1993 books match the query 'Latin America' and 12 start with j

cover of James G. Blaine and Latin America

James G. Blaine and Latin America

David Healy

University of Missouri Press, 2001

James G. Blaine was one of the leading national political figures of his day, and probably the most controversial. Intensely partisan, the dominant leader of the Republican Party, and a major shaper of national politics for more than a decade, Blaine is remembered chiefly for his role as architect of the post-Civil War GOP and his two periods as secretary of state. He also was the Republican presidential candidate in the notorious mud-slinging campaign of 1884. His foreign policy was marked by its activism, its focus on Latin America, and its attempt to increase U.S. influence there.

James G. Blaine and Latin America asserts that Latin America lay at the heart of Blaine's foreign policy and his vision for America. David Healy examines seven major issues that collectively defined the secretary of state's methods, goals, and views regarding Latin America and, more broadly, the international role of the United States. Healy places his explorations within the larger context of Blaine's ongoing role as a national party leader, his relations with the presidents under whom he served, and the responses of his predecessors and successors toward the issues at hand in Latin America.

The result is a deeper understanding of Blaine's ambitious vision for his country's international role, his energy and aggressiveness in moving to achieve that vision, and his effective efforts to transmit his worldview to the public. Blaine's emphasis on the importance of Latin America to the United States and his conviction that his country should be a world power influenced a new generation of leaders who, at the end of the century, would go beyond his goals and usher in a new era.

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cover of Japanese Brazilian Saudades: Diasporic Identities and Cultural Production

Japanese Brazilian Saudades

Diasporic Identities and Cultural Production

Ignacio López-Calvo

University Press of Colorado, 2019

Japanese Brazilian Saudades explores the self-definition of Nikkei discourse in Portuguese-language cultural production by Brazilian authors of Japanese ancestry. Ignacio López-Calvo uses books and films by twentieth-century Nikkei authors as case studies to redefine the ideas of Brazilianness and Japaneseness from both a national and a transnational perspective. The result suggests an alternative model of postcoloniality, particularly as it pertains to the post–World War II experience of Nikkei people in Brazil.
 
López-Calvo addresses the complex creation of Japanese Brazilian identities and the history of immigration, showing how the community has used writing as a form of reconciliation and affirmation of their competing identities as Japanese, Brazilian, and Japanese Brazilian. Japanese in Brazil have employed a twofold strategic, rhetorical engineering: the affirmation of ethno-cultural difference on the one hand, and the collective assertion of citizenship and belonging to the Brazilian nation on the other. López-Calvo also grapples with the community’s inclusion and exclusion in Brazilian history and literature, using the concept of “epistemicide” to refer to the government’s attempt to impose a Western value system, Brazilian culture, and Portuguese language on the Nikkeijin, while at the same time trying to destroy Japanese language and culture in Brazil by prohibiting Japanese language instruction in schools, Japanese-language publications, and even speaking Japanese in public.
 
Japanese Brazilian Saudades contributes to the literature criticizing the “cognitive injustice” that fails to acknowledge the value of the global South and non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world. With important implications for both Latin American studies and Nikkei studies, it expands discourses of race, ethnicity, nationality, and communal belonging through art and narrative.
 
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cover of Jarano

Jarano

By Ramón Beteta

University of Texas Press, 1970

Ramón Beteta was an important figure in Mexican life: politician, Cabinet member, diplomat, economist, professor, journalist. The manuscript of Jarano was found among his papers after his death in 1965 and was published in Mexico in 1966. "Jarano," the kind of broad sombrero worn by charros, was the secret nickname—partly disrespectful, partly amused, partly affectionate—which Ramón and his brother gave to their father. Except for part of the last chapter, the book is about Ramón's childhood and youth: sketches of family life, school experiences, a trip to Veracruz, and incidents of the Revolution.

Beteta brought to these reminiscences the skills of the short story writer, making superb use of dialogue, descriptive details, characterization, and mood. For a small book, the range of emotions is unusually wide, from the comedy of an evening meal to which Jarano has come home drunk to the tragedy of the indio and his wife in the chapter entitled "San Vicente Chicoloapan"—a chapter that gives more of the "feel" of the Revolution than do many longer works.

