Book Reviews

Hispanic American Historical Review

Book Reviews

General and Sources Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530–1900. Edited by joanne pillsbury. 3 volumes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. In collaboration with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. Illustrations. Maps. Bibliographies. Index. Vol. 1, 464 pp. Vol. 2, 384 pp. Vol. 3, 448 pp. Cloth, $195.00. Once upon a time, young scholars eager to work in the Andes learned their trade at the knees of the elders in the guild, who told stories of archives filled with uncatalogued packets of crumbling papers in which, like scholarly counterparts of Indiana Jones, they searched for documentary treasures. But even the most intrepid scholar-adventurer should be grateful to the editors and authors who, a decade ago, undertook to make it easier to work in the field of Andean studies. The objective of the project was to produce a guide to the major documentary sources in the field, focusing particularly on sources concerning indigenous cultures. The first volume of the Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies consists of a series of essays on both the well-known categories of Andean sources, such as the chronicles, censuses, and visitas that have become standard resources for Andeanists, and lesser-known archival and published resources generated by the colonial state and church, each written by a scholar especially familiar with the materials that are the subject of that chapter. The two additional volumes contain, in alphabetical order, shorter essays on authors and sources that are discussed in the more general essays of volume 1. This organization makes the set valuable both as an introduction to basic resources as well as lesser-known sources, including travelers’ accounts, scientific works, and indigenous texts. In several cases, the authors of essays include valuable perspectives on the criteria they used to define their subjects. The second and third volumes of the Guide include biographical data on authors and editions as well as current locations of the sources. This organization permits a researcher to move easily from a general discussion of a body of sources to the authors of those sources and their published editions and current locations. And while the Guide may lack the anecdotal, personal attraction of the elder scholars on whose guidance we relied, it makes it possible to develop a clearly defined and organized project with a reasonable expectation that the sources we need can be found where we expect them to be. These volumes should be an integral part of any research library and a basic Hispanic American Historical Review 90:2 Copyright 2010 by Duke University Press

Published by Duke University Press


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resource for everyone undertaking a new research project on an Andean topic. All of us who work in Andean history and its related fields, from linguistics and archaeology to art history and the history of science, will undoubtedly have our own favorite sources that are not included in the Guide, and additional sources will appear in the future, but none of that detracts from the major contribution represented by the Guide. My only major criticism is the lack of a version in the language of the majority of the authors and sources discussed in its pages. I hope that this limitation will be remedied in the near future.

karen spalding, Professor of History Emeritus, The University of Connecticut doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-137

Cristóbal de Acuña: Nuevo descubrimiento del Gran río de las Amazonas. Edited by ignacio arellano, josé m. díez borque, and gonzalo santonja. Biblioteca Indiana, 16. Madrid: Iberoamericana / Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2009. Appendix. Bibliography. Notes. Index. 181 pp. Paper. Although South American geography makes it seem unlikely, initial European penetrations of the Amazon basin originated in the Andean highlands. Quito was the base for Francisco de Orellana’s navigation of the river in 1540, and the Ursúa/Aguirre expedition launched from Cuzco 20 years later. While chronicles of these enterprises related encounters with Amazons, giants, gold, and silver, harrowing tales told by survivors and the absence of tangible results dampened enthusiasm for major forays into the region for more than 70 years. Cristóbal de Acuña’s report of his voyage from Quito to Pará in 1639 falls within a second period of Amazonian exploration, one in which Spain and Portugal, and Jesuits and Franciscans, would vie for control of the river course and the indigenous peoples who lived along it. This new edition of Acuña’s work is edited by three scholars of peninsular Spanish literature. It supplements the chronicle itself with two essays that introduce the author and interpret his work and with hundreds of footnotes intended to clarify the account’s ubiquitous ethnonyms and its sometimes archaic vocabulary. The editors are enthusiastic about Acuña as the practitioner of a particularly Spanish genre they call “chronicle of the Indies.” The preface defines this form as a report guided by instructions drawn up before the fact and intended to inform authorities in specified ways. Further, the editors suggest that many such chronicles wait to be discovered and published. Well, maybe. Cristóbal de Acuña was a Jesuit priest who sailed from Spain to Peru in 1631 and resided in Quito seven years later. He likely owes his position as Amazonian expeditionary to his brother, the corregidor of Quito. Failing in his own bid to organize the entry, Juan Vásquez de Acuña named Cristóbal and his fellow Jesuit Andrés de Artieda to accompany the Brazilian captain, Pedro de Tejeira, on his return to Pará. That Tejeira would be allowed to sail at all was not a foregone conclusion, as Spanish judges in Quito rightly suspected him of mapping a route to Peru on behalf of Portugal. Before he left the city, Acuña received instructions from the oidores to prepare a report on the course



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of the river, its inhabitants, and the tributaries and ports that he encountered on his voyage. From Quito, Tejeira led his band of Portuguese soldiers, Indian allies, and Spanish priests down the Rio Napo, Solimões, and Amazon to the Atlantic coast, reaching Pará in November of 1639. (The editors point out that the route now appears on Google Earth at http://www.eldoradocolombia.com/ruta-acuna.html.) From Pará, Acuña sailed for Spain to deliver his report to the Council of the Indies before returning to Peru, where he died in 1675. Nuevo descubrimiento del Gran rio de las Amazonas was likely one of two versions of the trip that Acuña prepared. Part travelogue, part ethnography, part natural history, the account gives special attention to the rich realm of Amazonia and ways that its native people prospered in it. The narrative hews closely to its author’s promise to spurn exaggeration, which he describes as discovery’s evil twin, in a clever turn of phrase typical of his writing. At the same time it captures the wonderment that the region still inspires in its visitors. Appearing nearly coterminous with this edition of Nuevo descubrimiento, although apparently without the editors’ knowledge, is another study of Acuña’s account of his trip. After examining a manuscript published as Descubrimiento del río de las Amazonas y sus dilitadas provincias and attributed to the Franciscan Alonso de Rojas, Hugo Burgos has concluded that this is a second, confidential report written by Acuña. Burgos’s Crónica prohibida (2005) makes a convincing case that the report and its accompanying map that include locations and descriptions of Portuguese garrisons along the river constitute a separate version of Acuña’s narrative reserved for the Spanish king and his ministers. Thus we have a pairing similar to Juan and Ulloa’s celebrated Viaje a la América meridional and Noticias secretas de América. Acuña’s work is well known to historians and has become a fundamental source for delineating the effects of European contact with Amazonia. Spliced into the gap between the few surviving sixteenth-century descriptions of the region and more numerous reports prepared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries now being republished in Lima as the Monumenta Amazónica, Nuevo descubrimiento captures a period when native peoples were only beginning to feel the impact of European disease, trade, and slaving. However, the editors present a version of Acuña’s text identical to the one first published in 1641 and, subsequently, in a dozen Spanish-language editions and translations. Scholars may find it difficult to justify purchasing a book priced at €16.8 when versions of the same primary text, including an Oxford University copy of the first edition, appear on the Internet. David Block, University of Texas at Austin doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-138



