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In Blood and Boundaries, Stuart B. Schwartz takes us to late medieval Latin America to show how Spain and Portugal’s policies of exclusion and discrimination based on religious origins and genealogy were transferred to their colonies in Latin America. Rather than concentrating on the three principal divisions of colonial society—Indians, Europeans, and people of African origins—as is common in studies of these colonial societies, Schwartz examines the three minority groups of moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Muslim and Jewish converts and their descendants, he shows, posed a special problem for colonial society: they were feared and distrusted as peoples considered ethnically distinct, but at the same time their conversion to Christianity seemed to violate stable social categories and identities. This led to the creation of “cleanliness of blood” regulations that explicitly discriminated against converts. Eventually, Schwartz shows, those regulations were extended to control the subject indigenous and enslaved African populations, and over time, applied to the growing numbers of mestizos, peoples of mixed ethnic origins. Despite the efforts of civil and church and state institutions to regulate, denigrate, and exclude, members of these affected groups often found legal and practical means to ignore, circumvent, or challenge the efforts to categorize and exclude them, creating in the process the dynamic societies of Latin America that emerged in the nineteenth century.

Conflicts over subterranean resources, particularly tin, oil, and natural gas, have driven Bolivian politics for nearly a century. “Resource nationalism”—the conviction that resource wealth should be used for the benefit of the “nation”—has often united otherwise disparate groups, including mineworkers, urban workers, students, war veterans, and middle-class professionals, and propelled an indigenous union leader, Evo Morales, into the presidency in 2006. Blood of the Earth reexamines the Bolivian mobilization around resource nationalism that began in the 1920s, crystallized with the 1952 revolution, and continues into the twenty-first century.

Drawing on a wide array of Bolivian and US sources, Kevin A. Young reveals that Bolivia became a key site in a global battle among economic models, with grassroots coalitions demanding nationalist and egalitarian alternatives to market capitalism. While US-supported moderates within the revolutionary regime were able to defeat more radical forces, Young shows how the political culture of resource nationalism, though often comprising contradictory elements, constrained government actions and galvanized mobilizations against neoliberalism in later decades. His transnational and multilevel approach to the 1952 revolution illuminates the struggles among Bolivian popular sectors, government officials, and foreign powers, as well as the competing currents and visions within Bolivia’s popular political cultures. Offering a fresh appraisal of the Bolivian Revolution, resource nationalism, and the Cold War in Latin America, Blood of the Earth is an ideal case study for understanding the challenges shared by countries across the Global South.

Upends current thinking about how early modern people started to conceptualize human beings in terms of populations.
 
Bloody Numbers is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies, where traders, financiers, officials, surgeons, notaries, ship captains, and others began thinking about human bodies as aggregate populations understood through numbers: measurements, averages, and calculations of risk and value assessed through the tabulation of heights, weights, tumors, scars, and other characteristics. Pablo F. Gómez explores how figures within the world of slave trading used this model for understanding human bodies to generalize about behavior and disease in ways that foreshadowed the work of modern epidemiologists and public health officials—though they employed their calculations with the aim of protecting their financial interests rather than of caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks.

A pathbreaking work, Bloody Numbers reveals the historical actions that rendered populations quantifiable. In doing so, it shows that confronting these origins is essential to understanding the violent political, legal, economic, and scientific practices that ascribe numbers to our own bodies.

The overthrow of Spanish rule and the birth of new republican governments in northern South America at the beginning of the nineteenth century were in large part the work of one man—Simón Bolívar. Bolívar was not only the soldier who built a patriot army from a small band of exiles and led them victoriously across Venezuela and down the spine of the Andes as far as Potosí; he was also the statesman who framed the new republics that sprang to life after the defeat of the Spanish and who called the Congress of Panama in hopes of making real his dream of uniting all the South American republics in a single confederation. He was truly the Liberator.

 The Narración, or narrative, of the Memorias of Daniel Florencio O’Leary has long been recognized by Spanish American scholars as one of the most important historical sources for a major part of Bolívar’s life. O’Leary took an active part in the wars for independence, first as a young officer, recruited in the British Isles to aid the patriot cause, and later as Bolívar’s chief aide, often entrusted with diplomatic missions. His firsthand knowledge of the stirring events of the period, his access to relevant documents, and his close association with the major figures in the struggle, as well as his friendship with Bolívar, made O’Leary a particularly valuable chronicler and biographer. Bolívar himself, shortly before his death, requested that O’Leary write the story of his life.

