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Based on extensive archival research, The Power of Huacas is the first book to take account of the reciprocal effects of religious colonization as they impacted Andean populations and, simultaneously, dramatically changed the culture and beliefs of Spanish Christians.

Winner, Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Historical Studies, American Academy of Religion, 2015

The role of the religious specialist in Andean cultures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was a complicated one, balanced between local traditions and the culture of the Spanish. In The Power of Huacas, Claudia Brosseder reconstructs the dynamic interaction between religious specialists and the colonial world that unfolded around them, considering how the discourse about religion shifted on both sides of the Spanish and Andean relationship in complex and unexpected ways. In The Power of Huacas, Brosseder examines evidence of transcultural exchange through religious history, anthropology, and cultural studies. Taking Andean religious specialists—or hechizeros (sorcerers) in colonial Spanish terminology—as a starting point, she considers the different ways in which Andeans and Spaniards thought about key cultural and religious concepts. Unlike previous studies, this important book fully outlines both sides of the colonial relationship; Brosseder uses extensive archival research in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, Italy, and the United States, as well as careful analysis of archaeological and art historical objects, to present the Andean religious worldview of the period on equal footing with that of the Spanish. Throughout the colonial period, she argues, Andean religious specialists retained their own unique logic, which encompassed specific ideas about holiness, nature, sickness, and social harmony. The Power of Huacas deepens our understanding of the complexities of assimilation, showing that, within the maelstrom of transcultural exchange in the Spanish Americas, European paradigms ultimately changed more than Andean ones.

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.

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.

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.

The ceque system of Cusco, the ancient capital of the Inca empire, was perhaps the most complex indigenous ritual system in the pre-Columbian Americas. From a center known as the Coricancha (Golden Enclosure) or the Temple of the Sun, a system of 328 huacas (shrines) arranged along 42 ceques (lines) radiated out toward the mountains surrounding the city. This elaborate network, maintained by ayllus (kin groups) that made offerings to the shrines in their area, organized the city both temporally and spiritually.

From 1990 to 1995, Brian Bauer directed a major project to document the ceque system of Cusco. In this book, he synthesizes extensive archaeological survey work with archival research into the Inca social groups of the Cusco region, their land holdings, and the positions of the shrines to offer a comprehensive, empirical description of the ceque system. Moving well beyond previous interpretations, Bauer constructs a convincing model of the system's physical form and its relation to the social, political, and territorial organization of Cusco.

Following completion of the U.S. air base in Natal, Brazil, in 1942, U.S. airmen departing for North Africa during World War II communicated with Brazilian mechanics with a thumbs-up before starting their engines. This sign soon replaced the Brazilian tradition of touching the earlobe to indicate agreement, friendship, and all that was positive and good—yet another indication of the Americanization of Brazil under way during this period.

In this translation of O Imperialismo Sedutor, Antonio Pedro Tota considers both the Good Neighbor Policy and broader cultural influences to argue against simplistic theories of U.S. cultural imperialism and exploitation. He shows that Brazilians actively interpreted, negotiated, and reconfigured U.S. culture in a process of cultural recombination. The market, he argues, was far more important in determining the nature of this cultural exchange than state-directed propaganda efforts because Brazil already was primed to adopt and disseminate American culture within the framework of its own rapidly expanding market for mass culture. By examining the motives and strategies behind rising U.S. influence and its relationship to a simultaneous process of cultural and political centralization in Brazil, Tota shows that these processes were not contradictory, but rather mutually reinforcing.

The Seduction of Brazil brings greater sophistication to both Brazilian and American understanding of the forces at play during this period, and should appeal to historians as well as students of Latin America, culture, and communications.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Argentina's Socialist Party became the largest and most effective socialist organization in Latin America. Richard J. Walter's interpretive study begins with the party's origins in the 1890s, traces its development through 1912, and then offers a comprehensive analysis of its activities and programs during the almost two decades of civilian, democratic government that ended with the military coup of 1930. His aim has been to provide a detailed case study of a Latin American political party within a specific historical context.

The work gives particular attention to the nature of party leadership, internal party organization, attempts to win the support of the Argentine working class, party activities in national elections and the National Congress, and internal disputes and divisions. In discussing these topics, Walter draws heavily on government documents, including national and municipal censuses, ministerial reports, and the Argentine Congressional Record. He also makes extensive use of national and party newspapers and journals, political memoirs, and collections of essays by party leaders.

Walter concludes that the party enjoyed relative electoral and legislative success because of efficient organization, capable leadership, and specific, well-reasoned programs. On the other hand, it failed to create a firm working-class base or to extend its influence much beyond Buenos Aires, mainly because of its inability to relate adequately to the needs of the proletariat and to the growth of nationalist sentiment. The analysis of these successes and failures also provides an important background for understanding the rise to power of Juan Perón and Peronism.