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Memória do jongo: As gravações históricas de Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras, 1949. Edited by silvia hunold lara and gustavo pacheco. Rio de Janeiro: Folha Seca / CECULT, 2007. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Lyrics. CD. 197 pp. Paper. Jongo is a combination of dance, chanting, drumming, and spiritual ritual originally performed by African descendants in coffee and sugar plantation areas in southeastern Brazil. Currently, Jongo is performed as part of a variety of cultural and political practices of Afro-descendant groups in urban and rural areas. This book, a collection of reminiscences, song transcriptions, and primary sources on Brazilian and Atlantic slavery organized by the historian Silvia H. Lara and the anthropologist Gustavo Pacheco, has the flavor of music. This is not only because the book includes a CD with recordings of Jongo practitioners and singers made by Stanley and Barbara Stein in 1948 in Paraíba Valley. The diverse authors of this book return to songs themselves each time they contextualize, analyze, and reflect on how, under what conditions, and with which theoretical, technical, and methodological approaches music and dance were transformed into knowledge and document. As a young Harvard graduate student in history following WWII, Stanley Stein envisioned a study on the economy of a post-slavery society, following Charles Wagley and other North American social scientists and historians’ views on “plantation America.” The coffee plantation area of Paraíba Valley offered the possibility of studying economic development cycles and the aftermath of abolition. In 1947 Stein and his wife, the historian Barbara Stein, went to Paraíba Valley and the Vassouras region. Instead of an isolated stay limited to visits to the local archives, they interacted with planters, rural workers, former slaves and overseers, local dwellers, merchants, and others. Although slavery was not his primary interest, Stein managed, in his words, “to live together with people who were there, in the same scenario where they had spent their whole life” (p. 51). Stein’s research tools were a combination of ethnographic and historical methodologies. By studying fieldwork techniques under Melville Herskovits and by reading ethnographies and case studies written by Robert Redfield and other anthropologists, the Steins learned to conduct interviews, to interact with people in the field, and to pay attention to material culture and social relations and to the “need to establish a relationship of explicit empathy with the community” (p. 38). Stein identifies these microsocial approaches as a kind of forebear of social history as it was proposed by the French historians. Stein also underscores the role of Brazilian historians in both his training and his book. The transformation of Stanley Stein’s dissertation into the book Vassouras, a Brazilian Coffee County, 1850–1900 (Harvard University Press, 1957) is considered in depth by the historian Silvia Lara, who tracks the reception of the book among Brazilian scholars. In the midst of different intellectual and political debates that have transformed Brazilian historiography over more than three decades, the book was rediscovered by a new generation of scholars. From a “case study” of a small municipality in the southwest of Rio de Janeiro state, it became an example of the combination of rich sources in which the voices and agency of slaves and their descendants could be heard. In this new context



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of reception, Jongo lyrics and Jongo practitioners appeared as privileged sources through which the conditions and culture of the everyday life of slaves could be understood. Until then a subject of only folkloric interest, Lara claims, Jongo lyrics seemed to reveal a different perspective on slavery, supposedly free of the researcher’s mediation and intervention. In a chapter analyzing the place of Jongo in folklorist literature, Hebe Mattos and Martha Abreu describe the contemporary reappropriation of this singular meaning of Jongo as a kind of window on the “slavery past.” Robert Slenes goes further, analyzing the entangled pontos and cumbas, specific themes developed and repeated in Jongo verses and refrains, through a careful reading of the historical literature on colonial slavery in Central Africa. References to religious practices — among others, those related to healing and witchcraft — reveal the plurality of linguistic and cultural influences intervening in Jongo songs. Finally, if for historians, Jongos are a unique source for scholarly understanding of the social history of slavery in Brazil, being what Lara calls the “sounds of bondage” (p. 45), one must ask for which observers and listeners this interpretation really matters and under which circumstances. This question leads us to the ongoing meanings that have been ascribed to Jongos by contemporary practitioners. After reading the careful interpretations made by Pacheco, Lara, Mattos and Abreu, and Slenes, along with Stein’s recollections, it seems clear that Jongo entails diverse practices of meaning over different times and spaces. Among them, slavery stands as one out of many other themes alluded to by Jongo practitioners, not only at the time of Stein’s research but also currently for the Comunidade São José da Serra (p. 104) and other jongueiros groups. As Gustavo Pacheco reminds us, Memória do Jongo is the result of a rather unusual interdisciplinary project. The discovery of Stein’s lost recordings was made possible through the joint endeavors of a group of anthropologists and historians. For this reason, the broad scope of this project invites us to explore other varieties of historicity that these recordings engage, not only those related to Stein’s recollections or to the historical and ethnomusicological interpretations of these meanings in a distant, colonial, and enslaved past. As Pacheco and Abreu and Mattos point out, Jongo is not a lost and forgotten practice. Rather, Jongo continues to be a creative form of expression, rich in its capacity to create and allude to the present. Perhaps, one unforeseen outcome of the recordings revealed in the book is to inspire other inquiries on the diverse temporalities of slavery, not only what it really was in the past but what kind of conversations current knowledge of the past has been producing in the present.

olivia maria gomes da cunha, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-139



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Colonial Period Justicia y gobierno: La Audiencia de Puerto Rico (1831–1861). By gerardo a. carlo altieri. Sevilla: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos / [San Juan, PR]: Academia Puertorriqueña de la Historia, 2007. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. 493 pp. Paper. The Audiencia was an appellate high court established after 1511 by the Spanish monarchs in their American territories, where it became a powerful and influential institution. It had from three to six oidores (judges) whose main duty was to oversee all legal cases brought to them by minor courts or local officials. However, these Audiencias also had administrative and legislative powers whenever a viceroy, a captain general, or governor was absent from the territory or when these officials came in conflict with the crown. These officials, advised by counsel, presided over the Audiencias in their territories. Eighteen Audiencias were created in the Americas over 300 years. The last one was decreed for Puerto Rico in 1831 by King Ferdinand VII. Gerardo Carlo Altieri postulates that its creation was forced by the island’s increasing population and growing wealth and was due to Spain’s fear of losing Puerto Rico. Before 1831, all Puerto Rican legal problems and cases had been sent to be resolved by the Audiencias of Santo Domingo, Puerto Principe, Cuba, and Caracas. The Audiencia’s importance has been brilliantly studied in the general institutional histories of Charles Gibson, Clarence Henry Haring, and J. M. Ots y Capdequí. Other authors such as Alfonso García Gallo, Mark A. Burkholder and D. S. Chandler, J. H. Parry, Pilar Arregui Zamorano, Juan Matienzo, Feliciano Barrios Pintado, and Tomás Polanco Alcántara have written on specific Audiencias, and various other authors have written articles on those created in their countries. The themes researched are diverse: from the art of the Royal Audiencia at Quito to the government of the Audiencia in New Galicia or New Granada. It is accepted that the jurisdiction of each of the Audiencias in the continental lands served to delimit the territorial boundaries of the new independent countries of Spanish America. The Audiencia as the foremost legal institution in the New World has not been studied in the richness of its legal activities since the foundation of the first one. This useful book, originally created as Carlo’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Seville, presents ample research on the Audiencia of Puerto Rico. An introduction, nine chapters, conclusions, a comparative chronology, and a most valuable bibliography fill its 493 pages. It is a notable contribution to Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latin American legal and institutional history. Carlo analyses the importance that the Audiencia had for Puerto Rico and how it became more modernized and more localized than its older sisters in Spanish America. He examines the role of the captain general of the island and his relation to the court. He also studies how the new acuerdo (agreement) decreed by the crown in 1832 gave



