Pitt Latin American Series

With unprecedented use of local and national sources, Lauria-Santiago presents a more complex portrait of El Salvador than has ever been ventured before. Using thoroughly researched regional case studies, Lauria-Santiago challenges the accepted vision of Central America in the nineteenth century and critiques the “liberal oligarchic hegemony” model of El Salvador. He reveals the existence of a diverse, commercially active peasantry that was deeply involved with local and national networks of power.

In 1872, there were more than 300,000 slaves in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Though the Spanish government had passed a law for gradual abolition in 1870, slaveowners, particularly in Cuba, clung tenaciously to their slaves as unfree labor was at the core of the colonial economies. Nonetheless, people throughout the Spanish empire fought to abolish slavery, including the Antillean and Spanish liberals and republicans who founded the Spanish Abolitionist Society in 1865. This book is an extensive study of the origins of the Abolitionist Society and its role in the destruction of Cuban and Puerto Rican slavery and the reshaping of colonial politics.

This innovative collection features studies of iconography in Mexico, telenovelas in Venezuela, drama in Chile, cinema in Brazil, comic strips and tango in Argentina, and ceramics in Peru. From the studies of these popular arts the idea of nationality in Latin America is revealed to be a problematic, divided one, worthy of further study.

In an unusually powerful book that will appeal to the general reader as well as to the specialist, Louis A. Perez, Jr., recounts the story of the critical years when Cuba won its independence from Spain only to fall in the American orbit.

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.”

This book presents in one volume a selection of the most representative, outstanding writing by Latin American women writers. Written entirely in Spanish, it is intended for third and fourth-year students.

In The Meaning of Freedom scholars from a wide variety of disciplines contemplate the aftermath of slavery, focusing on Caribbean societies and the southern United States. They attempt to answer the questions about culture, economics, and politics central to this issue.

Perez shows how U.S. armed intervention in Cuba in 1898 and subsequent military occupation revitalized elements of the colonial system that would serve U.S. imperialist interests during Cuba’s independence.

The definitive account of the expulsion laws passed in 1827-1829 and 1833-34 and the chaos they caused in the new Mexican republic.

Twenty essays by major filmmakers and critics provide the first survey of the evolution of documentary film in Latin America. While acknowledging the political and historical weight of the documentary, the contributors are also concerned with the aesthetic dimensions of the medium and how Latin American practitioners have defined the boundaries of the form.

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.

Looking back through the prism of the severe economic crisis for filmmaking in the 1980s, this book trace the development of this industry in Brazil, focusing specifically on its relationship to the state.

This book introduces to a larger audience the work of a group of Mexican writers whose work reflects the stimulus of the “boom” of the 1960s, especially in the experimental nueva novella.Duncan views the work of six writers in the context of more well known writers of the period (Ruflo, Fuentes, and Del Paso), and concludes with a chapter on other recent innovators in Mexican literature.

Although Juan Peron changed the course of modern Argentine history, scholars have often interpreted him in terms of their own ideologies and interests, rather than seeing the effect of this man and his movement had on the Argentine people. These essays seek to uncover the man behind the myth, to define the true nature of Peronism.

George Grayson examines the influence of oil and the oil sector both within Mexican society and in its relations with other nations, as he traces the development of the oil industry from its beginnings in 1901 up until the 1980s.