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cover of Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists, and the End of Slavery in Brazil: Correspondence 1880-1905

Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists, and the End of Slavery in Brazil

Correspondence 1880-1905

Edited by Leslie Bethell and Murilo De Carvalho

University of London Press, 2009

A little-studied aspect of the struggle to abolish slavery in Brazil in the 1880s is the relationship between Joaquim Nabuco, the leading Brazilian abolitionist, and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London. The correspondence between Nabuco and Charles Harris Allen, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, and other British abolitionists throughout the decade and beyond reveals a partnership consciously sought by Nabuco in order to internationalize the struggle. These letters provide a unique insight into the evolution of Nabuco's thinking on both slavery and abolition. At the same time, they offer a running commentary on the slow and (at least until 1887-88) uncertain progress of the abolitionist cause in Brazil.
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cover of José Martí's Our America: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies

José Martí's Our America

From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies

Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández, eds.

Duke University Press, 1998

Considerable attention has been given to Cuban poet, essayist, and activist José Martí’s 1891 essay “Nuestra América,” but relatively little has been paid to the rest of the journalistic work that Martí produced during his fourteen-year exile in the United States. In José Martí’s Our America, Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández present essays from Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S.-based scholars who consider Martí’s rich and underexplored body of work and position Martí as an emblem of New American studies.
A Cuban exile from 1881 to 1895, Martí was a correspondent writing in New York for various Latin American newspapers. Grasping the significance of rising U.S. imperial power, he came to understand the Americas as a complex system of kindred—but not equal—national formations whose cultural and political integrity was threatened by the overbearing aggressiveness of the United States. This collection explores how in his journalistic work Martí critiques U.S. racism, imperialism, and capitalism; warns Latin America of impending U.S. geographical, cultural, and economic annexation; and calls for recognition of the diversity of America’s cultural voices. Reinforcing Martí’s hemispheric vision with essays by a wide range of scholars who investigate his analysis of the United States, his significance as a Latino outsider, and his analyses of Latin American cultural politics, this volume explores the affinities between Martí’s thought and current reexaminations of what it means to study America.
José Martí’s Our America offers a new understanding of Martí’s ambiguous and problematic relation with the United States and will engage scholars and students in American, Latin American, and Latino studies as well as those interested in cultural, postcolonial, gender, and ethnic studies.

Contributors. Jeffrey Belnap, Raúl Fernández, Ada Ferrer, Susan Gillman, George Lipsitz, Oscar Martí, David Noble, Donald E. Pease, Beatrice Pita, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Susana Rotker, José David Saldívar, Rosaura Sánchez, Enrico Mario Santí, Doris Sommer, Brook Thomas

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cover of José Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race

José Vasconcelos

The Prophet of Race

Stavans, Ilan

Rutgers University Press, 2011

Mexican educator and thinker Jose Vasconcelos is to Latinos what W.E.B. Du Bois is to African Americans a controversial scholar who fostered an alternative view of the future. In Josè Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race, his influential 1925 essay, "Mestizaje" key to understanding the role he played in the shaping of multiethnic America—is for the first time showcased and properly analyzed. Freshly translated here by John H. R. Polt, "Mestizaje" suggested that the Brown Race from Latin America was called to dominate the world, a thesis embraced by activists and scholars north and south of the Rio Grande. Ilan Stavans insightfully and comprehensively examines the essay in biographical and historical context, and considers how many in the United States, especially Chicanos during the civil rights era, used it as a platform for their political agenda. The volume also includes Vasconcelos's long-forgotten 1926 Harris Foundation Lecture at the University of Chicago, "The Race Problem in Latin America," where he cautioned the United States that rejecting mestizaje in our own midst will ultimately bankrupt the nation.
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cover of José de Bustamante and Central American Independence: Colonial Administration in an Age of Imperial Crisis

José de Bustamante and Central American Independence

Colonial Administration in an Age of Imperial Crisis

Timothy Hawkins

University of Alabama Press, 2004

Reassessing the colonial official at the center of Central America's turbulent path to independence.

