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Analyzing how Peruvian feminist art and activism subverts and reclaims the chola stereotype to confront colonial and patriarchal institutions.

Indigenous Andean women have long been derided in Peru, spurned by colonial and then national elites as depraved cholas. Olga Rodriguez-Ulloa shows how contemporary artists and activists not only reclaim this term of abuse but also mobilize the stereotype of the angry and perverted chola to confront the cruelties of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy.

Sadistic Cholas examines music, visual arts, literature, and grassroots organizing by self-identified cholas—in particular, Black women and trans and queer feminists. Under colonial domination, cholas were destined for sexual coercion, labor extraction, and reproductive exploitation. While exhuming historical traces of chola resistance, Rodriguez-Ulloa argues that this condition of oppression persisted through the internal war of the 1980s, when Marxist women at the forefront of the armed campaign were condemned as hypersexual deviants. Inspired by their leftist forebears, today’s artists experiment with an aesthetic of sadistic vengeance, configured as rightful self-defense. Yet, in spite of their violent imagery, activist cholas pursue nonviolent goals, promoting a commons of care incorporating people, animals, and the environment.

Runner-up, Bronze Medal, Independent Publishers Book Awards: Memoir/Autobiography Category, 2009

Unclear about his future career path, Steve Reifenberg found himself in the early 1980s working at a small orphanage in a poor neighborhood in Santiago, Chile, where a determined single woman was trying to create a stable home for a dozen or so children who had been abandoned or abused. With little more than good intentions and very limited Spanish, the 23-year-old Reifenberg plunged into the life of the Hogar Domingo Savio, becoming a foster father to kids who stretched his capacities for compassion and understanding in ways he never could have imagined back in the United States.

In this beautifully written memoir, Reifenberg recalls his two years at the Hogar Domingo Savio. His vivid descriptions create indelible portraits of a dozen remarkable kids—mature-beyond-her-years Verónica; sullen, unresponsive Marcelo; and irrepressible toddler Andrés, among them. As Reifenberg learns more about the children's circumstances, he begins to see the bigger picture of life in Chile at a crucial moment in its history.

The early 1980s were a time of economic crisis and political uprising against the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Reifenberg skillfully interweaves the story of the orphanage with the broader national and international forces that dramatically impact the lives of the kids. By the end of Santiago's Children, Reifenberg has told an engrossing story not only of his own coming-of-age, but also of the courage and resilience of the poorest and most vulnerable residents of Latin America.

2023 Honorable Mention, Brazil Section Humanities Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

This book explores visual portrayals of blackness in Brazil to reveal the integral role of visual culture in crafting race and nation across Latin America.

In the early twentieth century, Brazil shifted from a nation intent on whitening its population to one billing itself as a racial democracy. Anadelia Romo shows that this shift centered in Salvador, Bahia, where throughout the 1950s, modernist artists and intellectuals forged critical alliances with Afro-Brazilian religious communities of Candomblé to promote their culture and their city. These efforts combined with a growing promotion of tourism to transform what had been one of the busiest slaving depots in the Americas into a popular tourist enclave celebrated for its rich Afro-Brazilian culture. Vibrant illustrations and texts by the likes of Jorge Amado, Pierre Verger, and others contributed to a distinctive iconography of the city, with Afro-Bahians at its center. But these optimistic visions of inclusion, Romo reveals, concealed deep racial inequalities. Illustrating how these visual archetypes laid the foundation for Salvador’s modern racial landscape, this book unveils the ways ethnic and racial populations have been both included and excluded not only in Brazil but in Latin America as a whole.

"Once again I repeat that I am not an impartial; objective critic. My judgments are nourished by my ideals, my sentiments, my passions. I have an avowed and resolute ambition: to assist in the creation of Peruvian socialism. I am far removed from the academic techniques of the university."—From the Author's Note

Jose Carlos Mariátegui was one of the leading South American social philosophers of the early twentieth century. He identified the future of Peru with the welfare of the Indian at a time when similar ideas were beginning to develop in Middle America and the Andean region. Generations of Peruvian and other Latin American social thinkers have been profoundly influenced by his writings.

Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana), first published in 1928, is Mariátegui's major statement of his position and has gone into many editions, not only in Peru but also in other Latin American countries. The topics discussed in the essays—economic evolution, the problem of the Indian, the land problem, public education, the religious factor, regionalism and centralism, and the literary process—are in many respects as relevant today as when the book was written.