 O’Leary’s meticulous attention to military and diplomatic maneuvers and his keen, sometimes acrid, comments on both men and events give the reader not only a vivid portrait of Bolívar—the man and his achievements—but also a remarkable insight into O’Leary’s own position as an autocratic-minded participant in the wars for independence. Although O’Leary’s devotion to, and admiration for, his Chief make for an occasionally partisan view, his stark account of the hardships and disappointments that Bolívar and his armies overcame against almost impossible odds does much to balance the narrative.

 In his abridged translation, Robert McNerney has omitted the Apéndice, documents that O’Leary, had he lived, undoubtedly would have used as the source for completing his account of Bolívar’s life. Numerous letters and documents scattered through the original text also have been omitted, leaving a highly readable narrative.

“We were trying to change the vision and the conversation about border fears.”

Border Odyssey takes us on a drive toward understanding the U.S./Mexico divide: all 1,969 miles—from Boca Chica to Tijuana—pressing on with the useful fiction of a map.

“We needed to go to the place where countless innocent people had been kicked, cussed, spit on, arrested, detained, trafficked, and killed. It would become clear that the border, la frontera, was more multifaceted and profound than anything we could have invented about it from afar.”

Along the journey, five centuries of cultural history (indigenous, French, Spanish, Mexican, African American, colonist, and U.S.), wars, and legislation unfold. And through observation, conversation, and meditation, Border Odyssey scopes the stories of the people and towns on both sides.

“Stories are the opposite of walls: they demand release, retelling, showing, connecting, each image chipping away at boundaries. Walls are full stops. But stories are like commas, always making possible the next clause.”

Among the terrain traversed: walls and more walls, unexpected roadblocks and patrol officers; a golf course (you could drive a ball across the border); a Civil War battlefield (you could camp there); the southernmost plantation in the United States; a hand-drawn ferry, a road-runner tracked desert, and a breathtaking national park; barbed wire, bridges, and a trucking-trade thoroughfare; ghosts with guns; obscured, unmarked, and unpaved roads; a Catholic priest and his dogs, artwork, icons, and political cartoons; a sheriff and a chain-smoking mayor; a Tex-Mex eatery empty of customers and a B&B shuttering its doors; murder-laden newspaper headlines at breakfast; the kindness of the border-crossing underground; and too many elderly, impoverished, ex-U.S. farmworkers, braceros, lined up to have Thompson take their photograph.

2022 Americo Paredes Award, Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College

A historical exploration of the worlds and healing practices of two curanderos (faith healers) who attracted thousands, rallied their communities, and challenged institutional powers.

Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo were curanderos—faith healers—who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, worked outside the realm of "professional medicine," seemingly beyond the reach of the church, state, or certified health practitioners whose profession was still in its infancy. Urrea healed Mexicans, Indigenous people, and Anglos in northwestern Mexico and cities throughout the US Southwest, while Jaramillo conducted his healing practice in the South Texas Rio Grande Valley, healing Tejanos, Mexicans, and Indigenous people there. Jennifer Koshatka Seman takes us inside the intimate worlds of both "living saints," demonstrating how their effective healing—curanderismo—made them part of the larger turn-of-the century worlds they lived in as they attracted thousands of followers, validated folk practices, and contributed to a modernizing world along the US-Mexico border.

While she healed, Urrea spoke of a Mexico in which one did not have to obey unjust laws or confess one's sins to Catholic priests. Jaramillo restored and fed drought-stricken Tejanos when the state and modern medicine could not meet their needs. Then, in 1890, Urrea was expelled from Mexico. Within a decade, Jaramillo was investigated as a fraud by the American Medical Association and the US Post Office. Borderlands Curanderos argues that it is not only state and professional institutions that build and maintain communities, nations, and national identities but also those less obviously powerful.

Common understandings drawn from biblical references, literature, and art portray deserts as barren places that are far from God and spiritual sustenance. In our own time, attention focuses on the rigors of climate change in arid lands and the perils of the desert in the northern Mexican borderlands for migrants seeking shelter and a new life.

Bountiful Deserts foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, for whom the desert was anything but barren or empty. Instead, they nurtured and harvested the desert as a bountiful and sacred space. Drawing together historical texts and oral testimonies, archaeology, and natural history, author Cynthia Radding develops the relationships between people and plants and the ways that Indigenous people sustained their worlds before European contact through the changes set in motion by Spanish encounters, highlighting the long process of colonial conflicts and adaptations over more than two centuries. This work reveals the spiritual power of deserts by weaving together the cultural practices of historical peoples and contemporary living communities, centered especially on the Yaqui/Yoeme and Mayo/Yoreme.

Radding uses the tools of history, anthropology, geography, and ecology to paint an expansive picture of Indigenous worlds before and during colonial encounters. She re-creates the Indigenous worlds in both their spiritual and material realms, bringing together the analytical dimension of scientific research and the wisdom of oral traditions in its exploration of different kinds of knowledge about the natural world.

