Latin America otherwise : languages, empires, nations

The story of the dramatic struggle to define collective memory in Chile during the violent, repressive dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

By sharing individual Chileans' recollections of the Pinochet regime, historian Steve J. Stern provides an analytic framework for understanding memory struggles in history.

Lamonte Aidoo upends dominant narratives of Brazilian national identity by showing how the myth of racial democracy is based on interracial and same-sex sexual violence between slave owners and their slaves that operated as a mechanism of perpetuating slavery and heteronormative white patriarchy.

In Indian Given María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo provides a sweeping historical and comparative analysis of racial ideologies in Mexico and the United States from 1550 to the present to show how indigenous peoples provided the condition of possibility for the emergence of each nation.

Light in the Dark is the culmination of Gloria E. Anzaldúa's mature thought and the most comprehensive presentation of her philosophy. Focusing on aesthetics, ontology, epistemology, and ethics, it contains several developments in her many important theoretical contributions.

A leading Latin Americanist exhorts scholars to reclaim the indigenous subjectivities still perceived by many as "not modern" and excluded from the production, distribution, and organization of knowledge.

Salsa Crossings is an ethnography describing how hierarchies of gender, race, and class, and of migration, citizenship, and belonging, are enacted on and off the dance floors of Los Angeles salsa clubs.

Ángel Rama was one of twentieth-century Latin America's most distinguished men of letters. Writing across Cultures is his comprehensive analysis of the varied sources of Latin American literature. Originally published in 1982, the book links Rama's work on Spanish American modernism with his arguments about the innovative nature of regionalist literature, and it foregrounds his thinking about the close relationship between literary movements, such as modernism or regionalism, and global trends in social and economic development.

Available in English for the first time, a masterwork by Enrique Dussel, one of the world's foremost philosophers, and a cornerstone of the philosophy of liberation, which he helped to found and develop.

A new and more concrete understanding of the inseparability of colonialism and modernity that also explores how the rhetoric of modernity disguises the logic of coloniality and how this rhetoric has been instrumental in establishing capitalism as the econ

Sigal argues that sixteenth century Nahua sexuality cannot be fully understood only through colonial sensibilities and sources. He examines legal documents, clerical texts, pictorial manuscripts, images and glyphs of Nahua gods and goddesses and descriptions of fertility rituals and other historical accounts and stories to show the complexity of Nahua sexuality.

Unspeakable Violence argues that racialized and gendered violence in the U.S.Mexico borderlands from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth was fundamental to U.S., Mexican, and Chicano/a nationalisms.

Demonstrates the centrality of Gloria Anzaldúas concept of spiritual mestizaje to the queer feminist Chicana theorists life and thought, and its utility as a framework for interpreting contemporary Chicana narratives.

An anthropological and historical analysis of the multiple meanings of the term el pueblo, among working-class indigenous and mestizo populations in Mexicos Yucatán peninsula.

An influential work originally published in Mexico in 1970; the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch seeks to identify and recover indigenous and popular ways of thinking devalued since colonization.

Uses oral histories to analyze Peruvian agrarian reform carried out by the left-leaning military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado between 1969 and 1999, highlighting struggles to dismantle models of social experimentation after disillusion with the fai

A collection of published and unpublished writings of the groundbreaking Chicana writer and self-described "chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer and cultural theorist" Gloria Anzaldúa.

A feminist analysis of the Chicano family that sees it as a site of political struggle with patriarchal masculinity, nationalism, and homophobia.

Historical investigations into how Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multiethnic progeny understood their identities in colonial Latin America.

Complicates the Spanish conquest of Peru by seeking to overturn the interpretation made by 16th century Spanish writers and modern academics that cast the Inca-Spanish encounter as a battle between two clearly defined sides,

Analyzes the practice of informal adoption and child circulation between communities in Peru, showing how these historical practices respond to and are constrained by state and international efforts to concretize family and love.

A study of working class and elite intellectual Mexican and Mexican American women that focuses on their sexuality and identity, particularly their identification with four primary Mexican female cultural symbols: La Malinche, Aztec goddesses, the Virgin

Gives historical background to late 20th century activism of Ecuador’s Native peoples, highlighting women’s role and the importance of cross-fertilization between class-based movements and ones based on race, ethnicity and identity.