Mariátegui's thinking was strongly tinged with Marxism. Because contemporary sociology, anthropology, and economics have been influenced by Marxism much more in Latin America than in North America, it is important that North Americans become more aware of Mariátegui's position and accord it its proper historical significance.

Jorge Basadre, the distinguished Peruvian historian, in an introduction written especially for this translation, provides an account of Mariátegui's life and describes the political and intellectual climate in which these essays were written.

A central tenet of Catholic religious practice, confession relies upon the use of language between the penitent and his or her confessor. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Spain colonized the Quechua-speaking Andean world, the communication of religious beliefs and practices—especially the practice of confession—to the native population became a primary concern, and as a result, expansive bodies of Spanish ecclesiastic literature were translated into Quechua. In this fascinating study of the semantic changes evident in translations of Catholic catechisms, sermons, and manuals, Regina Harrison demonstrates how the translated texts often retained traces of ancient Andean modes of thought, despite the didactic lessons they contained.

In Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru, Harrison draws directly from confession manuals to demonstrate how sin was newly defined in Quechua lexemes, how the role of women was circumscribed to fit Old World patterns, and how new monetized perspectives on labor and trade were taught to the subjugated indigenous peoples of the Andes by means of the Ten Commandments. Although outwardly confession appears to be an instrument of oppression, the reformer Bartolomé de Las Casas influenced priests working in the Andes; through their agency, confessional practice ultimately became a political weapon to compel Spanish restitution of Incan lands and wealth. Bringing together an unprecedented study (and translation) of Quechua religious texts with an expansive history of Andean and Spanish transculturation, Harrison uses the lens of confession to understand the vast and telling ways in which language changed at the intersection of culture and religion.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a charismatic Peruvian Amazonian indigenous chief, José Carlos Amaringo Chico, played a key role in leading his people, the Ashaninka, through the chaos generated by the collapse of the rubber economy in 1910 and the subsequent pressures of colonists, missionaries, and government officials to assimilate them into the national society. Slavery and Utopia reconstructs the life and political trajectory of this leader whom the people called Tasorentsi, the name the Ashaninka give to the world-transforming gods and divine emissaries that come to this earth to aid the Ashaninka in times of crisis.

Fernando Santos-Granero follows Tasorentsi’s transformations as he evolved from being a debt-peon and quasi-slave to being a slave raider; inspirer of an Ashaninka movement against white-mestizo rubber extractors and slave traffickers; paramount chief of a multiethnic, anti-colonial, and anti-slavery uprising; and enthusiastic preacher of an indigenized version of Seventh-Day Adventist doctrine, whose world-transforming message and personal influence extended well beyond Peru’s frontiers. Drawing on an immense body of original materials ranging from archival documents and oral histories to musical recordings and visual works, Santos-Granero presents an in-depth analysis of chief Tasorentsi’s political discourse and actions. He demonstrates that, despite Tasorentsi’s constant self-reinventions, the chief never forsook his millenarian beliefs, anti-slavery discourse, or efforts to liberate his people from white-mestizo oppression. Slavery and Utopia thus convincingly refutes those who claim that the Ashaninka proclivity to messianism is an anthropological invention.

Praised by his admirers as "one of those rare heroic figures out of Plutarch" and as "an intrepid Don Quixote," Brazilian lawyer Heráclito Fontoura Sobral Pinto (1893-1991) was the most consistently forceful opponent of dictator Getúlio Vargas. Through legal cases, activism in Catholic and lawyers' associations, newspaper polemics, and a voluminous correspondence, Sobral Pinto fought for democracy, morality, and justice, particularly for the downtrodden.

This book is the first of a projected two-volume biography of Sobral Pinto. Drawing on Sobral's vast correspondence, which was not previously available to researchers, John W. F. Dulles confirms that Sobral Pinto was a true reformer, who had no equal in demonstrating courage and vehemence when facing judges, tribunals, and men in power. He traces the leading role that Sobral played in opposing the Vargas regime from 1930 to 1945 and sheds light on the personalities and activities of powerful figures in the National Security Tribunal, the police, the censorship bureau, and the Catholic Church.

In addition to the many details that this volume adds to Brazilian history, it illuminates the character of a man who sacrificed professional advancement and emolument in the interest of fighting for justice and charity. Thus, it will be important reading not only for students of Brazilian history, but also for a wider audience dedicated to the crusade for human rights and political freedom and the reformers who carry on that struggle.

