced only scrawny sheep and cattle became one of the world’s leading exporters of wheat, corn, beef, mutton, and wool. A country that had had only a sparse and scattered Spanish and mestizo population now boasted a metropolis of one and a half million, and a national population of eight million people, nearly a third of whom were born in Europe. These were significant changes, and wheat growing played a major role in all of them. This study traces the development of the Argentine wheat zone, focusing on the part wheat played in forming the Argentina of today.

James R. Scobie begins his account with the first settlers who colonized Santa Fe in the 1850s and shows how they and thousands of other European immigrants converted this vast grassland into a world breadbasket. He explains why these small farmer-owners soon gave way to tenant farmers, and how crop farming developed primarily as servant to the predominant sheep and cattle interests. He expands on several factors responsible for this evolvement: the elimination of indigenous threat, the coming of the railroad, the agricultural policy—or lack of policy—of the Argentine government, and the urban orientation of the Argentine people.

The railroads, by suppressing the building of other roads through the pampas, had the effect of isolating the wheatgrowers. By making the products of the pampas available to world markets, the railroads opened up new trade, which helped the growth of cities tremendously; but this very prosperity pushed the cost of land far beyond the wheatgrower’s ability to buy it. The result was a pampas without settlers, a frontier filled with migrant sharecroppers and tenant farmers, a land exploited but not possessed. Transiency as well as isolation became the common denominators of these families, who were forced to move every few years to make way for more valued tenants—sheep and cattle. They left behind them no schools, no churches, no roads, no villages. Immigrants came to labor but not to sink their roots in the pampas.

Without sentimentality but with understanding and compassion, Scobie explores every facet of the lives of these laborers who created Argentina’s agricultural greatness. His examination of Argentina’s broad policies toward land, immigration, and tariffs shows that the national government had little lasting or effective interest in the country’s agricultural development. In a social sense, the thousands of immigrants who toiled the pampas were looked upon as the wild cattle or fertile soil—blessings which neither needed nor warranted official attention. Scobie’s conclusion is that Argentina got better than it deserved.

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Revolutionizing Repertoires
The Rise of Populist Mobilization in Peru
Robert S. Jansen
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Politicians and political parties are for the most part limited by habit—they recycle tried-and-true strategies, draw on models from the past, and mimic others in the present. But in rare moments politicians break with routine and try something new.

Drawing on pragmatist theories of social action, Revolutionizing Repertoires sets out to examine what happens when the repertoire of practices available to political actors is dramatically reconfigured. Taking as his case study the development of a distinctively Latin American style of populist mobilization, Robert S. Jansen analyzes the Peruvian presidential election of 1931. He finds that, ultimately, populist mobilization emerged in the country at this time because newly empowered outsiders recognized the limitations of routine political practice and understood how to modify, transpose, invent, and recombine practices in a whole new way. Suggesting striking parallels to the recent populist turn in global politics, Revolutionizing Repertoires offers new insights not only to historians of Peru but also to scholars of historical sociology and comparative politics, and to anyone interested in the social and political origins of populism.
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Rhythms of the Pachakuti
Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia
Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar
Duke University Press, 2014
In the indigenous Andean language of Aymara, pachakuti refers to the subversion and transformation of social relations. Between 2000 and 2005, Bolivia was radically transformed by a series of popular indigenous uprisings against the country's neoliberal and antidemocratic policies. In Rhythms of the Pachakuti, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar documents these mass collective actions, tracing the internal dynamics of such disruptions to consider how motivation and execution incite political change.

"In Rhythms of the Pachakuti we can sense the reverberations of an extraordinary historical process that took place in Bolivia at the start of the twenty-first century. The book is the product of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar's political engagement in that historical process. . . . Though of Mexican nationality, [she] was intimately involved in Bolivian politics for many years and acquired a quasi-legendary status there as an intense, brilliant activist and radical intellectual. . . . [Her account is] . . . itself a revolutionary document. . . . Rhythms of the Pachakuti deserves to stand as a key text in the international literature of radicalism and emancipatory politics in the new century."—Sinclair Thomson, from the foreword
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A Right to Health
Medicine, Marginality, and Health Care Reform in Northeastern Brazil
By Jessica Scott Jerome
University of Texas Press, 2015

In 1988, a new health care system, the Sistema Único de Saúde (Unified Health Care System or SUS) was formally established in Brazil. The system was intended, among other goals, to provide universal access to health care services and to redefine health as a citizen’s right and a duty of the state. A Right to Health explores how these goals have unfolded within an urban peripheral community located on the edges of the northeastern city of Fortaleza. Focusing on the decade 1998–2008 and the impact of health care reforms on one low-income neighborhood, Jessica Jerome documents the tensions that arose between the ideals of the reforms and their entanglement with pervasive socioeconomic inequality, neoliberal economic policy, and generational tension with the community.