Postcolonial theory has developed mainly in the U.S. academy, and it has focused chiefly on nineteenth-century and twentieth-century colonization and decolonization processes in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Colonialism in Latin America originated centuries earlier, in the transoceanic adventures from which European modernity itself was born. Coloniality at Large brings together classic and new reflections on the theoretical implications of colonialism in Latin America. By pointing out its particular characteristics, the contributors highlight some of the philosophical and ideological blind spots of contemporary postcolonial theory as they offer a thorough analysis of that theory’s applicability to Latin America’s past and present.

Written by internationally renowned scholars based in Latin America, the United States, and Europe, the essays reflect multiple disciplinary and ideological perspectives. Some are translated into English for the first time. The collection includes theoretical reflections, literary criticism, and historical and ethnographic case studies focused on Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, the Andes, and the Caribbean. Contributors examine the relation of Marxist thought, dependency theory, and liberation theology to Latin Americans’ experience of and resistance to coloniality, and they emphasize the critique of Occidentalism and modernity as central to any understanding of the colonial project. Analyzing the many ways that Latin Americans have resisted imperialism and sought emancipation and sovereignty over several centuries, they delve into topics including violence, identity, otherness, memory, heterogeneity, and language. Contributors also explore Latin American intellectuals’ ambivalence about, or objections to, the “post” in postcolonial; to many, globalization and neoliberalism are the contemporary guises of colonialism in Latin America.

Contributors: Arturo Arias, Gordon Brotherston, Santiago Castro-Gómez, Sara Castro-Klaren, Amaryll Chanady, Fernando Coronil, Román de la Campa, Enrique Dussel, Ramón Grosfoguel, Russell G. Hamilton, Peter Hulme, Carlos A. Jáuregui, Michael Löwy, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, José Antonio Mazzotti, Eduardo Mendieta, Walter D. Mignolo, Mario Roberto Morales, Mabel Moraña, Mary Louise Pratt, Aníbal Quijano, José Rabasa, Elzbieta Sklodowska, Catherine E. Walsh

An analysis of Western attitudes toward war from a subaltern perspective that brings new insights into Western philosophical paradigms.

An exploration of the impact of the 1960s and the U.S. post-cold war moment on the reception of Latin American art and artists.

Investigates role that Las Casas played in the evolution of Spanish imperialism and 16th century arguments about human rights, and claims that scholars have overestimated the extent to which he helped indigenous people.

El Alto, Rebel City combines ethnography and political theory to explore the astonishing political power exercised by the indigenous citizens of El Alto, Bolivia in the past decade.

Mexican American author Josie Méndez-Negrete's memoir of how she and her siblings and mother survived years of violence and sexual abuse at the hands of her father.

Explores how participants in the indigenous movement in Cauca, Colombia--including indigenous, non-indigenous, scholars, and shamans--have helped define a new sense of Colombian nationhood.

Collection of essays explores the processes by which political power was constructed in four Andean republics--Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia--during the two formative centuries of nation-state formation.

A social history of trade in a colonial city in Peru, arguing that markets, stores, and taverns were important sites of cultural creation and showing how the gender and ethnic identities of participants affected how they adapted to the market economy.

Analyzes the massive shift in Mexican political culture between the 18th and 19th centuries, asking how shifts in ideology initiated by elites played out in popular political culture and comparing the impact of political innovations on the culture of bot

An ethnographic study of cultural policy in Jamaica as seen from above and below in relation to race, class, and nation.

Analyzes spatial history of 19th and early 20th century Mexico, particularly political uses of mapping and surveying, to demonstrate multiple ways that space can be negotiated in the service of local or national agendas.

An ethnography of Andean knot writing, where media convey information without an alphabet or any other visual likeness of speech, examining the ways that such "mute inscription" communicates social experience.

Analyzes the relationship between conceptions of racial and ethnic identity and the ways social stratification and inequality are reproduced and experienced in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.

This study analyzes a popular festival and vigilante lynching, examining them as a form of political spectacle performed by improverished people who want to gain access to the potential benefits of citizenship in a modern city.

The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader brings together thirty-six field-defining essays by the most prominent theorists of Latin American cultural studies. Written over the past several decades, these essays provide an assessment of Latin American cultural studies, an account of the field’s historical formation, and an outline of its significant ideological and methodological trends and theoretical controversies. With many essays appearing in English for the first time, the collection offers a comprehensive view of the specific problems, topics, and methodologies that characterize Latin American cultural studies vis-à-vis British and U.S. cultural studies.