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

The first comprehensive cultural history of Brazil to be written in English, Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present captures the role of the artistic imaginary in shaping Brazil's national identity. Analyzing representations of Brazil throughout the world, this ambitious survey demonstrates the ways in which life in one of the world's largest nations has been conceived and revised in visual arts, literature, film, and a variety of other media.

Beginning with the first explorations of Brazil by the Portuguese, Darlene J. Sadlier incorporates extensive source material, including paintings, historiographies, letters, poetry, novels, architecture, and mass media to trace the nation's shifting sense of its own history. Topics include the oscillating themes of Edenic and cannibal encounters, Dutch representations of Brazil, regal constructs, the literary imaginary, Modernist utopias, "good neighbor" protocols, and filmmakers' revolutionary and dystopian images of Brazil. A magnificent panoramic study of race, imperialism, natural resources, and other themes in the Brazilian experience, this landmark work is a boon to the field.

Portugal extracted wealth from its Brazilian colony. Slaves--first indigenous peoples, later Africans--mined its ore and cut its sugarcane. From the customs of the colonists and the aspirations of the enslaved rose Brazil. Bosi scrutinizes signal points in the creation of Brazilian culture--the plays and poetry, the sermons of missionaries and Jesuit priests, the Indian novels of José de Alencar and the Voices of Africa of poet Castro Alves. His portrait of the country's response to the pressures of colonial conformity offers a groundbreaking appraisal of Brazilian culture as it emerged from the tensions between imposed colonial control and the African and Amerindian cults--including the Catholic-influenced ones--that resisted it.

When the Brazilian military overthrew President João Goulart in 1964, American diplomats characterized the coup as a "100 percent Brazilian movement." It has since become apparent, largely through government documents declassified during the course of research for this book, that the United States had an invisible but pervasive part in the coup.

Relying principally on documents from the Johnson and Kennedy presidential libraries, Phyllis Parker unravels the events of the coup in fascinating detail. The evidence she presents is corroborated by interviews with key participants.

U.S. interference in the Goulart regime began when normal diplomatic pressure failed to produce the desired enthusiasm from him for the Alliance of Progress. Political and economic manipulations also proving ineffective, the United States stood ready to back a military takeover of Brazil's constitutional democracy.

U.S. operation "Brother Sam" involved shipments of petroleum, a naval task force, and tons of arms and ammunition in preparation for intervention during the 1964 coup. When the Brazilian military gained control without calling on the ready assistance, U.S. policy makers immediately accorded recognition to the new government and set in motion plans for economic support.

Has the world economy shaped and defined Brazil’s economic and political history and, if so, to what extent? Is Brazil’s past to be explained principally by its insertion in a single world capitalist system? The authors of the three essays in this volume reflect critically on these questions along with the following: Should the determining factors be understood as sociological-cultural (as in a heritage of patrimonial rule) or were they based on material reality? What was the connection between the presence of slavery in the Americas and the emergence of capitalism in Europe? What accounts for Brazil’s centuries-long reliance on exports and the slow development of its industry?

The chapters in this book draw contrasting judgments on virtually every major issue in Brazilian history because they begin from divergent premises. In arguing their cause, noted scholars John R. Hall, Fernando A. Novais, and Luís Carlos Soares provide a formidable intellectual point and counterpoint whose theoretical assumptions bear heavily on all social scientists engaged in exploring colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, dependency, and relative international poverty.

Brazil and the World System provides provocative insights not only about Brazil but also about the nature of colonialism in general and its relationship to the rise of capitalism in Europe. It should appeal to Latin Americanists of all disciplinary persuasions as well as to general readers curious about great patterns of change in history. Stuart Schwartz, director of the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota, says, “ . . . an excellent collection . . . North American scholarship will find these essays an eye-opener.

The Brazilian Communist Party was one of the largest Communist parties in Latin America until its split and dissolution in the 1990s. Although not granted legal status as a political party of Brazil until 1985, the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB) has been tolerated by that country's regime.

Such governmental tolerance of the PCB was not always the case. In the past, the regime of Getúlio Vargas practiced savage forms of repression against Brazilian leftists, whose "Red extremism" was cited by both government leaders and the press as sufficient cause for Vargas' adoption of the most extreme measures.

Brazilian Communism, 1935–1945 is an objective and remarkably comprehensive account of the Brazilian Communist Party's struggle to survive those days of repression.