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the presidency of the Audiencia to an official called regente, an act that impinged on the captain general’s power. Carlo discusses the new bureaucracy of oidores — judges brought to Puerto Rico from the lost Audiencias — and the numerous new officials and judges (alcaldes mayores) who were part of the new legal network in the island. He includes cases and decisions of the court on such issues as municipal relations, taxes, commerce, military cases, servitude, and slavery. Carlo uses excellent documentary evidence from major archives in Puerto Rico and Spain, which is supported by fine secondary material. This book helps the reader see the manifold actions carried out by the Puerto Rican Audiencia during its first 30 years, when a body of decisions and legal interpretations were made solely for the island. Law has been given scant attention in the study of colonial Latin America, and this work contributes to that knowledge. This valuable work, however, needed to lose its dissertation format and explain in a good glossary many legal terms taken from royal decrees and Spanish courts of previous centuries. It is a book readable mainly by legal historians of Spanish America but not by the general public. The writing is repetitive and confusing in many places (pp. 175–76) in the author’s effort to cover as many aspects as possible of the Audiencia’s activities. There are also long discussions on topics not specifically related to the Audiencia in an effort to bring out the “origins” of the cases seen or decisions by the court. Nonetheless, with his treatise, Gerardo Carlo Altieri opens anew a path for legal and institutional research of Spanish America’s colonial history and of Puerto Rico’s Spanish history.

marcial e. ocasio-meléndez, University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-140

Justicia y tortura en los Andes: Recurso de Judas Tadeo Andrade ante la Audiencia de Charcas, 1791. Coordinated by marcela inch calvimonte and marta irurozqui victoriano. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas / Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia, 2007. 178 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Cloth. The Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia is the repository of, among other treasures, a most valuable and unique document, the “Recurso de Judas Tadeo Andrade, residente en Cochabamba, ante la Audiencia de Charcas para que se reciba información de testigos, según el interrogatorio y las laminas en colores que presenta, sobre diversos excesos del gobernador intendente y otros magistrados de esta provincial.” It consists of a complaint against the Santa Crúz de la Sierra’s intendant and governor Francisco de Viedma, his asesor Eusebio Gómez García, and several other state officials, filed in 1791 before the Real Audiencia de Charcas, in La Plata. The author, Judas Tadeo Andrade, was a shoemaker, barber, and bleeder born in Río de la Plata and residing at the time in the city of Cochabamba. This late eighteenth-century document is particularly striking



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in that it not only addresses vividly the crooked functioning of the justice system and the tortures and abuses committed by the local authorities when they jailed its author, accusing him of having both injured a shoemaker apprentice and disrespected them, but also in that 7 of its 30 pages are colorful graphic illustrations of the irregular conducts described in it. Said illustrations depict the shackles placed on Andrade’s legs and also a metallic security device and lock put around his waist and over his stomach, the public parading of his shackled body on a piece of cloth or on horseback, and the way he was kept in chains tied to a pole while standing up inside a prison cell. Along with the document’s rich iconography, in which several contemporary characters are depicted wearing the garments corresponding to their respective occupational or social group — there being soldiers, officers, scribes, blacksmiths, local noblemen, and other contemporaries who observe the events — there are also detailed written accusations of wrongdoing by several of the crown’s officers. These charges included physical punishments inflicted on Andrade and other prisoners, some of whom died, during the almost three years that he remained locked in a Cochabamba jail, as well as diverse acts of corruption, especially bribe taking, that occurred during the handling of criminal cases and detentions. They are also accused of embezzlement of public funds, encouragement of tobacco smuggling, and influence peddling. This nicely designed publication is presented in landscape format and contains other lavish illustrations. Published jointly by the Bolivian National Archives and Libraries and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the volume offers a facsimile edition of the document in question, its transcription, and three rich essays dealing with its context and related issues. The first essay is a newspaper piece originally published in 1971 by Gunnar Mendoza, who for 50 years (1944–94) directed the Bolivian archives and is credited with having published equivalent historical documents of great significance, including Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela’s celebrated Tales of Potosí. Mendoza examines the collective pre-independence mood at the time of Andrade’s complaint and also reconstructs the barber’s biography, putting into doubt his authorship of the paintings, which are instead attributed to a local artist supposedly commissioned by him to carry out the task. Later historians, however, have forcefully argued otherwise. The second essay, by CSIC researcher and historian Víctor Peralta Ruiz, is a discussion of the larger iconography addressing justice and judicial torture under the Spanish monarchy, within which the only relatively equivalent images identified are the ones contained in Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s Nueva crónica y buen gobierno. The third and most extensive essay, by Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas professor José Enciso Contreras, is a judicious study that addresses the extent to which Judas Tadeo Andrade’s judicial case, tortures, and confinement conditions were similar to or different from other known colonial cases. This essay confirms that judicial abuses, torture, and inhuman jails were far from exceptional in colonial Spanish America. Finally, the volume also offers a unified bibliography listing all of the pertinent works cited in the various essays. This fascinating and useful book belongs in both research collections and even



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general libraries. It lends itself to further discussions of the functioning of the colonial administration and judicial system, the political conditions and culture prevailing on the eve of independence, and the characteristics of the period’s dress codes and material culture. The editors and publishers should be congratulated on making available to a wider readership such a unique historical record and for the selection of informative essays to accompany and explain the significance of the document.

victor m. uribe-uran, Florida International University doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-141

Domination without Dominance: Inca-Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru. By gonzalo lamana. Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Map. Table. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiii, 287 pp. Paper, $22.95. Cloth, $79.95. The goal of this book is to provide an alternative historical narrative of the encounter between the Incas and the Spanish that took place during the 20-year transition from contact to colony during 1531 to 1550. The setting is the high mountainous landscape that was the huge extent of the Inca empire, from present-day Ecuador to the north of Argentina and Chile, and in particular the Inca capital city of Cuzco and its environs. Gonzalo Lamana challenges prevailing interpretations of the extraordinary series of events that led to the defeat of the Incas, which are dominated by diverse and rich accounts of conquistadors, witnesses, indigenous participants, and others biased by sixteenth-century Western/Spanish modes of articulation and translation. He presents the long-accepted readings of the early accounts that contrast the heroic superiority of the Christians (Spaniards) with that of their pagan, inferior enemies, but challenges current scholarship that perpetuates similar ideas while attempting to give voice to the indigenous population, albeit with the same Western attitude, or with the more sensational approach that describes a chain of battles, again with the result of Spanish superiority. Domination becomes dominance, whether it is military, social, religious, or cultural. The exceptionally brave, clever, and often quite successful strategies of the Incas have not been given the attention they deserve, and the author sets this straight in a most fascinating way that has the reader cheering for the Incas and respecting their tenacity and survival skills. The strong theoretical framework that informs the book sets the stage for the topics that follow. Lamana dialogues with critical thinking from different disciplines and traditions, with an emphasis on “semiotic realism” as put forth by Ferdinand de Saus sure (p. 12). He also compares theoretical discussions of colonial transformations in other locations such as Mexico, India, and New Zealand. Undoubtedly, few societies can compare to the complex nature of the Incas, the king himself and the noble hierarchy, and the vast sociopolitical web of his empire, which may make such comparisons almost unnecessary. At times, the comparisons are even distracting as the message gleaned from