Divided into sections preceded by brief introductory essays, this volume traces the complex development of Latin American cultural studies from its roots in literary criticism and the economic, social, political, and cultural transformations wrought by neoliberal policies in the 1970s. It tracks the impassioned debates within the field during the early 1990s; explores different theoretical trends, including studies of postcolonialism, the subaltern, and globalization; and reflects on the significance of Latin American cultural studies for cultural studies projects outside Latin America. Considering literature, nationalism, soccer, cinema, postcolonialism, the Zapatistas, community radio, and much more, The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader is an invaluable resource for all those who want to understand the past, present, and future of Latin American cultural studies.

Contributors. Hugo Achugar, Eduardo Archetti, John Beverley, José Joaquín Brunner, Antonio Candido, Debra A. Castillo, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Román de la Campa, Ana Del Sarto, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Juan Flores, Jean Franco, Néstor García Canclini, María Gudelia Rangel Gómez, Adrián Gorelik, John Kraniauskas, Neil Larsen, Ana López, Jesús Martín-Barbero, Francine Masiello, Daniel Mato, Walter D. Mignolo, Carlos Monsiváis, Mabel Moraña, Alberto Moreiras, Renato Ortiz, José Rabasa, Angel Rama, Gustavo A. Remedi, Darcy Ribeiro, Nelly Richard, Alicia Ríos, Beatriz Sarlo, Roberto Schwarz, Irene Silverblatt, Graciela Silvestri, Armando Rosas Solís, Beatriz González Stephan, Abril Trigo, George Yúdice

An ethnographic case study of sex tourism in the Dominican Republic, showing how the sex trade is linked to economic and cultural globalization.

The first collection of essays to make a historically grounded, specifically Latin Americanist, intervention in postcolonial studies.

How revolutionary movements in the Americas mirror the language and styles of their opponents who favor traditional development.

Relations between Blacks and Indigenous people in Colonial Mexico as seen through a study of witchcraft accusations in inquisition records.

An oral history of popular protest in today's Argentina.

Claims that Colombia’s present-day regional and local hierarchies were shaped by 19th and 20th century processes of colonization and that regionalism and race are tied into Colombia’s history of violence.

This study of one of the most deadly conflicts this hemisphere has ever experienced, the Colombian Violencia (1945-1958), demonstrates links between past and present violence and its connection to political democracy, racism, regionalism, and state format

Examines how Chicana literature -- its narrative techniques, stylistic conventions, plot dilemmas and resolutions -- interrogate the multiple ways space and social relations constitute each other.

Provides new insight into the development of black nationalism by examining the intersection of African-American and West Indian nationalist literatures.

Comparative study through discourses by Gaimo, Silko, Anzaldua and others examining the disruption of the boundaries of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality in Chicano, Mexican and Native American immigrants in the Americas.

The first systematic account of Chilean women's labor from 1885 to 1930 showing how women's paid labor became a locus of anxiety for a society confronting social problems linked to modernization.

Argues that the reform of military recruitment in Brazil had a profound impact, second only to the abolition of slavery, on institutions of social discipline and the lives of the poor.

Argues for the saliency of the category of the subaltern over that of class.

Addresses the problems defined by practitioners of literary and visual culture in the post-dictatorship years in Chile and Argentina.

An anthology of testimonials from Latina/Chicana feminists - some of whom are well known - which give insight into their personal life experiences and break barriers and assumptions.

From Two Republics to One Divided examines Peru’s troubled transition from colonial viceroyalty to postcolonial republic from the local perspective of Andean peasant politics. Thurner’s reading of the Andean peasantry’s engagement and disengagement with the postcolonial state challenges long-standing interpretations of Peruvian and modern Latin American history and casts a critical eye toward Creole and Eurocentric ideas about citizenship and nationalism.
Working within an innovative and panoramic historical and linguistic framework, Thurner examines the paradoxes of a resurgent Andean peasant republicanism during the mid-1800s and provides a critical revision of the meaning of republican Peru’s bloodiest peasant insurgency, the Atusparia Uprising of 1885. Displacing ahistorical and nationalist readings of Inka or Andean continuity, and undermining the long-held notion that the colonial legacy is the dominant historical force shaping contemporary Andean reality, Thurner suggests that in Peru, the postcolonial legacy of Latin America’s nation-founding nineteenth century transfigured, and ultimately reinvented, the colonial legacy in its own image.

A study of the political and cultural formation of one of Guatemala's indigenous communities that explores the nationalization of ethnicity, the preservation of Mayan identity, and the formation of a brutally repressive state.

In the early twentieth century, Peruvian intellectuals, unlike their European counterparts, rejected biological categories of race as a basis for discrimination. But this did not eliminate social hierarchies; instead, it redefined racial categories as cultural differences, such as differences in education or manners. In Indigenous Mestizos Marisol de la Cadena traces the history of the notion of race from this turn-of-the-century definition to a hegemony of racism in Peru.

