History / Latin America / South America

This edited volume offers new perspectives on the important work of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616), one of the first Latin American writers to present an intellectual analysis of pre-Columbian history and culture and the ensuing colonial period. To the contributors, Inca Garcilaso presented an early counter-hegemonic discourse and a reframing of the history of native cultures that undermined the colonial rhetoric of his time and the geopolitical divisions it purported.

Castilho offers original perspectives on the political upheaval surrounding the process of slave emancipation in postcolonial Brazil. He shows how the abolition debates in Pernambuco transformed the practices of political citizenship and marked the first instance of a mass national political mobilization.

Winner, 2016 Southern Cone Studies Section Social Sciences Book Award, Latin American Studies Association

This book examines the dramatic forms of social mobilization, state-directed repression, mass development projects, and socioeconomic exclusion that have marked struggles over low-income urban housing in Santiago, Chile, during the past half-century.

In this groundbreaking study, Moises Arce exposes a long-standing climate of popular contention in Peru. Looking beneath the surface to the subnational, regional, and local level as inception points, he rigorously dissects the political conditions that set the stage for protest. Focusing on natural resource extraction and its key role in the political economy of Peru and other developing countries, Arce reveals a wide disparity in the incidence, forms, and consequences of collective action.

Provides a comprehensive ethnography of writing in the Andes, and details the relationship between Andean peoples’ struggle to preserve their indigenous textual forms in the face of Western cirricula, with their struggle for land and power.

In this groundbreaking study, E. Gabrielle Kuenzli revisits the events of the Bolivian civil war and its aftermath during the early twentieth-century, to dispel popular myths about the Aymara and reveal their forgotten role in the nation-building project of modern Bolivia.

Race and the Chilean Miracle examines conflicts between Mapuche indigenous people and state and private actors over natural resources, territorial claims, and collective rights in the Araucania region. Through ground-level fieldwork, extensive interviews with local Mapuche and Chileans, and analysis of contemporary race and governance theory, Richards exposes the ways that local, regional, and transnational realities are shaped by systemic racism in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. Her compelling analysis offers new perspectives on indigenous rights, race, and neoliberal multiculturalism in Latin America and globally.

Honorable Mention, Society for the Study of Social Problem’s 2014 Global Division Book Award

Susana Draper uses the phenomenon of the “opening” of prisons to begin a dialog on conceptualizations of democracy and freedom in postdictatorship Latin America. Focusing on the Southern Cone nations of Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, she examines key works in architecture, film, and literature to peel away the veiled continuity of dictatorial power structures in ensuing consumer cultures.

Jorge Nallim chronicles the decline of liberalism in Argentina during the volatile period between two military coups—the 1930 overthrow of Hip—lito Yrigoyen and the deposing of Juan Per—n in 1955. Nallim documents a wide range of locations where liberalism was claimed and ultimately marginalized in the pursuit of individual agendas. He demonstrates how liberalism became a vital and complex factor in the metamorphosis of modern history in Argentina and Latin America as well.

Transition Cinema documents the critical role filmmakers, the film industry, and state regulators played in Argentina’s volatile and unfinished transition from dictatorship to democracy. Jessia Stites Mor shows how, during periods of both military repression and civilian rule, the state moved to control political film production and its content, distribution, and exhibition. She also reveals the strategies that the industry, independent filmmakers, and film activists employed to comply with or circumvent these regulations.

Bound Lives chronicles the lived experience of race relations in northern coastal Peru during the colonial era. Rachel Sarah O’Toole examines how Andeans and Africans negotiated and employed casta, and in doing so, constructed these racial categories. This study highlights the tenuous interactions of colonial authorities, indigenous communities, and enslaved populations and shows how the interplay between colonial law and daily practice shaped the nature of colonialism and slavery.

Winner of the 2013 Perœ Flora Tristan Prize from the Peru Section of theLatin American Studies Association

In republican Colombia, salt became an important source of revenue not just to individuals, but to the state, which levied taxes on it and in some cases controlled and profited from its production. Focusing his study on the town of La Salina, Joshua M. Rosenthal presents a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the early Colombian state, its institutions, and their interactions with local citizens during this formative period.

This volume chronicles the changing forms of indigenous engagement with the Ecuadorian state since the early nineteenth century that grew into the strongest unified indigenous movement in Latin America. Nine case studies examine how indigenous peoples have attempted to claim control over state formation in order to improve their position in society. It concludes with four comparative essays that place indigenous organizational strategies in Ecuador within a larger Latin American historical context.

In this original cultural history, Ernesto Capello analyzes the formation of memory, myth, and modernity through the eyes of Quito’s diverse populations. By employing Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopes, Capello views the configuration of time and space in narratives that defined Quito’s identity and its place in the world. To Capello, these tropes began to crystallize at the end of the nineteenth century, serving as a tool for distinct groups who laid claim to history for economic or political gain during the upheavals of modernism.

During their term, Juan and Eva Per—n (1946-1955) led the region’s largest populist movement in pursuit of new political hopes and material desires. In Dignifying Argentina, Eduardo Elena considers this transformative moment from a fresh perspective by exploring the intersection of populism and mass consumption. He argues that Peronist actors redefined national citizenship around expansive promises of a vida digna (dignified life), which encompassed not only the satisfaction of basic wants, but also the integration of working Argentines into a modern consumer society.

Winner of the 2013 Book Prize in the Social Sciences awarded by the Southern Cone Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association.