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rereading the classic documents is revealed. To reread and reinterpret the well-known accounts, Lamana resorts to alternative sources that include local documents produced at the time, probanzas (legal depositions), nativelike narratives once neglected as fictive, and “lapses” in the conquerors’ accounts that were necessary to justify and validate their actions to the Spanish king. He exposes these silences in the record and the many contradictions that exist. The sequence of Inca kings in this short period and the cruel fates of their reigns are keys to the story. From the ruling Inca Atahuallpa to his successor Manca Capac and his all-out war to regain control, to the new Inca, Atahuallpa’s half-brother Paullu, the Inca kings pursued impressive strategies not only to survive in a now-hostile domain of defeat but to retain some semblance of noble, political, and ritual authority. The key figure in the story is Paullu Inca, whose attempt to be an Inca among the Christians was uncertain. Yet he managed to reinvent himself and in this period of supposedly total Spanish dominance was crowned Inca with great ceremony in 1537. While Manco Inca’s war, presented in the chapter titled “Illusions of Mastery,” sets the stage, Paullu’s coronation in the following chapter, titled “The Emergence of a New Mestizo Consciousness,” may be considered the grand summation of the period and the book. All the military, intellectual, ritual, and sociopolitical dynamics that make up this remarkable transition period can now be appreciated not as the trademarks of Spanish conquest but as the beginning of a new world order for the Inca and his people, based on a “strategy of learning and appropriating the Spaniards — their potencies, cosmology, and forms — to then outdo them” (p. 161). The author can now put all the pieces together, and theoretical constructs such as mimicry, mimesis, appropriation, alterity, imitation, magicality, exoticizing, and co-option inform his contention that the landscape of transition is untidy at best, and fraught with danger if the only interpretation is that of the conqueror. It is time to rethink the role of the Inca and look again at the remnants of empire, especially in Cuzco and its surroundings, where feathers, huacas, and apus still carry meaning.

carol damian, Florida International University doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-142

National Period Ni con Lima ni con Buenos Aires: La formación de un estado nacional en Charcas. By josé luis roca. Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos / La Paz: Plural Editores, 2007. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 771 pp. Paper. The 200-year anniversary of Bolivia’s revolts against Spanish control in May 25, 1809 (Sucre), and July 16, 1809 (La Paz), coupled with the current political reorientations of President Evo Morales, has sparked renewed interest in the meaning of independence, citizenship, and political identity for the embattled Andean nation. As Bolivians look to their past as a guide to the future, independence and the sense of nation it engendered has taken a new importance with interpretations that rarely escape the prevailing politi-



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cal divisions at work. At the heart of these debates are questions such as what exactly is Bolivia’s national identity? Who were the progenitors of this identity, and to what extent do they represent the bulk of Bolivians? It was against this backdrop that the late Bolivian historian and former diplomat José Luis Roca wrote Ni con Lima ni con Buenos Aires: La formación de un estado nacional en Charcas, a dense collection of essays that explore the issue of national identity from preColumbian times to approximately 1828. Roca writes that he began writing this book in 1980 while in exile in London as a rebuttal to the interpretations of fellow historian Charles Arnade (p. 17). Arnade, who also recently passed, had published the influential Emergence of the Republic of Bolivia in 1957. Arnade questioned the basis of Bolivia’s founding and the intentions of its founders, particularly the duplicitous Casimiro Olañeta, whom he considered a “two-faced” opportunist that sided with both rebel and loyalist leaders for personal gain (p. 542). According to Roca, Arnade had misunderstood processes at work during Bolivia’s founding period. Olañeta and others of his generation were driven by what Roca terms a “patriotic logic” (p. 568) wherein they rubbed shoulders with loyalists and supplied intelligence to rebels in the waning years of the war. Roca moreover argues that the lines that separated rebels from loyalists were in constant flux, especially after the liberal revolt of 1820 in Spain, and were further undermined by regional rivalries and a host of colonial-clientelist attitudes. Roca employs Olañeta’s case, along with others who participated in the independence process, as symptomatic of a broader dilemma. Charcas (colonial Bolivia), he argues, had always been under the jurisdiction of outside forces, controlled by viceregal courts in Lima until 1776, and later Buenos Aires. With the onset of the independence wars, both metropolises sought to annex the region and control its mineral wealth. The ensuing conflict brought armies from Argentina, Peru, and as far as Colombia, each laden with political projects that did not always benefit the region’s long-term interests. Roca argues that these campaigns actually accentuated existing animosities and that Bolivia’s national identity was formed precisely in response to these geopolitical tensions. In each of the 24 essays that comprise Ni con Lima ni con Buenos Aires, Roca connects a segment of Bolivia’s history to his overarching theme: Bolivia’s cohesive national identity. Although he begins with an overview of the Aymara kingdoms and colonial Charcas, his central focus is the struggle for independence. He does not mince words or his intentions. He in fact dedicates the book “to the constitutional assembly of 1825 . . . who voted for the sovereign republic of Bolivia” (p. 25). Roca vehemently believed that the history of Bolivia’s founding is relevant for the formation of a strong national character and against those who wish to dismember the nation politically, historically, or otherwise. This book represents Roca’s opus insofar as it encapsulates themes that run through his previous works; some chapters are actually revised versions of older essays. The essays are grounded in archival material and supporting secondary sources, many of which are long out of print. Many of his interpretations proved groundbreaking. His assertions, for example, that loyalism and royalism were not incompatible with patriotism and the



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founding of nation-states have recently been supported by other scholars working on the independence period. He also makes persuasive connections between regional rivalries and political action, but his defense of Olañeta’s presumed altruistic intentions may be overstated. Moreover, his early quarrel with Arnade established the tone and tenor of his writing and this approach, however persuasive, reduces sections of the text into a series of litigation proceedings. These limitations, however, do not diminish the overall value of the book. José Luis Roca was a dedicated historian who was unafraid to ask tough questions and defend his convictions no matter how unpopular they may have been. He approached his topic with candor, humor, and an encyclopedic command of history, particularly as it pertained to Bolivian independence. Ni con Lima ni con Buenos Aires is an important and intriguing source for anyone interested in Bolivian independence and the debates that surround this formative period.

javier f. marion, Emmanuel College, Boston doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-143