Using ethnographic and historical research, the book traces the history of political activism in the community, showing that, since the community’s formation in the early 1930s, residents have consistently fought for health care services. In so doing, Jerome develops a multilayered portrait of urban peripheral life and suggests that the notion of health care as a right of each citizen plays a major role not only in the way in which health care is allocated, but, perhaps more importantly, in how health care is understood and experienced.

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The Rio de Janeiro Reader
History, Culture, Politics
Daryle Williams, Amy Chazkel, and Paulo Knauss, editors
Duke University Press, 2016
Spanning a period of over 450 years, The Rio de Janeiro Reader traces the history, culture, and politics of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, through the voices, images, and experiences of those who have made the city's history. It outlines Rio's transformation from a hardscrabble colonial outpost and strategic port into an economic, cultural, and entertainment capital of the modern world. The volume contains a wealth of primary sources, many of which appear here in English for the first time. A mix of government documents, lyrics, journalism, speeches, ephemera, poems, maps, engravings, photographs, and other sources capture everything from the fantastical impressions of the first European arrivals to the complaints about roving capoeira gangs, and from sobering eyewitness accounts of slavery's brutality to the glitz of Copacabana. The definitive English-language resource on the city, The Rio de Janeiro Reader presents the "Marvelous City" in all its complexity, importance, and intrigue.
 
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The Rise and Fall of the Paraguayan Republic, 1800–1870
By John Hoyt Williams
University of Texas Press, 1979

Paraguay plays a very small role in the modern world, but for part of the nineteenth century it was a significant regional force. Between 1800 and 1865 it changed from an imperial backwater into a dynamic, dictator-led, financially sound nation. Then came the terrible War of the Triple Alliance, and by 1870 Paraguay had virtually been destroyed.

John Hoyt Williams re-creates the era’s people, places, and events in rich detail and a vigorous style, but this is much more than a mere narrative. His archival research in Paraguay and several other countries enables him to offer new facts and interpretations, correct a number of misapprehensions, and explode a few myths.

He also provides the clearest, most objective portraits available of the three extraordinary men who ruled Paraguay during this time: Dr. José Gaspar de Francia, “El Supremo”; Carlos Antonio López, “the Corpulent Despot”; and López’s flamboyant son Francisco Solano López. Discussions of social, economic, and cultural conditions round out a masterly account of a remarkable historical period.

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Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes
Rachel Corr
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Not every world culture that has battled colonization has suffered or died. In the Ecuadorian Andean parish of Salasaca, the indigenous culture has stayed true to itself and its surroundings for centuries while adapting to each new situation. Today, indigenous Salascans continue to devote a large part of their lives to their distinctive practices—both community rituals and individual behaviors—while living side by side with white-mestizo culture.

In this book Rachel Corr provides a knowledgeable account of the Salasacan religion and rituals and their respective histories. Based on eighteen years of fieldwork in Salasaca, as well as extensive research in Church archives—including never-before-published documents—Corr’s book illuminates how Salasacan culture adapted to Catholic traditions and recentered, reinterpreted, and even reshaped them to serve similarly motivated Salasacan practices, demonstrating the link between formal and folk Catholicism and pre-Columbian beliefs and practices. Corr also explores the intense connection between the local Salasacan rituals and the mountain landscapes around them, from peak to valley.

Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is, in its portrayal of Salasacan religious culture, both thorough and all-encompassing. Sections of the book cover everything from the performance of death rituals to stories about Amazonia as Salasacans interacted with outsiders—conquistadors and camera-toting tourists alike. Corr also investigates the role of shamanism in modern Salasacan culture, including shamanic powers and mountain spirits, and the use of reshaped, Andeanized Catholicism to sustain collective memory. Through its unique insider’s perspective of Salasacan spirituality, Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is a valuable anthropological work that honestly represents this people’s great ability to adapt.
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Ritual Encounters
Otavalan Modern and Mythic Community
Michelle Wibbelsman
University of Illinois Press, 2008

This book examines ritual practices and public festivals in the Otavalo and Cotacachi areas of northern Andean Ecuador's Imbabura province. Otavaleños are a unique group in that they maintain their traditional identity but also cultivate a cosmopolitanism through frequent international travel. Ritual Encountersexplores the moral, mythic, and modern crossroads at which Otavaleños stand, and how, at this junction, they come to define themselves as millennial people. 