Latin American independence histories of the last 150 years have tended to stereotype Captain General Bustamante, governor of the Spanish colony of Guatemala from 1811 to 1818, as a tyrannical arch-villain who personified colonial oppression. Timothy Hawkins, in contrast, examines Bustamante and his administration within the context of preservation of empire, the effort by colonial officials and partisans to maintain the integrity of the Spanish empire in spite of internal and external unrest.

Based on extensive primary research in the archives of Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain, Hawkins’s approach links the Central American experience to that of areas such as Peru, Venezuela, and Mexico, that also responded equivocally and haphazardly to rebellious uprisings against colonial rule. While conceding that Bustamante’s role in the suppression of unrest turned him into one of the more controversial figures in Latin American history, Hawkins argues that the Bustamante administration should not be seen as an isolated and perverse case of Spanish repression but as an example of a relatively successful, if short lived, campaign by Spain to preserve its empire.

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cover of Journey without End: Migration from the Global South through the Americas

Journey without End

Migration from the Global South through the Americas

Rob Curran and Andrew Nelson

Vanderbilt University Press, 2022

Journey without End chronicles the years-long journey of "extracontinentales"—African and South Asian migrants moving through Latin America toward the United States. Based on five years of collaborative research between a journalist and an anthropologist, this book makes an engrossing, sometimes surreal, narrative-driven critique of how state-level immigration policy fails extracontinental migrants.

The book begins with Kidane, an Eritrean migrant who has left his pregnant wife behind to make the four-year trip to North America; it then picks up the natural disaster–riddled voyage of Roshan and Kamala Dhakal from Nepal to Ecuador; and it continues to the trials of Cameroonian exile Jane Mtebe, who becomes trapped in a bizarre beachside resort town on the edge of the Darién Gap—the gateway from South to Central America.

Journey without End follows these migrants as their fitful voyages put them in a semi-permanent state of legal and existential liminality. Mercurial policy creates profit opportunities that transform migration bottlenecks—Quito's tourist district, a Colombian beachside resort, Panama's Darién Gap, and a Mexican border town—into spontaneous migration-oriented spaces rife with racial, gender, and class exploitation. Throughout this struggle, migrant solidarity allows for occasional glimpses of subaltern cosmopolitanism and the possibility of mobile futures.
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cover of Juan Gregorio Palechor: The Story of My Life

Juan Gregorio Palechor

The Story of My Life

Myriam Jimeno Translated by Andy Klatt

Duke University Press, 2014

The Colombian activist Juan Gregorio Palechor (1923–1992) dedicated his life to championing indigenous rights in Cauca, a department in the southwest of Colombia, where he helped found the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca. Recounting his life story in collaboration with the Colombian anthropologist Myriam Jimeno, Palechor traces his political awakening, his experiences in national politics, the disillusionment that resulted, and his turn to a more radical activism aimed at confronting ethnic discrimination and fighting for indigenous territorial and political sovereignty.

Palechor's lively memoir is complemented by Jimeno's reflections on autobiography as an anthropological tool and on the oppressive social and political conditions faced by Colombia's indigenous peoples. A faithful and fluent transcription of Palechor's life story, this work is a uniquely valuable resource for understanding the contemporary indigenous rights movements in Colombia.
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cover of Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint

Juan Soldado

Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint

Paul J. Vanderwood

Duke University Press, 2004

Paul J. Vanderwood offers a fascinating look at the events, beliefs, and circumstances that have motivated popular devotion to Juan Soldado, a Mexican folk saint. In his mortal incarnation, Juan Soldado was Juan Castillo Morales, a twenty-four-year-old soldier convicted of and quickly executed for the rape and murder of eight-year-old Olga Camacho in Tijuana in 1938. Immediately after Morales’s death, many people began to doubt the evidence of his guilt, or at least the justice of his brutal execution. People reported seeing blood seeping from his grave and hearing his soul cry out protesting his innocence. Soon the “martyred” Morales was known as Juan Soldado, or John the Soldier. Believing that those who have died unjustly sit closest to God, people began visiting Morales’s grave asking for favors. Within months of his death, the young soldier had become a popular saint. He is not recognized by the Catholic Church, yet thousands of people have made pilgrimages to his gravesite. While Juan Soldado is well known in Tijuana, southern California’s Mexican American community, and beyond, this book is the first to situate his story within a broader exploration of how and why popular canonizations such as his take root and flourish.