De la Cadena’s ethnographically and historically rich study examines how indigenous citizens of the city of Cuzco have been conceived by others as well as how they have viewed themselves and places these conceptions within the struggle for political identity and representation. Demonstrating that the terms Indian and mestizo are complex, ambivalent, and influenced by social, legal, and political changes, she provides close readings of everyday concepts such as marketplace identity, religious ritual, grassroots dance, and popular culture, as well as of such common terms as respect, decency, and education. She shows how Indian has come to mean an indigenous person without economic and educational means—one who is illiterate, impoverished, and rural. Mestizo, on the other hand, has come to refer to an urban, usually literate, and economically successful person claiming indigenous heritage and participating in indigenous cultural practices. De la Cadena argues that this version of de-Indianization—which, rather than assimilation, is a complex political negotiation for a dignified identity—does not cancel the economic and political equalities of racism in Peru, although it has made room for some people to reclaim a decolonized Andean cultural heritage.

This highly original synthesis of diverse theoretical arguments brought to bear on a series of case studies will be of interest to scholars of cultural anthropology, postcolonialism, race and ethnicity, gender studies, and history, in addition to Latin Americanists.

An innovative ethnography of peasant communities in Peru caught between the government and the Shining Path.

Reconsiders Peru's transition from colony to republic, highlighting the important role indigenous peasants played in anti-colonial struggles.

After the 1854 abolition of slavery in Peru, a new generation of plantation owners turned to a system of peasant tenantry to maintain cotton production through the use of cheap labor. In Peasants on Plantations Vincent C. Peloso analyzes the changing social and economic relationships governing the production of cotton in the Pisco Valley, a little-studied area of Peru’s south coast. Challenging widely held assumptions about the system of relations that tied peasants to the land, Peloso’s work examines the interdependence of the planters, managers, and peasants—and the various strategies used by peasants in their struggle to resist control by the owners.

Grounded in the theoretical perspectives of subaltern studies and drawing on an extremely complete archive of landed estates that includes detailed regular reports by plantation managers on all aspects of farming life, Peasants on Plantations reveals the intricate ways peasants, managers, and owners manipulated each other to benefit their own interests. As Peloso demonstrates, rather than a simple case of domination of the peasants by the owners, both parties realized that negotiation was the key to successful growth, often with the result that peasants cooperated with plantation growth strategies in order to participate in a market economy. Long-term contracts gave tenants and sharecroppers many opportunities to make farming choices, to assert claims on the land, compete among themselves, and participate in plantation expansion. At the same time, owners strove to keep the peasants in debt and well aware of who maintained ultimate control.

Peasants on Plantations offers a largely untold view of the monumental struggle between planters and peasants that was fundamental in shaping the agrarian history of Peru. It will interest those engaged in Latin American studies, anthropology, and peasant and agrarian studies.

Shining and Other Paths offers the first systematic account of the social experiences at the heart of the war waged between Shining Path and the Peruvian military during the 1980s and early 1990s. Confronting and untangling the many myths and enigmas that surround the war and the wider history of twentieth-century Peru, this book presents clear and often poignant analyses of the brutal reshaping of life and politics during a war that cost tens of thousands of lives.

The contributors—a team of Peruvian and U.S. historians, social scientists, and human rights activists—explore the origins, social dynamics, and long-term consequences of the effort by Shining Path to effect an armed communist revolution. The book begins by interpreting Shining Path’s emergence and decision for war as one logical culmination, among several competing culminations, of trends in oppositional politics and social movements. It then traces the experiences of peasants and refugees to demonstrate how human struggle and resilience came together in grassroots determination to defeat Shining Path, and explores the unsuccessful efforts of urban shantytown dwellers, as well as rural and urban activists, to build a “third path” to social justice. Integral to this discussion is an examination of women’s activism and consciousness during the years of the crisis. Finally, this book analyzes the often paradoxical and unintended legacies of this tumultuous period for social and human rights movements, and for presidential and military leadership in Peru.

Extensive field research, broad historical vision, and strong editorial coordination enable the authors to write a coherent and deeply humanistic account, one that draws out the inner tragedies, ambiguities, and conflicts of the war.

Providing historically grounded explication of the conflicts that reshaped contemporary Peru, Shining and Other Paths will be widely read by Latin Americanists, historians, anthropologists, gender theorists, sociologists, political scientists, and human rights activists.