In the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivaling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government. The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing how indigenous-led mass movements reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011.

Drawing on interviews with protest participants, on-the-ground observation, and documentary research, activist and scholar Carwil Bjork-James provides an up-close history of the indigenous-led protests that changed Bolivia. At the heart of the study is a new approach to the interaction between protest actions and the parts of the urban landscape they claim. These “space-claiming protests” both communicate a message and exercise practical control over the city. Bjork-James interrogates both protest tactics—as experiences and as tools—and meaning-laden spaces, where meaning is part of the racial and political geography of the city.

Taking the streets of Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz as its vantage point, The Sovereign Streetoffers a rare look at political revolution as it happens. It documents a critical period in Latin American history, when protests made headlines worldwide, where a generation of pro-globalization policies were called into question, and where the indigenous majority stepped into government power for the first time in five centuries.

The São Paulo Law School, the oldest institution of higher learning in Brazil, has long been the chief training center for that country’s leadership. For the members of the school’s secret Burschenschaft society, the training consisted principally in leading demonstrations for liberal causes, such as the abolition of slavery and the overthrow of the monarchy. During the Old Republic (1889–1930), the Brazilian presidency and other high posts in Rio de Janeiro were usually occupied by alumni of the powerful society, while its members in São Paulo continued to agitate for political reform. But in the 1920s, when they formed the Nationalist League and the Democratic Party, schisms resulted. Thus the Burschenschaft was weakened before the long rule of Brazil by Getúlio Vargas, starting in 1930, brought an end to the society’s influence.

The role of the school in these and other historical events is carefully reviewed by Dulles before he turns to the school’s well-known resistance to the dictatorship of Vargas. That resistance, the most persistent confronting the dictator, appeared to be unified—especially when it provoked the police into shooting the students. But, as Dulles discovered when interviewing participants and consulting documents and scrapbooks of the early 1940s, the movement was characterized by heated internal strife. In the end, however, the idealism and courage of the participants and the ultimate effectiveness of the movement contributed mightily to the fall of Vargas.

This book is another in Dulles’s series of narrative histories in which he gives flesh and blood to the names and breathes life into the events of twentieth-century Brazilian politics.

How artists challenged a military dictatorship through mass print technologies in 1970s and 1980s São Paulo.

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, during Brazil's military dictatorship, artists shifted their practices to critique the government and its sanitized images of Brazil, its use of torture, and its targeted persecutions. Mari Rodríguez Binnie's The São Paulo Neo-Avant-Garde examines these artworks and their engagement with politics and mainstream art institutions and practices.

As Binnie skillfully shows, artists appropriated processes like photocopy, offset lithography, and thermal and heliographic printing, making newly available technologies of mass production foundational to their work of resistance against both the dictatorship and the established art world. Often working collaboratively, these artists established alternative networks of exchange locally and internationally to circulate their work. As democracy was reestablished in Brazil, and in the decades that followed, their works largely fell out of sight. Here, in the first English-language book to focus entirely on conceptual practices in São Paulo in the 1970s and 1980s, Binnie unearths a scene critical to the development of contemporary Brazilian Art.

An exploration of gender, race, and food in Peru in the 1950s and 1960s and today.

From the late 1940s to the mid 1960s, Peru’s rapid industrialization and anti-communist authoritarianism coincided with the rise of mass-produced cookbooks, the first televised cooking shows, glossy lifestyle magazines, and imported domestic appliances and foodstuffs. Amy Cox Hall’s The Taste of Nostalgia uses taste as a thematic and analytic thread to examine the ways that women, race, and the kitchen were foundational to Peruvian longings for modernity, both during the Cold War and today.

Drawing on interviews, personal stories, media images, and archival and ethnographic research, Cox Hall considers how elite, European-descended women and the urban home were central to Peru’s modernizing project and finds that all women who labored within the deeply racialized and gendered world of food helped set the stage for a Peruvian food nationalism that is now global in the twenty-first century. Cox Hall skillfully connects how the sometimes-unsavory tastes of the past are served again in today’s profitable and pervasive gastronostalgia that helps sell Peru and its cuisine both at home and abroad.

Focusing on the experiences of women who are predominantly poor, nonwhite, rural-to-urban migrants with little or no formal education, The Woman in the Violence addresses a range of serious concerns. What types of violence do women experience at different stages in their lives? Which identities and roles are manifested throughout their lives, and do some of these increase their vulnerability to different forms of violence? What strategies do women employ to gain some power and control in these situations, and how can we conceptualize these strategies?

In examining these questions, The Woman in the Violence contributes to our understanding of violence, gender, race, resistance, and urbanism as it exposes and analyzes systemic violence against women. The everyday forms of resistance these women employ provide significant insight for students, scholars, and health professionals.