Simón Bolívar: Essays on the Life and Legacy of the Liberator. Edited by david bushnell and lester d. langley. Latin American Silhouettes. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008. Illustration. Notes. Index. xv, 207 pp. Cloth, $75.00. This book makes a strong addition to the English-language literature on Simón Bolívar. The opening essay, by the late Simon Collier, is strategically placed, for it provides a lucid introduction to Bolívar’s principal political concerns: first, his preoccupation with creating order while protecting freedom from tyranny and his persistent preference for uncomplicated, practical ways of governing societies without experience of civil liberty and political representation; and second, his effort to nurture Spanish American unity (through plans for various forms of confederation and federation) and to find a stable place for the new republics in the international community through alliance with Britain. Collier addresses these issues with admirable clarity, raising themes that are elaborated in the essays that follow: Bolívar’s education in the political thought of the Enlightenment and its connections to classical republican models; his selective admiration for the French and American revolutions; his belief in the need for republican virtue; his admiration for the “republican monarchy” of Britain; his impatience with complex constitutional systems created by lawyers; his sense of the need to unite the uneducated populace under strong leadership, providing a substitute for kingship; and his urge to cultivate a virtuous political elite capable of educating the masses without being corrupted by power. Following Collier’s introduction, Judith Ewell reflects on the context and causes of Bolívar’s internationalism, showing why his education inclined him to look to Europe, particularly Britain, and how his ideas interacted with political conditions to shape his diplomatic priorities. Karen Racine offers another perspective on Bolívar’s political




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Anglophilia. She draws attention to his brief encounter with London’s social reformers, his empathy with British aristocratic “reform from above,” and its influence on his ideas for a “moral power” embodied in a hereditary senate or chamber of censors. Racine also comments provocatively on his use of religious imagery to promote a providential role, an interesting observation that deserves further elaboration. Iván Jaksic´’s essay takes a distinctive angle on Bolívar’s “enlightened” republicanism in a deft comparison with Andrés Bello’s. This sets Bolívar’s concern to cultivate political virtue against Bello’s insistence on the importance of the civil law, and contrasts Bolívar’s ideas of transnational unity based in political systems with Bello’s promotion of cultural unity. Frank Safford’s sharp sketch of Bolívar’s actions in his final years draws closer attention to the obstacles to embodying his political vision, suggesting how his authoritarianism was shaped by the fusion of his aristocratic, cosmopolitan outlook on the rustic, racially hybrid societies of South America with the practical politics of trying to entrench a constitution that would shore up the structures of a fragmenting Gran Colombia. The theme of Bolívar’s internationalism is revisited in two further essays. Lester Langley’s commentary on his image in the United States gives a nice account of the North American prejudices and realpolitik that hindered Bolívar’s dreams of fraternal connections. David Bushnell gives a persuasive account of why Bolívar’s position on the United States shifted with circumstances, and why his interest in the United States was overshadowed by his conviction that Britain was the indispensable model and ally. Two other essays consider the Liberator’s legacy. Hermes Tovar Pinzón resurrects the positive image of Bolívar, optimistically offering him as an inspiration for constitutional renewal in Colombia’s current troubles. Germán Carrera Damas takes a harsher view, showing how, in the vacuum left by the failures of socialism and liberal democracy, the authoritarian elements of Bolívar’s legacy may be appropriated to legitimate antidemocratic causes. Clearly, Bolívar can still be used to support opposing political positions, following the historical practices traced by John Lombardi in his unifying epilogue to this volume. By focusing tightly on Bolívar himself, this book tends to isolate his thinking from currents of thought (especially Hispanic traditions) that informed other political actors. Should we regard Bolívar as an Anglophile exception in a political world shaped by Hispanic legacies of political thought and behaviour? Jaksic´’s essay indicates other variants, but the discussion is curtailed. Racine also points in the direction of Hispanic influences, implying that Bolívar manipulated popular religious beliefs, but does not connect with the emerging literature on the sacralization of the republic. Bolívar’s role as a military leader is neglected here, too. This is surprising, given the strong case for seeing his military achievements as more historically important than his constitutional imagination or his projects for American unity. However, such caveats certainly should not discourage readers from turning to this book. Not only will they be able to choose essays that display Bolívar from distinctive angles, but they will also get an indirect sense of the wider debates that took place among Spanish Americans as Spanish power crumbled. From 1810, the problems of how new



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states should govern themselves and how they might best relate to a changing international world occupied polar positions in political debate and activity. Reading Bolívar’s position on these key issues affords us an important perspective on the genesis of the Spanish American republics. For those stimulated to further study, Lombardi’s final chapter offers an attractive bibliographical review.

anthony mcfarlane, University of Warwick doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-144

For Glory and Bolívar: The Remarkable Life of Manuela Sáenz, 1797–1856. By pamela s. murray. Foreword by fredrick b. pike. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Photographs. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 222 pp. Cloth, $55.00. Pamela Murray has provided the field with the biography of Manuela Sáenz that we have needed for many years. As studies of the history of the fledgling United States have long recognized, both women as individuals and gender roles as frames of reference were significant factors first in the break with England and then in the formation of the new nation. We have been aware of this on a theoretical level as regards Latin America as well. We now understand, for instance, the importance of the tertulias (which we might translate as “salons”) hosted by women in the unfolding independence movements, and the significance of the status demanded by early republican mothers. But we have tended to lack specifics, studies grounded in the lives of real people. Flamboyant, half-fantastical figures like Manuela Sáenz and Policarpa Salavarrieta have danced around the edges of what is commonly known; now Murray has performed the valuable service of taking one of these women and making her real. Murray’s definitive biography first treats Sáenz’s youth, in itself fascinating as it vividly illustrates the experiences of children born out of wedlock to members of highstatus families in the late colonial period. We then watch a real marriage in operation, that of a young woman of Quito to an English merchant, and observe a genuine example of the kind of power that wives are now understood to have held, even in the patriarchal era of the Bourbon reforms. After Sáenz meets Simón Bolívar, Murray finds herself writing about a much-mythologized period. But with her careful use of extant correspondence — including a more thoughtful and undoubtedly correct sequencing of some undated letters than has hitherto been attempted — she manages to convey the sense of a very real relationship and gives a more than usually believable account of this crucial period in Latin America’s struggle for independence. These long-dead heroes and martyrs were, after all, people who did not always know what they were about, who doubted, changed their minds, argued with each other, and made mistakes. The movement, in short, was bigger than they were. Perhaps most remarkably of all, the biography continues where all the mythological accounts of the protagonist end, that is, after Bolívar’s death, following Sáenz into the 20 years she spent in exile in Peru. Here her life allows us to consider how real people coped with the political near-chaos that erupted in this period. We as readers can test the vary-




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ing theories we have been offered in studies concerning the differences (or lack thereof) between the political parties, and consider what was at stake as we attempt to understand the depth of the bitterness that existed. Sáenz carved out an understanding of this new world and of her place in it, and the author allows us to follow her thoughts. Murray does not shy away from any detail that might help us better understand either this woman or her era — the financial details of her establishment, her changing appearance as the years passed, or her relationship with the black women who worked for her, first as slaves and then as servants. If I have any criticism at all, it would be that there are moments when certainty eludes us and where Murray might have offered more, might have hazarded a guess about events or thought out loud about possible meanings. Still, she clearly refrained from such ventures for the best of reasons: a determination to avoid at all costs the kind of projecting and mythologizing that has been ordinary fare in past studies of “romantic heroines” like Sáenz. Even without the intellectual rewards this book offers in comparing Sáenz’s lived experience with the stories that shroud her life, I would strongly recommend it. For Sáenz was a fascinating, strong-minded woman, and one well worth knowing. The reader’s own life is improved by coming face-to-face with hers.