Michelle Wibbelsman shows that Otavaleños are deeply engaged in transnational mobility and in the cultural transformations that have resulted from Otavalan participation in global markets, international consumer trends, and technological developments. Rituals have persisted among this ethnic community as important processes for symbolically capturing and critically assessing cultural changes in the face of modern influences. As religious expression, political commentary, transcendental communication, moral judgment, and transformative experience, Otavalan rituals constitute enduring practices that affirm ethnic identities, challenge dominant narratives, and take issue with power inequalities behind hegemony. Ritual Encounters thus offers an appreciation of the modern and mythic community as a single and emergent condition.

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The Road to OPEC
United States Relations with Venezuela, 1919-1976
By Stephen G. Rabe
University of Texas Press, 1982

On September 10, 1960, Venezuela spearheaded the formation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (other original members included Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait). However, in a world abundantly supplied with oil, the United States could and did ignore Venezuelan suggestions that OPEC and the consuming nations work together to control production and to increase prices. Then, in late 1973, OPEC sent shudders throughout the world economy, and an energy crisis struck with full force. Emboldened by the power of their oil cartel, Venezuelan leaders denounced the old economic relationship with the United States, nationalized U.S. oil and steel holdings, and fashioned a foreign economic policy that differed sharply from Washington's.

The Road to OPEC is the story of the fiery debates among U.S. oil companies, the Department of State, and the Venezuelan government over oil policies—clashes that led Venezuela to establish OPEC and to nationalize U.S.-owned properties. In addition, this is the first study of twentieth-century Venezuelan-U.S. relations. Its focus on oil diplomacy is placed within the context of key U.S. policies toward Latin America and such programs as the Open Door, the Good Neighbor, and the Alliance for Progress. The author also provides insight into both the politics of the contemporary energy crisis and the growing split between raw-material producers and their industrial customers.

The Road to OPEC is based on extensive archival research, as well as the author's successful use of the Freedom of Information Act to declassify files of such agencies as the National Security Council and the CIA.

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The Road to Santiago
Walking the Way of St James
René Freund
Haus Publishing, 2016
Each year, over 200,000 people pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Often called the Way of St. James, this journey has been an important Christian tradition for centuries. The Road to Santiago is one man’s incredible story of walking almost a thousand miles to experience it.

As René Freund learns, when you reach the edge of the European continent having walked along the Way of St. James—which pilgrims of former times thought to be the end of the world—only then do you realize that the old pilgrim’s saying is true: the journey does not end in Santiago. The journey begins in Santiago. In this vivid travelogue, Freund not only introduces us to the overwhelming natural beauty he encountered along the way, but also shares his experience of reaching his physical and psychological limits during the arduous journey.
 
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Roads to Reason
Transportation Administration and Rationality in Colombia
Richard E. Hartwig
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983
Hartwig views the Columbian Ministry of Public Works, applying a theoretical model of rationality and responsibility to view how policy failures were caused by faulty definitions of problems and mistaken approaches in building Andean Highways from 1922-1974. This book will interest those involved in policy administration, organization theory, and policy planning in both developed and developing countries.
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Routine Crisis
An Ethnography of Disillusion
Sarah Muir
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Argentina, once heralded as the future of capitalist progress, has a long history of economic volatility. In 2001–2002, a financial crisis led to its worst economic collapse, precipitating a dramatic currency devaluation, the largest sovereign default in world history, and the flight of foreign capital. Protests and street blockades punctuated a moment of profound political uncertainty, epitomized by the rapid succession of five presidents in four months. Since then, Argentina has fought economic fires on every front, from inflation to the cost of utilities and depressed industrial output. When things clearly aren't working, when the constant churning of booms and busts makes life almost unlivable, how does our deeply compromised order come to seem so inescapable? How does critique come to seem so blunt, even as crisis after crisis appears on the horizon? What are the lived effects of that sense of inescapability?

Anthropologist Sarah Muir offers a cogent meditation on the limits of critique at this historical moment, drawing on deep experience in Argentina but reflecting on a truly global condition. If we feel things are being upended in a manner that is ongoing, tumultuous, and harmful, what would we need to do—and what would we need to give up—to usher in a revitalized critique for today's world? Routine Crisis is an original provocation and a challenge to think beyond the limits of exhaustion and reimagine a form of criticism for the twenty-first century.
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Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, Part One
By Garcilaso de la Vega; translated by Harold V. Livermore
University of Texas Press, 1966

Garcilaso de la Vega, the first native of the New World to attain importance as a writer in the Old, was born in Cuzco in 1539, the illegitimate son of a Spanish cavalier and an Inca princess. Although he was educated as a gentleman of Spain and won an important place in Spanish letters, Garcilaso was fiercely proud of his Indian ancestry and wrote under the name EI Inca.