The Moche, or Mochica, created an extraordinary civilization on the north coast of Peru for most of the first millennium AD. Although they had no written language with which to record their history and beliefs, the Moche built enormous ceremonial edifices and embellished them with mural paintings depicting supernatural figures and rituals. Highly skilled Moche artisans crafted remarkable ceramic vessels, which they painted with figures and scenes or modeled like sculpture, and mastered metallurgy in gold, silver, and copper to make impressive symbolic ornaments. They also wove textiles that were complex in execution and design.

A senior scholar renowned for her discoveries about the Moche, Elizabeth P. Benson published the first English-language monograph on the subject in 1972. Now in this volume, she draws on decades of knowledge, as well as the findings of other researchers, to offer a grand overview of all that is currently known about the Moche. Touching on all significant aspects of Moche culture, she covers such topics as their worldview and ritual life, ceremonial architecture and murals, art and craft, supernatural beings, government and warfare, and burial and the afterlife. She demonstrates that the Moche expressed, with symbolic language in metal and clay, what cultures in other parts of the world presented in writing. Indeed, Benson asserts that the accomplishments of the Moche are comparable to those of their Mesoamerica contemporaries, the Maya, which makes them one of the most advanced civilizations of pre-Columbian America.

Documents how initial Mapuche-Spanish alliances were built and how they were destroyed by increasingly powerful slave-trading elites operating like organized crime families

The history of Spanish presence in the Americas is usually viewed as a one-sided conquest. In This Incurable Evil: Mapuche Resistance to Spanish Enslavement, 1598–1687, Eugene C. Berger provides a major corrective in the case of Chile. For example, in the south, indigenous populations were persistent in their resistance against Spanish settlement. By the end of the sixteenth century, Spanish aspirations to conquer the entire Pacific Coast were dashed at least twice by armed resistance from the Mapuche peoples. By 1600, the Mapuche had killed two Spanish governors and occupied more than a dozen Spanish towns. Chile’s colonial future was quite uncertain.

As Berger documents, for much of the seventeenth century it seemed that there could be peace along the Spanish-Mapuche frontier. Through trade, intermarriage, and even mutual distrust of Dutch and English pirates, the Mapuche and the Spanish began to construct a colonial entente. However, this growing alliance was obliterated by the “incurable evil,” an ever-expanding enslavement of Mapuches, and one which prompted a new generation of Mapuche resistance. This trade saw Mapuche rivals, neutrals, and even friends placed in irons and forced to board ships in Valdivia and Concepción or to march northward along the Andes. The Mapuche labored in the gold mines of La Serena, in urban workshops in Lima, in the silver mines of Potosí, or on the thousands of haciendas in between and would never return to their homes. With this tragic betrayal, Chile was left a more corrupt, violent, and polarized place, which would cause deep wounds for centuries.
 

During the seventeenth century, many of the fundamental characteristics of Spanish America were established. Peter Marzahl adds significantly to our understanding of this period with this study of Popayán, a town in what was then part of New Granada and is now Colombia. New Granada was something of a backwater of the empire, but very likely Popayán was more typical of everyday colonial life than the major centers that have drawn most attention from historians.

In the first part of his study, Marzahl describes both town and region, depicts economic activities (agriculture, gold mining, trade), and analyzes urban and rural society. Of particular interest is his discussion of the complex interaction among the different ethnic groups: Spaniards, Mestizos, Indians, and Blacks. In the longer second part he presents a detailed account of the makeup and operations of the town councils. His extensive research in primary sources makes possible a thorough examination of Popayán's administration and politics and their relationship to economic and social patterns. He also describes the councils' relations with the provincial governors, the viceregal authorities in Bogotá, and the Church. Because this study treats a neglected period and region and, in so doing, offers fresh materials and insights, it is an important contribution to our knowledge and comprehension of colonial Spanish America.

Their motivation to migrate and to work as erotic dancers can also be understood in the context of a representational system, inaugurated in colonial times, that emphasizes the exoticism of Brazilian womentheir bodies, their skin tone, their sexuality. These stereotypes are the props that Brazilian women use to construct their performances in Manhattan and Queens gentlemen's bars and the language through which they negotiate their relationships to society at large.

Transnational Desires focuses on the lives of nine Brazilian dancers with whom the author, herself a middleclass Brazilian, developed close relationships over the years. Maia examines their social relations both in the bar scene and with family, friends, and lovers outside. She shows that for these women erotic dancing is part of a life trajectory that involves negotiating their social position and life prospects in a fundamentally transnational social universe.

This book presents new data on warfare from both ethnohistoric and ethnographic sources. The author documents principal differences between tribal and chiefly warfare; outlines the evidence archaeologists can expect to recover from warfare; and formulates testable hypotheses on the role of warfare in social and political evolution. This monograph is part of a series on Latin American Ethnohistory and Archaeology.