camilla townsend, Rutgers University doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-145

Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861. By raúl a. ramos. Chapel Hill: Published in association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Illustrations. Map. Tables. Notes. Index. xiii, 297 pp. Cloth, $35.00. Paper, $22.95. In Beyond the Alamo, Raúl A. Ramos sets out to trace political and cultural identity in Bexareño (present-day San Antonio) from 1821 to 1861 in order to provide an alternative understanding of Texan secession and the persistence of Mexican culture in the region. Ramos argues correctly that this period of Texas history is almost always — though Andrés Reséndez’s Changing National Identities at the Frontier is an exception — approached from the point of view of the Alamo, its Anglo defenders, and other important Anglo figures such as Steven F. Austin and Sam Houston. This is partly the result of the dearth of non-Anglo sources and partly the result of the study of Texan secession by U.S. historians who place it within the context of standard periodizations of U.S. history. The previous focus on Anglo heroes turns local Mexicans (or Tejanos) into passive victims instead of the active historical agents that they were. This has resulted in major distortions of the historical record. First, the focus on Anglo heroes results in definitions of nationalism and national identity as either/or propositions when, in fact, they were (and are) often fluid. As Ramos notes, due to the political volatility in Mexico City, Tejanos focused less on the national symbols of nation-states and more on local political practices and social connections.



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Hence, for many Tejanos, rebelling against unjust rules and rulers from Mexico City was not necessarily unpatriotic or un-Mexican. Second, it presents Texan secession as the Anglo triumph of a Texan revolution by creating the idea that there was a sharp break with the past. In fact, there was remarkable continuity before and after Texan secession. For example, many Anglo colonies pledged their allegiance to the Mexican government and helped put down the Edwards rebellion in 1826. Also, important Tejanos often maintained their positions of power after secession (at least until the Know Nothing Party eliminated Anglo support for Tejano Democrats). Furthermore, both Tejano elites (some of whom fought for the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War) and Anglo elites favored slavery and collaborated to extend its practice in the region even as slaves were emancipated in the rest of Mexico. Like Frederick Jackson Turner’s now debunked view of the frontier, traditional interpretations present Texas as a perilous but unpeopled environment that incoming Anglos made into an advanced civilization. Turning Turner’s thesis on its head, Ramos demonstrates that Anglos needed to ally themselves with well-connected Tejano elites in order to maneuver through a complex, already existing society. Without the leadership of Tejano statesmen, many of whom were at odds with their central government in Mexico City, Anglo interlopers would have been able to accomplish little. In fact, Ramos uncovers the leading roles — greater than those played by Austin and Houston — of Erasmo and Juan Seguín. In addition, by approaching this from the point of view of Tejanos, Anglos are cast in the role of immigrants, which they were, bringing into question the motives and ideologies of those migrants. It also calls into question the motives of elite Tejanos who promoted Anglo immigration since they stood to benefit from it economically. Finally, adopting this point of view demonstrates the ways in which “colonization encouraged Tejanos to expand the bounds of what it meant to be Mexican,” rather than calling into question the mexicanidad of Tejanos (p. 88). While its theoretical framework is especially strong, the book is weaker in the area of narrative illustrative examples of culture. Ramos opens with the local 1835 celebration of Mexico’s Independence, which few Anglos attended, only months before the Angloled Army of Texas captured Béxar and the Alamo. These events were planned by several elite Tejanos who would side with the Anglos. He ends the book by highlighting the 2003 Mexican Independence celebration in San Antonio, which focused on “Saluting San Antonio’s Heroes,” including many Mexican Americans as well as Mexican citizens serving in the U.S. military. I kept wishing for more of these moments. Most of the book focuses on the political and ideological aspects of cultural identity. And while the documentation of non-elite Tejanos is sparse, a more vivid portrayal of the ways in which Tejano social networks were maintained would have been helpful. Nonetheless, Ramos’s work is a welcome addition to the field of transnational history. I hope that more historians will take up the challenge of learning multiple national historiographies so that they too can explore the liminal spaces between nation-states where people create their own identities and their own meanings.

andrae m. marak, California University of Pennsylvania doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-146




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El trabajo en las calles: Subsistencia y negociación política en la ciudad de México a comienzos del siglo XX. By mario barbosa cruz. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos / Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Cuajimalpa, 2008. Photographs. Map. Notes. Bibliography. 291 pp. Paper. This new publication provides an analysis of the social experience of work on the streets of Mexico City from the latter years of the Porfiriato through the early years of revolutionary reconstruction and reform. Rejecting the idea that vendors, performers, and those who provided services on public sidewalks, outside markets, and in the streets formed part of a marginal population, Mario Barbosa Cruz argues that the men and women who earned a living selling food, repairing household items, or peddling used clothes in public spaces in the early twentieth-century Mexican capital were key actors within the larger urban economy. Building on the work of urban sociologists who, in the 1970s, demonstrated the importance of networks of solidarity and mutual support among the urban poor, Barbosa asserts that the physical changes of the city over the latter years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, coupled with the growth of the impoverished urban population after the revolution, led to the creation of new ideas about community, identity, and social status in the capital. The volume is organized into five chapters, which are supplemented by photographs drawn from the Casasola collection. In the introduction, Barbosa explains that his goal is to explain the ways in which work and the social experience of the street-based population changed in the context of the physical and political changes that shaped Mexico City between 1900 and 1930. Early on he describes the extensive efforts undertaken after the Wars of Reform to remove church properties, connect streets, and standardize local names on signs and maps. Hand in hand with this impulse for order and standardization, according to Barbosa, was a corresponding obsession on the part of elites with urban hygiene and microorganisms. If, in the early nineteenth century, elites viewed the urban poor as objects of compassion and charity, by the early twentieth century elites and members of Mexico’s growing middle class disparaged street dwellers’ sanitary practices as a way of creating social distance and asserting their own status, according to Barbosa. In the second section Barbosa analyzes the diverse occupations of those who worked on the streets using data drawn from official censuses, statistical bulletins, and contemporary travel accounts of the city to paint a portrait of those who worked in public spaces. He supplements his discussion with evidence drawn from archived letters and petitions from vendors, musicians, and others seeking permission from public officials to work on the street. After the revolution, he notes, women writing to public officials frequently portrayed themselves as poor women widowed by the conflict in order to negotiate advantageously for access to choice vending spots. The ways in which the transformation of urban space affected sociability and relationships among elites and those living and/or working on the streets are the focus of the third chapter. Here Barbosa argues that the establishment and growth of markets and other commercial zones helped forge a sense of urban identity in Mexico City. Barbosa asserts that construction projects, along with vendors’ own uses of space, catalyzed



