Books

Using Ecuador as her case study, she shows how industrial growth has given birth to an exclusive, ingrown bourgeoisie that is highly dependent on the state and foreign capital and is increasingly alienated from the peasants and urban poor.

During much of the military regime in Brazil (1964-1985), an elaborate but illegal system of restrictions prevented the press from covering important news or criticizing the government. In this intriguing new book, Anne-Marie Smith investigates why the press acquiesced to this system, and why this state-administered system of restrictions was known as “self-censorship.”

Based on interviews with more than 100 participants, Van Cott demonstrates how social issues were placed on the constitutional reform agenda and transformed into the nation’s highest law. She follows each reform for five years to assess early results of what she calls an emerging model of multicultural constitutionalism.

This is the first work in English to discuss the social and political history of lawyers in a Latin American country. By exploring the lives of lawyers, Uribe-Uran is also able to focus on a general history of Latin America, while exploring key social and political changes and continuities from 1780 to 1850.

Kenneth Serbin uncovers the existence of secret talks between generals and Roman Catholic bishops at the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship. It illuminates the complicity of the Catholic Church in the military’s subversive PR campaigns, abductions, and torturings.

Examines Alberto Fujimori’s corrupt presidency, and the thin line between democracy and dictatorship, demonstrating how closely they can resemble one another. Analyzes how public institutions can empower dictators and also bring them down.

Myths of Harmony examines a foundational moment for Latin American racial constructs. While most contemporary scholarship has focused the explanation for racial tolerance in the colonial period, Marixa Lasso argues that the origins of modern race relations are to be found later, in the Age of Revolution. Lasso’s work brings much-needed attention to the important role of the anticolonial struggles in shaping the nature of contemporary race relations and racial identities in Latin America.

Traces the production of nationalist imaginaries through the public visual representation of modern state formation in Brazil and Argentina. The purpose of these imaginaries was to vindicate political upheavals and secure the viability of the newly independent states through a sense of historic destiny and inevitable evolution. The visions of national heritage, territory, and social and ethnic composition were conceived in a complex interplay between government, cultural and scientific institutions, as a means of propagating political agendas and power throughout the emerging states.

Intersecting Tango engages Buenos Aires during the sweeping changes of 1900-1930, to capture a culture in motion through which Buenos Aires transformed itself into a modern, cosmopolitan city. Taking the reader through a dazzling array of sites, sources, and events, Bergero conveys the city in all its complexity. Drawing on architecture and gendered spaces, photography, newspaper columns, schoolbooks, “high” and “low” literature, private letters, advertising, fashion, and popular music, she illuminates a range of urban social geographies inhabited by the city’s defining classes and groups. In mining this vast material, Bergero traces the profound change in social fabric by which these diverse identities evolved, through the processes of modernization and its many dislocations, into a new national identity capable of embodying modernity.

During the wars for independence in Spanish South America (1808-1826), thousands of slaves enlisted under the promise of personal freedom and, in some cases, freedom for other family members. Blacks were recruited by opposing sides in these conflicts and their loyalties rested with whomever they believed would emerge victorious. The prospect of freedom was worth risking one’s life for, and wars against Spain presented unprecedented opportunities to attain it. Blanchard’s study investigates the issue of slavery from the perspectives of Royalists, patriots, and slaves. He examines the wartime political, ideological, and social dynamics that led to slave recruitment, and the subsequent repercussions in the immediate postindependence era. Under the Flags of Freedom sheds new light on the vital contribution of slaves to the wars for Latin American independence.

Legras views the factors that have both formed and stifled the integration of peripheral experiences into Latin American literature. He analyzes key works by novelists Juan Jose Saer (The Witness), Nellie Campobello (Cartucho), Roa Bastos (Son of Man), and Jose Maria Arguedas (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below), among others, to provide a theoretical basis for understanding the plight of the author, the peripheral voice, and the confines of the literary medium.

Repositions Peruvian indigenismo as a discourse of and about modernity, in which the movement’s artists and intellectuals used the figure of the Indian to mobilize larger questions about becoming modern.

Examines the negotiations over women’s rights and the politics of gender in Chile throughout the twentieth century. Centering her study on motherhood, Pieper Mooney explores dramatic changes in health policy, population paradigms, and understandings of human rights, and reveals that motherhood is hardly a private matter defined only by individual women or couples. Instead, it is intimately tied to public policies and political competitions on nation-state and international levels.

A study of the rise of Bolivian tin miners into a politically active labor movement during the early twentieth century, and their eventual challenge to the oligarchy controlling the nation.

An original study examining the primacy placed on physicians and medical care to generate population growth and increase the workforce during the late eigteenth century in colonial Peru.