From his prison cell, PCB leader Luís Carlos Prestes guided the Party's quarreling factions. All who were associated with the Left shared a common enemy: the police, who used the most brutal forms of torture to extract information about leftist activities. Young Elza Fernandes, companion of the PCB's secretary general, was one whom the police interrogated. Suspecting that she had betrayed them, the Party itself arranged her murder.

Dulles' vivid account of this violent chapter in Latin American history is based on exclusive interviews with leading activists of the period and exhaustive research in the archives of both the PCB and the Brazilian police. The results make fascinating reading for Latin Americanists, historians of World War II, and students of international Communism alike.

At most recent count, there are no fewer than forty-five women in Brazil directing or codirecting feature-length fiction or documentary films. In the early 1990s, women filmmakers in Brazil were credited for being at the forefront of the rebirth of filmmaking, or retomada, after the abolition of the state film agency and subsequent standstill of film production. Despite their numbers and success, films by Brazilian women directors are generally absent from discussions of Latin American film and published scholarly works.

During the nineteenth century, British-owned railways grew under the protection of an Argentine ruling elite that considered railways both instruments and symbols of progress. Under this program of support for foreign enterprise, Argentina had by 1914 built the largest railway network in Latin America.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the railways were successful in following a policy of calculated disregard for Argentine interests in general. However, following the end of World War I, the British economic empire began to decline and Argentine economic nationalism grew. A number of popularistic political movements incorporated economic nationalism into their platforms, and even among the ruling elite there were signs of increasing nationalistic sentiment.

Although most studies of economic nationalism have emphasized the importance of the middle-class Radical party in the rise of xenophobia, Winthrop R. Wright's study shows that antiforeign economic nationalism was not entirely a reaction to the conservative elite. Between 1932 and 1938 the nationalistic programs of General Agustin Justo's government—basically a conservative regime—led the British interests to decide to sell their holdings. The British govemment had arrived at a position of supporting the economic withdrawal of the large British-owned firms long before Juan D. Perón appeared on the political scene.

Perón combined traditional Argentine economic nationalism with his own scheme to gain power over all elements in Argentina. His solution to the railway problem, although more dramatically executed, did not differ greatly from that of the conservative Justo. Perón purchased the railways outright in 1947–1948, but his use of nationalism was in reality covering his own inability to outbargain Britain and the United States following the conclusion of World War II.

During the 1980s war in El Salvador, Radio Venceremos was the main news outlet for the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), the guerrilla organization that challenged the government. The broadcast provided a vital link between combatants in the mountains and the outside world, as well as an alternative to mainstream media reporting. In this first-person account, "Santiago," the legend behind Radio Venceremos, tells the story of the early years of that conflict, a rebellion of poor peasants against the Salvadoran government and its benefactor, the United States.

Originally published as La Terquedad del Izote, this memoir also addresses the broader story of a nationwide rebellion and its international context, particularly the intensifying Cold War and heavy U.S. involvement in it under President Reagan. By the war's end in 1992, more than 75,000 were dead and 350,000 wounded—in a country the size of Massachusetts. Although outnumbered and outfinanced, the rebels fought the Salvadoran Army to a draw and brought enough bargaining power to the negotiating table to achieve some of their key objectives, including democratic reforms and an overhaul of the security forces.

Broadcasting the Civil War in El Salvador is a riveting account from the rebels' point of view that lends immediacy to the Salvadoran conflict. It should appeal to all who are interested in historic memory and human rights, U.S. policy toward Central America, and the role the media can play in wartime.

As Spain consolidated its Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, discourses about the perfect Spanish man or "Vir" went hand-in-hand with discourses about another kind of man, one who engaged in the "abominable crime and sin against nature"—sodomy. In both Spain and Mexico, sodomy came to rank second only to heresy as a cause for prosecution, and hundreds of sodomites were tortured, garroted, or burned alive for violating Spanish ideals of manliness. Yet in reality, as Federico Garza Carvajal argues in this groundbreaking book, the prosecution of sodomites had little to do with issues of gender and was much more a concomitant of empire building and the need to justify political and economic domination of subject peoples.

Drawing on previously unpublished records of some three hundred sodomy trials conducted in Spain and Mexico between 1561 and 1699, Garza Carvajal examines the sodomy discourses that emerged in Andalucía, seat of Spain's colonial apparatus, and in the viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico), its first and largest American colony. From these discourses, he convincingly demonstrates that the concept of sodomy (more than the actual practice) was crucial to the Iberian colonizing program. Because sodomy opposed the ideal of "Vir" and the Spanish nationhood with which it was intimately associated, the prosecution of sodomy justified Spain's domination of foreigners (many of whom were represented as sodomites) in the peninsula and of "Indios" in Mexico, a totally subject people depicted as effeminate and prone to sodomitical acts, cannibalism, and inebriation.