Royal Commentaries of the Incas is the account of the origin, growth, and destruction of the Inca empire, from its legendary birth until the death in 1572 of its last independent ruler. For the material in Part One of Royal Commentaries—the history of the Inca civilization prior to the arrival of the Spaniards—Garcilaso drew upon "what I often heard as a child from the lips of my mother and her brothers and uncles and other elders . . . [of] the origin of the Inca kings, their greatness, the grandeur of their empire, their deeds and conquests, their government in peace and war, and the laws they ordained so greatly to the advantage of their vassals."

The conventionalized and formal history of an oral tradition, Royal Commentaries describes the gradual imposition of order and civilization upon a primitive and barbaric world. To this Garcilaso adds facts about the geography and the flora and fauna of the land; the folk practices, religion, and superstitions; the agricultural and the architectural and engineering achievements of the people; and a variety of other information drawn from his rich store of traditional knowledge, personal observation, or speculative philosophy.

Important though it is as history, Garcilaso's classic is much more: it is also a work of art. Its gracious and graceful style, skillfully translated by Harold V. Livermore, succeeds in bringing to life for the reader a genuine work of literature.

Part One covers the history of the Incas up to the arrival of the Spanish.

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Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, Part Two
By Garcilaso de la Vega; translated by Harold V. Livermore
University of Texas Press, 1966

Garcilaso de la Vega, the first native of the New World to attain importance as a writer in the Old, was born in Cuzco in 1539, the illegitimate son of a Spanish cavalier and an Inca princess. Although he was educated as a gentleman of Spain and won an important place in Spanish letters, Garcilaso was fiercely proud of his Indian ancestry and wrote under the name El Inca.

Royal Commentaries of the Incas is the account of the origin, growth, and destruction of the Inca empire, from its legendary birth until the death in 1572 of its last independent ruler. For the material in Part One of Royal Commentaries—the history of the Inca civilization prior to the arrival of the Spaniards—Garcilaso drew upon "what I often heard as a child from the lips of my mother and her brothers and uncles and other elders . . . [of] the origin of the Inca kings, their greatness, the grandeur of their empire, their deeds and conquests, their government in peace and war, and the laws they ordained so greatly to the advantage of their vassals."

The conventionalized and formal history of an oral tradition, Royal Commentaries describes the gradual imposition of order and civilization upon a primitive and barbaric world. To this Garcilaso adds facts about the geography and the flora and fauna of the land; the folk practices, religion, and superstitions; the agricultural and the architectural and engineering achievements of the people; and a variety of other information drawn from his rich store of traditional knowledge, personal observation, or speculative philosophy.

Important though it is as history, Garcilaso's classic is much more: it is also a work of art. Its gracious and graceful style, skillfully translated by Harold V. Livermore, succeeds in bringing to life for the reader a genuine work of literature.

Part Two covers the Spanish conquest of the Incas.

[more]

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Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, Parts One and Two
Harold V. Garcilaso de la Vega
University of Texas Press, 2014

Garcilaso de la Vega, the first native of the New World to attain importance as a writer in the Old, was born in Cuzco in 1539, the illegitimate son of a Spanish cavalier and an Inca princess. Although he was educated as a gentleman of Spain and won an important place in Spanish letters, Garcilaso was fiercely proud of his Indian ancestry and wrote under the name El Inca.

Royal Commentaries of the Incas is the account of the origin, growth, and destruction of the Inca empire, from its legendary birth until the death in 1572 of its last independent ruler. For the material in Part One of Royal Commentaries—the history of the Inca civilization prior to the arrival of the Spaniards—Garcilaso drew upon "what I often heard as a child from the lips of my mother and her brothers and uncles and other elders . . . [of] the origin of the Inca kings, their greatness, the grandeur of their empire, their deeds and conquests, their government in peace and war, and the laws they ordained so greatly to the advantage of their vassals."

The conventionalized and formal history of an oral tradition, Royal Commentaries describes the gradual imposition of order and civilization upon a primitive and barbaric world. To this Garcilaso adds facts about the geography and the flora and fauna of the land; the folk practices, religion, and superstitions; the agricultural and the architectural and engineering achievements of the people; and a variety of other information drawn from his rich store of traditional knowledge, personal observation, or speculative philosophy.

Important though it is as history, Garcilaso's classic is much more: it is also a work of art. Its gracious and graceful style, skillfully translated by Harold V. Livermore, succeeds in bringing to life for the reader a genuine work of literature.

