Ann Miles has been chronicling life in the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca for more than thirty years. In that time, she has witnessed change after change. A large regional capital where modern trains whisk residents past historic plazas, Cuenca has invited in the world and watched as its own citizens risk undocumented migration abroad. Families have arrived from rural towns only to then be displaced from the gentrifying city center. Over time, children have been educated, streetlights have made neighborhoods safer, and remittances from overseas have helped build new homes and sometimes torn people apart. Roads now connect people who once were far away, and talking or texting on cell phones has replaced hanging out at the corner store.

Unraveling Time traces the enduring consequences of political and social movements, transnational migration, and economic development in Cuenca. Miles reckons with details that often escape less committed observers, suggesting that we learn a good deal more when we look back on whole lives. Practicing what she calls an ethnography of accrual, Miles takes a long view, where decades of seemingly disparate experiences coalesce into cultural transformation. Her approach not only reveals what change has meant in a major Latin American city but also serves as a reflection on ethnography itself.

… I offer my life in a holocaust … This people whose slave I was will no longer be slave to anyone. My sacrifice will remain forever in their souls and my blood will be the price of their ransom.

President Getulio Vargas' testament—written shortly before his suicide on August 24, 1954—was prophetic, for the Vargas legacy was to cast a shadow on political-military events of the next decade.

With news of Vargas' suicide, opponents of the late President, who were usually out of power, tried to organize. The military itself was split, but those favoring Kubitschek, apparent winner of the 1955 presidential election on a ticket of Vargas-created parties, gained control. To assure Kubitschek's inauguration Army leaders deposed two acting Presidents in 1955.

During Kubitschek's presidency (1956–1961 ) there were manifestations of discontent by military and political groups who ascribed numerous evils to Vargas and his followers.

In 1961, when Kubitschek's successor, Jânio Quadros, resigned after six months in office, the unrest intensified. Vice President Jango Goulart assumed the presidency and sought unsuccessfully to conciliate contending forces; his battle for reform seemed to make him an ally of "far leftists." Feeling that discipline was being undermined by men close to the President and that only military action could save Brazil from following the path favored by influential Communist labor leaders, a majority of the Army officers agreed to overthrow Goulart's administration in 1964.

Unrest in Brazil describes in exciting detail the government crises and resulting military interventions that punctuated the power struggle between supporters and opponents of Vargas in the decade following his death.

The Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path launched its violent campaign against the government in Peru’s Ayacucho region in 1980. When the military and counterinsurgency police forces were dispatched to oppose the insurrection, the violence quickly escalated. The peasant community of Sarhua was at the epicenter of the conflict, and this small village is the focus of Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes. There, nearly a decade after the event, Olga M. González follows the tangled thread of a public secret: the disappearance of Narciso Huicho, the man blamed for plunging Sarhua into a conflict that would sunder the community for years.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a novel use of a cycle of paintings, González examines the relationship between secrecy and memory. Her attention to the gaps and silences within both the Sarhuinos’ oral histories and the paintings reveals the pervasive reality of secrecy for people who have endured episodes of intense violence. González conveys how public secrets turn the process of unmasking into a complex mode of truth telling. Ultimately, public secrecy is an intricate way of “remembering to forget” that establishes a normative truth that makes life livable in the aftermath of a civil war.

In this remarkable story of one man’s encounter with an indigenous people of Peru, Michael Brown guides his readers upriver into a contested zone of the Amazonian frontier, where more than 50,000 Awajún—renowned for their pugnacity and fierce independence—remain determined, against long odds, to live life on their own terms.

When Brown took up residence with the Awajún in 1976, he knew little about them other than their ancestors’ reputation as fearsome headhunters. The fledgling anthropologist was immediately impressed by his hosts’ vivacity and resourcefulness. But eventually his investigations led him into darker corners of a world where murderous vendettas, fear of sorcery, and a shocking incidence of suicide were still common. Peru’s Shining Path insurgency in the 1980s forced Brown to refocus his work elsewhere. Revisiting his field notes decades later, now with an older man’s understanding of life’s fragility, Brown saw a different story: a tribal society trying, and sometimes failing, to maintain order in the face of an expanding capitalist frontier. Curious about how the Awajún were faring, Brown returned to the site in 2012, where he found a people whose combative self-confidence had led them to the forefront of South America’s struggle for indigenous rights.

Written with insight, sensitivity, and humor, Upriver paints a vivid picture of a rapidly growing population that is refashioning its warrior tradition for the twenty-first century. Embracing literacy and digital technology, the Awajún are using hard-won political savvy to defend their rainforest home and right of self-determination.

This book presents the first authoritative and comprehensive account of the development of the Peruvian revolution of 1968. The study resulted from a team experiment in applied political science, economics, and sociology that maintained effective communications between Peru and the United States at many levels during the difficult years following the revolution. Each chapter is the result of continuous interaction between a leading authority and the major sectors of both societies. History is here presented in its diplomatic, social, economic, and cultural context.

The Peruvian and U.S. governments helped to define the subjects of greatest interest to their respective countries, and a systematic effort was made to find the leading authorities on each issue. Since one purpose of this volume is to affect policy by identifying new alternative policies, the papers included here were prepared specifically to be of value to policy makers.

This book was produced by a citizens’ constituency on U.S. foreign policy under the auspices of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs, the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, and the Johnson Foundation.