Bridging print culture and performance, Spectacular Wealth draws on eighteenth-century festival accounts to explore how colonial residents of the silver-mining town of Potosí, in the viceroyalty of Peru, and the gold-mining region of Minas Gerais, in Brazil, created rich festive cultures that refuted European allegations of barbarism and greed. In her examination of the festive participation of the towns’ diverse inhabitants, including those whose forced or slave labor produced the colonies’ mineral wealth, Lisa Voigt shows how Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Europeans, and creoles displayed their social capital and cultural practices in spectacular performances.

Tracing the multiple meanings and messages of civic festivals and religious feast days alike, Spectacular Wealth highlights the conflicting agendas at work in the organization, performance, and publication of festivals. Celebrants and writers in mining boomtowns presented themselves as far more than tributaries yielding mineral wealth to the Spanish and Portuguese empires, using festivals to redefine their reputations and to celebrate their cultural, spiritual, and intellectual wealth.

A timely exploration of the nature of memory and its political uses

Hearing the news from South America at the turn of the millennium can be like traveling in time: here are the trials of Pinochet, the searches for “the disappeared” in Argentina, the investigation of the death of former president Goulart in Brazil, the Peace Commission in Uruguay, the Archive of Terror in Paraguay, a Truth Commission in Peru. As societies struggle to come to terms with the past and with the vexing questions posed by ineradicable memories, this wise book offers guidance.

Based on extensive research into opposition and government documents, including the previously unavailable Manual Básico da Escola de Guerra, Maria Helena Moreira Alves provides a rich description of the long and tortuous attempt by the Brazilian military government to create a workable “national security state” in the face of determined and resilient opposition.

She interviewed more than one hundred key figures in government, the military, business, professional associations, the Catholic church, grassroots organizations, and trade unions in order to analyze politically and historically the relationship between civil society and government structures in Brazil during the years 1964–1983. Her study charts the rise and subsequent decline of the military government’s power, concluding with a discussion of the abertura policy instituted under General João Batista Figueiredo.

Winner, Warren Dean Memorial Prize, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH), 2018

Street vending has supplied the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro with basic goods for several centuries. Once the province of African slaves and free blacks, street commerce became a site of expanded (mostly European) immigrant participation and shifting state regulations during the transition from enslaved to free labor and into the early post-abolition period. Street Occupations investigates how street vendors and state authorities negotiated this transition, during which vendors sought greater freedom to engage in commerce and authorities imposed new regulations in the name of modernity and progress.

Examining ganhador (street worker) licenses, newspaper reports, and detention and court records, and considering the emergence of a protective association for vendors, Patricia Acerbi reveals that street sellers were not marginal urban dwellers in Rio but active participants in a debate over citizenship. In their struggles to sell freely throughout the Brazilian capital, vendors asserted their citizenship as urban participants with rights to the city and to the freedom of commerce. In tracing how vendors resisted efforts to police and repress their activities, Acerbi demonstrates the persistence of street commerce and vendors’ tireless activity in the city, which the law eventually accommodated through municipal street commerce regulation passed in 1924.

A focused history of a crucial era of transition in Brazil, Street Occupations offers important new perspectives on patron-client relations, slavery and abolition, policing, the use of public space, the practice of free labor, the meaning of citizenship, and the formality and informality of work.

Students played a critical role in the Sandinista struggle in Nicaragua, helping to topple the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979—one of only two successful social revolutions in Cold War Latin America. Debunking misconceptions, Students of Revolution provides new evidence that groups of college and secondary-level students were instrumental in fostering a culture of insurrection—one in which societal groups, from elite housewives to rural laborers, came to see armed revolution as not only legitimate but necessary.

Drawing on student archives, state and university records, and oral histories, Claudia Rueda reveals the tactics by which young activists deployed their age, class, and gender to craft a heroic identity that justified their political participation and to help build cross-class movements that eventually paralyzed the country. Despite living under a dictatorship that sharply curtailed expression, these students gained status as future national leaders, helping to sanctify their right to protest and generating widespread outrage while they endured the regime’s repression. Students of Revolution thus highlights the aggressive young dissenters who became the vanguard of the opposition.

Oswaldo Truzzi's original work on these so-called patrícios changed the face of Brazilian studies. Now available in an English translation, Truzzi's pioneering book identifies the complex social paths blazed by Syrian and Lebanese immigrants and their descendants from the 1890s to the 1960s. He considers their relationships to other groups within São Paulo's kaleidoscopic mix of cultures. He also reveals the differences--real and perceived--between Syrians and Lebanese in terms of religious and ethnic affinities and in the economic sphere. Finally, he compares the two groups with their counterparts in the United States and looks at the wave of Lebanese Muslims to São Paulo that began in the 1960s.