[more]

front cover of The Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America
The Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America
Vol. 1: Peru
John J. Tepaske and Herbert S. Klein, editors
Duke University Press, 1982
The Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America provides records of Spanish colonial treasuries of various New World administrative centers. In this volume, the fourth in the series, the authors have compiled quantitative date on the fiscal structure of the presidency of Quito that will be an invaluable source for reconstructing the economic, political, and social history of eighteenth-century Ecuador.
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front cover of The Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America
The Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America
Vol. 2: Upper Peru (Bolivia)
John J. Tepaske and Herbert S. Klein, editors
Duke University Press, 1982
The Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America provides records of Spanish colonial treasuries of various New World administrative centers. In this volume, the fourth in the series, the authors have compiled quantitative date on the fiscal structure of the presidency of Quito that will be an invaluable source for reconstructing the economic, political, and social history of eighteenth-century Ecuador.
[more]

front cover of The Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America
The Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America
Vol. 3: Chile and Rio de la Plata
John J. Tepaske and Herbert S. Klein, editors
Duke University Press, 1982
The Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America provides records of Spanish colonial treasuries of various New World administrative centers. In this volume, the fourth in the series, the authors have compiled quantitative date on the fiscal structure of the presidency of Quito that will be an invaluable source for reconstructing the economic, political, and social history of eighteenth-century Ecuador.
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Rubble
The Afterlife of Destruction
Gastón R. Gordillo
Duke University Press, 2014
At the foot of the Argentine Andes, bulldozers are destroying forests and homes to create soy fields in an area already strewn with rubble from previous waves of destruction and violence. Based on ethnographic research in this region where the mountains give way to the Gran Chaco lowlands, Gastón R. Gordillo shows how geographic space is inseparable from the material, historical, and affective ruptures embodied in debris. His exploration of the significance of rubble encompasses lost cities, derelict train stations, overgrown Jesuit missions and Spanish forts, stranded steamships, mass graves, and razed forests. Examining the effects of these and other forms of debris on the people living on nearby ranches and farms, and in towns, Gordillo emphasizes that for the rural poor, the rubble left in the wake of capitalist and imperialist endeavors is not romanticized ruin but the material manifestation of the violence and dislocation that created it.
 
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front cover of The Ruins of the New Argentina
The Ruins of the New Argentina
Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan after the 1944 Earthquake
Mark A. Healey
Duke University Press, 2011
In January 1944, an earthquake reduced the province of San Juan, Argentina, to rubble, leaving perhaps ten thousand dead and one hundred thousand homeless. In The Ruins of the New Argentina, Mark A. Healey argues that the disaster and the massive rebuilding project that followed transformed not only the province but also the nation. The earthquake was a shattering and galvanizing experience, an indictment of the old social order and an invitation to transform it. From the nation’s capital, an obscure colonel in a recently installed military regime launched a relief campaign and rapidly commissioned plans to rebuild the province, especially its capital city. The campaign was a rousing success, launching the public career of its director, Juan Domingo Perón, who would soon found a movement, reach the presidency, and transform the politics and social structure of the country. Dreaming and building the new city became the landmark project for a generation of modernist architects and planners, as well as an enduring challenge and controversy for local residents and the Peronist state. By exploring the struggle to rebuild, Healey shows how this destroyed province played a crucial role in forging, testing, and ultimately limiting the Peronist project of transforming the nation.
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front cover of The Rural State
The Rural State
Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru's Central Sierra
Javier Puente
University of Texas Press, 2022

2023 Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize, New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS)

A study of the intersection of rural populations, state formation, and the origins of political conflict in Peru.


On the eve of the twentieth century, Peru seemed like a profitable and yet fairly unexploited country. Both foreign capitalists and local state makers envisioned how remote highland areas were essential to a sustainable national economy. Mobilizing Andean populations lay at the core of this endeavor. In his groundbreaking book, The Rural State, Javier Puente uncovers the surprising and overlooked ways that Peru’s rural communities formed the political nation-state that still exists today.

Puente documents how people living in the Peruvian central sierra in the twentieth century confronted emerging and consolidating powers of state and capital and engaged in an ongoing struggle over increasingly elusive subsistence and autonomies. Over the years, policy, politics, and social turmoil shaped the rural, mountainous regions of Peru until violent unrest, perpetrated by the Shining Path and other revolutionary groups, unveiled the extent, limits, and fractures of a century-long process of rural state formation. Examining the conflicts between one rural community and the many iterations of statehood in the central sierra of Peru, The Rural State offers a fresh perspective on how the Andes became la sierra, how pueblos became comunidades, and how indígenas became campesinos.

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