Contributors. Jo-Marie Burt, Marisol de la Cadena, Isabel Coral Cordero, Carlos Iván Degregori, Iván Hinojosa, Carlos Basombrío Iglesias, Florencia E. Mallon, Nelson Manrique, Hortensia Muñoz, Enrique Obando, Patricia Oliart, Ponciano del Pino H., José Luis Rénique, Orin Starn, Steve J. Stern

Challenging the widely held belief that Nicaragua has been ethnically homogeneous since the nineteenth century, To Die in This Way reveals the continued existence and importance of an officially “forgotten” indigenous culture. Jeffrey L. Gould argues that mestizaje—a cultural homogeneity that has been hailed as a cornerstone of Nicaraguan national identity—involved a decades-long process of myth building.

Through interviews with indigenous peoples and records of the elite discourse that suppressed the expression of cultural differences and rationalized the destruction of Indian communities, Gould tells a story of cultural loss. Land expropriation and coerced labor led to cultural alienation that shamed the indigenous population into shedding their language, religion, and dress. Beginning with the 1870s, Gould historicizes the forces that prompted a collective movement away from a strong identification with indigenous cultural heritage to an “acceptance” of a national mixed-race identity.

By recovering a significant part of Nicaraguan history that has been excised from the national memory, To Die in This Way critiques the enterprise of third world nation-building and thus marks an important step in the study of Latin American culture and history that will also interest anthropologists and students of social and cultural historians.

The function of dance in Latin/o American culture is the focus of the essays collected in Everynight Life. The contributors interpret how Latin/o culture expresses itself through dance, approaching the material from the varying perspectives of literary, cultural, dance, performance, queer, and feminist studies. Viewing dance as privileged sites of identity formation and cultural resistance in Latin/o America, Everynight Life translates the motion of bodies into speech, and the gestures of dance into a provocative socio-political grammar.
This anthology looks at many modes of dance—including salsa, merengue, cumbia, rumba, mambo, tango, samba, and norteño—as models for the interplay of cultural memory and regional conflict. Barbara Browning’s essay on capoeira, for instance, demonstrates how dance has been used as a literal form of resistance, while José Piedra explores the meanings conveyed by women of color dancing the rumba. Pieces such as Gustavo Perez Fírmat’s "I Came, I Saw, I Conga’d" and Jorge Salessi’s "Medics, Crooks, and Tango Queens" illustrate the lively scope of this volume’s subject matter.

Contributors. Barbara Browning, Celeste Fraser Delgado, Jane C. Desmond, Mayra Santos Febres, Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia, Josh Kun, Ana M. López, José Esteban Muñoz, José Piedra, Gustavo Perez Fírmat, Augusto C. Puleo, David Román, Jorge Salessi, Alberto Sandoval

Wandering Peoples is a chronicle of cultural resiliency, colonial relations, and trespassed frontiers in the borderlands of a changing Spanish empire. Focusing on the native subjects of Sonora in Northwestern Mexico, Cynthia Radding explores the social process of peasant class formation and the cultural persistence of Indian communities during the long transitional period between Spanish colonialism and Mexican national rule. Throughout this anthropological history, Radding presents multilayered meanings of culture, community, and ecology, and discusses both the colonial policies to which peasant communities were subjected and the responses they developed to adapt and resist them.
Radding describes this colonial mission not merely as an instance of Iberian expansion but as a site of cultural and political confrontation. This alternative vision of colonialism emphasizes the economic links between mission communities and Spanish mercantilist policies, the biological consequences of the Spanish policy of forced congregación, and the cultural and ecological displacements set in motion by the practices of discipline and surveillance established by the religious orders. Addressing wider issues pertaining to ethnic identities and to ecological and cultural borders, Radding’s analysis also underscores the parallel production of colonial and subaltern texts during the course of a 150-year struggle for power and survival.

How does a culture in which writing is not a prominent feature create historical tradition? In The Politics of Memory, Joanne Rappaport answers this question by tracing the past three centuries of the intellectual history of the Nasa—a community in the Colombian Andes. Focusing on the Nasa historians of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, Rappaport highlights the differences between "native" history and Eurocentric history and demonstrates how these histories must be examined in relation to the particular circumstances in which they were produced.
Reconsidering the predominantly mythic status of non-Western historical narrative, Rappaport identifies the political realities that influenced the form and content of Andean history, revealing the distinct historical vision of these stories. Because of her examination of the influences of literacy in the creation of history, Rappaport’s analysis makes a special contribution to Latin American and Andean studies, solidly grounding subaltern texts in their sociopolitical contexts.