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new ideas regarding what it meant to be a city dweller. Vendors, performers, and service providers congregated outside new commercial zones, such as the sidewalks of high-end department stores, provoking protests by elite and middle-class observers. The volume’s final chapters examine the discourse of hygiene and the challenge of providing trash, sewage, and water services to the growing city. Through his discussion of Mexico City officials’ campaigns against unsanitary housing as well as rats and stray dogs, Barbosa charts the increasingly prominent role played by public health agencies and sanitary police during the late Porfiriato and early revolutionary years. Readers of this book will be impressed by Barbosa’s detailed description of how construction and infrastructure projects transformed Mexico City’s segregated neighborhoods and enclaves and in many ways made the urban poor more visible. They will also gain an appreciation of the political power accumulated by sanitation experts, who disdained the men and women who worked in public spaces as unhygienic, equating their lack of hygiene with a lack of morality. But readers may be disappointed by Barbosa’s reliance on elite attitudes toward the urban poor to develop his analysis. Despite the introduction’s promise to highlight the ways in which those who worked on the streets of Mexico City played a role in creating a new urban identity, Barbosa relies heavily on social commentary provided by elites to advance his argument, although archived petitions from the poor to public officials inform his analysis in some key places. Nevertheless, the book will be interesting reading for those interested in the history of Mexico City, urban planning, and the politics of public space.

katherine e. bliss, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-147

Los pueblos indios en los tiempos de Benito Juárez. Edited by antonio escobar ohmstede. Colección del Bicentenario del Nacimiento de Benito Juárez, 1806–2006. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2007. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. 363 pp. Paper. This collection of stimulating essays exemplifies how regional approaches have become the dominant method to address the “big questions” of Mexican history: each author uses provincial-level analysis to explore the fate of indigenous people under liberal rule. Readers should be warned that Benito Juárez makes only a fleeting appearance, since most of the chapters focus more broadly on liberalism rather than Juárez’s actions or ideas. While the contributors reach no consensus on the status of villagers in the latter part of the nineteenth century, all portray them as active participants in the evolution of the liberal state. Francie Chassen’s contribution is a sophisticated reading of the well-studied conflict between the then governor of Oaxaca, Benito Juárez, and the combative Juchitecos. Chassen rejects the usual description of “modern” liberals vs. “traditionalist” Zapotecs, demonstrating that the villagers opposing tax and privatization schemes were often adept




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political operators attuned to the new possibilities of citizenship, while Juárez was not the inflexible liberal either. Daniela Traffano uses the case of Oaxacan villages to explore education, one of liberalism’s national crusades. Liberals put great faith in municipal schools as the medium to cultivate the new political identities, and Traffano finds that, judging from the savvy language of petitioners (pp. 86–87), villagers learned the lingo of republican citizenship well, even as they used it to advance communal agendas. Raymond Buve’s contribution and that of Alonso Domínguez Rascón both demonstrate how liberals mobilized support within indigenous communities. Buve’s essay is a fine example of historical craft, carefully reconstructing the motives of different indigenous community leaders as they interacted with the state’s political and economic leaders. He finds that local political competition often drove factional loyalties, but that central to the motives of indigenous liberals was the desire for municipal autonomy. Domínguez Rascón explores the surprising legacy of Juárez’s refuge in the state of Chihuahua, where the itinerant liberal government confirmed land ownership of various pueblos. He reconstructs Juárez’s journey through Chihuahua cementing political alliances with local communities; more significantly, the Rarámuri used the memory of the president’s actions to defend their interests well into the twentieth century. Liberalism’s “Indian problem” originated in its conflict-ridden drive to transform communal institutions profoundly imbued with colonial Catholic practices and local traditions into organs of a state built around individual citizens. Romana Falcón uses the military draft to explore villagers’ ideas of justice and contrast them to the liberal state’s “modern” legal notions that left little room for appeals for mercy. She uses Maximilian’s imperial project as a point of comparison, noting that villagers enthusiastically returned to the language of the antiguo régimen at the first opportunity. She argues that liberal discourse rejected the traditional concepts of lo justo that villagers had used so effectively under the paternalistic colonial state. Antonio Escobar and Ana María Gutiérrez are not convinced that indigenous villagers disdained the liberal project. In their exhaustive review of the complex land tenure histories of Huastecan villages they find that Indians often successfully held their own and adopted diverse strategies to conserve their territories within a liberal framework. Most notably they point to the use of condueñazgos (where villages maintained their communal lands as large undivided properties belonging to associations of private owners), thus permitting comuneros, now redefined as “association members,” to maintain communal traditions of land use under the fiction of private titles. While the privatization schemes frequently had tragic consequences, the nineteenth-century state was not an unstoppable juggernaut impervious to indigenous resistance. Brian Connaughton and Mario Vázquez Olivera offer an innovative comparison of liberal-Indian relations in Mexico’s southern states with Rafael Carrera’s conservative presidency in Guatemala. Carrera’s rule recalled the colonial order in that he granted communities autonomy and was willing to negotiate solutions that disregarded universal principles in favor of local social realities. It did not eliminate conflict; it merely channeled it into a system of negotiation. Liberalism in Chiapas was a rejection of Carrera-



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style accommodation in favor of a system that sought to subordinate Indians. Carrera allied with villagers against his liberal enemies, creating opportunities for Indians to act independently, while chiapaneco elites never sought to mobilize village supporters and fashioned an exclusionary system. While many of the essays touch on the role of municipalities in liberal politics, two chapters of the book specifically explore how town government fared after the reform. Carmen Salinas Sandoval and Diana Birrichaga Gardida’s unfocused discussion of municipal administration and communal lands in the state of Mexico makes some interesting points (for example, the importance of fiscal considerations in privatization), but the impact of these contributions is diluted in a flurry of superfluous data. In contrast, J. Edgar Mendoza’s case study from Oaxaca concisely demonstrates how local political actors subverted liberal laws to keep communal traditions alive under the aegis of constitutional municipalities. This compilation of cutting-edge research will be of great service to any student of liberalism and its impact on Mexico’s indigenous population.

michael t. ducey, Universidad Veracruzana doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-148

Runaway Daughters: Seduction, Elopement, and Honor in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. By kathryn a. sloan. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi, 244 pp. Paper, $27.95. Scholars have mined the complex political and economic events during the reign of Mexico’s Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911) to unearth essential material for their studies on the profound economic transformations that took place during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Kathryn Sloan’s original contribution to the historiography of this formative time in Mexico’s history is to delve beneath the surface of political events and uncover how working-class citizens from Oaxaca de Juárez (today’s Oaxaca City) interacted with the state over issues of honor, courtship practices, and everyday gender conflicts. Court cases involving rapto, or the abduction of young women at the hands of their lovers, provide the backbone of Sloan’s engaging study, and the witnesses’ intriguing accounts are as seductive as the lovers’ promises of marriage and life-long love. Throughout her work Sloan stresses women’s strength and agency despite their calculated court testimony that often professed weakness at the hands of their male partner. Women’s statements were evidence of a courtroom script that required all parties, including daughters, lovers, fathers, and mothers, to act out defined gender roles even while the couple’s own actions contradicted their testimonies and belied traditional gender norms. As Sloan argues, ultimately the rapto cases reveal that the young women, often in cahoots with their male lovers, effectively negotiated with liberal state authorities and structures in order to achieve a degree of freedom from parental authority and shape their future destinies. Moreover, although Sloan states that the litigants in her