In addition to conducting extensive archival research, Vanderwood interviewed central actors in the events of 1938, including Olga Camacho’s mother, citizens who rioted to demand Morales’s release to a lynch mob, those who witnessed his execution, and some of the earliest believers in his miraculous powers. Vanderwood also interviewed many present-day visitors to the shrine at Morales’s grave. He describes them, their petitions—for favors such as health, a good marriage, or safe passage into the United States—and how they reconcile their belief in Juan Soldado with their Catholicism. Vanderwood puts the events of 1938 within the context of Depression-era Tijuana and he locates people’s devotion, then and now, within the history of extra-institutional religious activity. In Juan Soldado, a gripping true-crime mystery opens up into a much larger and more elusive mystery of faith and belief.

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cover of Judge and Jury in Imperial Brazil, 1808–1871: Social Control and Political Stability in the New State

Judge and Jury in Imperial Brazil, 1808–1871

Social Control and Political Stability in the New State

By Thomas Flory

University of Texas Press, 1981

In nineteenth-century Brazil the power of the courts rivaled that of the central government, bringing to it during its first half century of independence a stability unique in Latin America. Thomas Flory analyzes the Brazilian lower-court system, where the private interests of society and the public interests of the state intersected.

Justices of the peace—lay judges elected at the parish level—played a special role in the early years of independence, for the post represented the triumph of Brazilian liberalism’s commitment to localism and decentralization. However, as Flory shows by tracing the social history and performance of parish judges, the institution actually intensified conflict within parishes to the point of destabilizing the local regime and proved to be so independent of national interests that it all but destroyed the state.

By the 1840s the powers of the office were passed to state appointees, particularly the district judges. Flory recognizes these professional magistrates as a new elite who served as brokers between the state and the poorly articulated landowner elite, and his account of their rise reveals the mechanisms of state integration.

In focusing on the judiciary, Flory has isolated a crucial aspect of Brazil’s early history, one with broad implications for the study of nineteenth-century Latin America as a whole. He combines social, intellectual, and political perspectives—as well as national-level discussion with scrutiny of parish-level implementation—and so makes sense of a complicated, little-studied period. The study clearly shows the progression of Brazilian social thought from a serene liberal faith in the people as a nation to an abiding, very modern distrust of that nation as a threat to the state.

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cover of Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill

Jungle Laboratories

Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill

Gabriela Soto Laveaga

Duke University Press, 2009

In the 1940s chemists discovered that barbasco, a wild yam indigenous to Mexico, could be used to mass-produce synthetic steroid hormones. Barbasco spurred the development of new drugs, including cortisone and the first viable oral contraceptives, and positioned Mexico as a major player in the global pharmaceutical industry. Yet few people today are aware of Mexico’s role in achieving these advances in modern medicine. In Jungle Laboratories, Gabriela Soto Laveaga reconstructs the story of how rural yam pickers, international pharmaceutical companies, and the Mexican state collaborated and collided over the barbasco. By so doing, she sheds important light on a crucial period in Mexican history and challenges us to reconsider who can produce science.

Soto Laveaga traces the political, economic, and scientific development of the global barbasco industry from its emergence in the 1940s, through its appropriation by a populist Mexican state in 1970, to its obsolescence in the mid-1990s. She focuses primarily on the rural southern region of Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, where the yam grew most freely and where scientists relied on local, indigenous knowledge to cultivate and harvest the plant. Rural Mexicans, at first unaware of the pharmaceutical and financial value of barbasco, later acquired and deployed scientific knowledge to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies, lobby the Mexican government, and ultimately transform how urban Mexicans perceived them. By illuminating how the yam made its way from the jungles of Mexico, to domestic and foreign scientific laboratories where it was transformed into pills, to the medicine cabinets of millions of women across the globe, Jungle Laboratories urges us to recognize the ways that Mexican peasants attained social and political legitimacy in the twentieth century, and positions Latin America as a major producer of scientific knowledge.

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