History / Latin America / South America

Total 68 results found.

City at the Center of the World

City at the Center of the World

Space, History, and Modernity in Quito

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.

Dignifying Argentina

Dignifying Argentina

Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption

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.

The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality

The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality

Race and Regional Identity in Northeastern Brazil

Explores conceptualizations of regional identity and a distinct population group known as nordestinos in northeastern Brazil during a crucial historical period. Beginning with the abolition of slavery and ending with the demise of the Estado Novo under Getœlio Vargas, Stanley E. Blake offers original perspectives on the paradoxical concept of the nordestino and the importance of these debates to the process of state and nation building.

Sentencing Canudos

Sentencing Canudos

Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil

In the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian army staged several campaigns against the settlement of Canudos in northeastern Brazil. The colony’s residents followed Antonio Conselheiro, who promoted a communal existence free from taxes and oppression. Estimates of the death toll range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand. Sentencing Canudos offers an original perspective on the hegemonic intellectual discourse surrounding this event. In her study, Johnson views the process of nation building and the silencing of “other” voices through the reinvisioning of history. Looking primarily to Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sert›es, she maintains that the events and people of Canudos have been “sentenced” to history by this work.

Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru

Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru

Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms

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.

I Sweat the Flavor of Tin

I Sweat the Flavor of Tin

Labor Activism in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia

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.

The Politics of Motherhood

The Politics of Motherhood

Maternity and Women's Rights in Twentieth-Century Chile

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.

The Andes Imagined

The Andes Imagined

Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity

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.

Literature and Subjection

Literature and Subjection

The Economy of Writing and Marginality in Latin America

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.

Under the Flags of Freedom

Under the Flags of Freedom

Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish South America

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.

Intersecting Tango

Intersecting Tango

Cultural Geographies of Buenos Aires, 1900-1930

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.

The Optic of the State

The Optic of the State

Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil

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.

Myths of Harmony

Myths of Harmony

Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia, 1795-1831

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.

Fujimori’s Peru

Fujimori’s Peru

Deception in the Public Sphere

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.

Secret Dialogues

Secret Dialogues

Church-State Relations, Torture, and Social Justice in Authoritarian Brazil

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.

Total 68 results found.