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court cases “never mentioned the color of skin” (p. 7), ethnicity also plays an important role in Sloan’s study, especially since many of the women discussed in her book came from Zapotec or Mixtec communities. Sloan traces the transformation of cultural and societal factors that impacted the relationship between the state and its working-class citizens over time. For example, Sloan argues that evidence from the colonial era suggests that instead of eloping, young couples turned to the church courts, which most often supported their free will in marriage if they faced parental opposition. While the early post-independence civil courts continued the practice of siding with young men and women over their parents’ objections to marriage, by the second half of the nineteenth century a more liberal state usurped the power of the church in matters of family life. The growing influence of the state within family matters is reflected in the distribution of Sloan’s rapto court cases: although she examined a total of 212 cases from 1841 to 1919, most originated during the Porfiriato. Parents, armed with more “modern” liberal laws that sought to ensure social order through “family stability and the regulation of female sexuality” (p. 7), now utilized the civil courts to oppose their children’s marriages if they deemed them unacceptable. Elopement, then, was an ingenious ploy to circumvent this parental authority, but it was a co-optation of liberal ideals by the young couples to control their individual destinies as well. Sloan is most effective when she analyzes the ways in which popular culture permeated Mexican society and thus influenced men’s and women’s notions of love. Love letters included within many of the court cases reveal prevalent ideas concerning morality, honor, and appropriate gender norms that circulated widely throughout Mexican society. Young and old alike avidly read inexpensive broadsheets whose vivid stories presented clear moral lessons on love, betrayal, and intimate relationships. Even illiterate folk could enjoy this popular literature, as people orally shared the dramatic narratives among their neighbors, families, and friends. Here is where Sloan discusses the impact of the artist José Guadalupe Posada, who illustrated the broadsheets’ spectacular tales of lost virginity, alcohol abuse, star-crossed lovers, parents’ violent acts toward their children, and crimes of passion. Rapto represented a sophisticated ploy employed by young lovers to force their parents’ consent to marriage, especially after sexual intercourse had “soiled” a young women’s fragile honor. Because female consent in rapto cases can be difficult to decipher, though, I wish Sloan had included more on the theoretical discussions that focus on the complexities of rapto, especially since she chose to analyze primarily those cases that were “akin to elopement” (p. 9) or where couples were involved in an acknowledged relationship before they ran away. Still, Sloan is part of a growing movement to center women and gender in Latin American histories, and I applaud Sloan’s insistence on women’s agency in the determination of their lives. Sloan’s lively writing and her apt use of fascinating documents will ensure that this book will enjoy a broad audience.

stephanie smith, The Ohio State University doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-149



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Dos mujeres fuera de serie: Elvia Carrillo Puerto y Felipa Poot. By piedad peniche rivero and kathleen r. martín. Mérida: Instituto de Cultura de Yucatán. 2007. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. 123 pp. Paper. Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatán Women and the Realities of Patriarchy. By stephanie j. smith. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi, 257 pp. Cloth, $65.00. Paper, $27.50. Yucatán has long been recognized as Mexico’s leading revolutionary laboratory of the teens and twenties, in no small part due to reforms aimed at uplifting women: divorce, limited suffrage, expanded opportunities for education, and even a feminist congress. Although Yucatán’s women’s movement has been the object of several notable studies, we still know relatively little about how revolutionary legal reforms and discursive shifts affected the everyday lives of these women. The two works reviewed here address this gap. In Gender and the Mexican Revolution, Stephanie J. Smith explores how subaltern women tried to use revolutionary tribunals and courts to minimize the disadvantages of gender, class, and ethnicity. In doing so, she reveals the profound contradictions that marred the revolution’s “rhetoric of equality” (p. 13). Mining rich veins of previously untapped judicial archives from the administrations of Governor Salvador Alvarado (1915–17) and of the more radical Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1922–23), Smith carefully examines criminal prosecutions for sexual assault, legal and social disputes over social definitions of morality, and divorce proceedings. The result is a highly readable and at times poignant social history rich with political implications. Even the most radical reforms, such as Carrillo Puerto’s, often unintentionally reproduced conservative, patriarchal attitudes, but Carrillo Puerto’s assassination in a botched military uprising in early 1924 accelerated these conservative trends. As Paul Eiss has shown, Alvarado’s much-trumpeted emancipation of Maya peons from serfdom on henequen haciendas was followed by state efforts to restore a racialized labor hierarchy. Taking a similar tack, Smith carefully examines Alvarado’s tribunals tasked with freeing indigenous women trapped in domestic servitude as well as protecting widows and female orphans. A surprising number of cases were in fact initiated by young indigenous women seeking to escape domestic bondage that was socially sanctioned as a quasi-familial relationship. Litigants invoked notions of revolutionary justice to escape exploitation, but Smith finds judges often confirmed rather than overturned established social hierarchies, limiting gains promised by Alvarado. Again and again, Smith draws important parallels between discursive and procedural marginalization of women (often young Maya women) in the courts and the postrevolutionary state’s retreat from revolutionary vindication of workers and indigenous people. Both processes, she argues, resulted from radical leaders’ attempts to consolidate power during postrevolutionary reconstruction. In examining revolutionary divorce legislation and its effects, she discerns a simi-




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lar conservative undertow beneath the revolutionary high tides. Following national precedents, Alvarado greatly expanded divorce and branded the change as progressive and liberating. Yet Smith’s careful reconstruction of broken marriages and divorce proceedings demonstrates that the freedom to dissolve marriage in practice largely favored non-Maya, fairly privileged men, rather than allowing women to escape what Christine Hunefeldt called “intimate tyranny.” Carrillo Puerto’s subsequent liberalization of divorce laws, which meant marriage could be terminated quickly by only one partner, did not reverse this trend. Just as importantly, Smith’s work shows the many intricate ways in which science helped to rationalize gender inequality. Here she expands on the work of scholars like Donna Guy and Katherine Bliss in important new ways. During Carrillo Puerto’s socialist regime, the new criminal pathology unit favored empirical evidence, such as pseudoscientific hymen examinations, over supposedly fallible human testimony when investigating sexual assaults, including statutory rape. Consequently, female victims were often silenced. Revolutionary attempts to regulate sex workers from exploitation also deployed scientific examinations targeting women’s bodies. By making the control of venereal disease a priority of public policy, Alvarado and Carrillo Puerto promised prostitutes and society as a whole a modern, healthy future. Attempts to protect sex workers from abusive madams and diseased johns was also justified as protecting “good” women from these “bad” ones. Sex workers chafed at invasive campaigns of surveillance, inspection, and even incarceration. Smith, like Brazilianist Susan Besse, sees the state as modernizing patriarchy by replacing fathers, husbands, and brothers as guardians of women. Of course, Mexico, unlike Brazil, had a social revolution. But Smith repeatedly shows how its celebratory rhetoric of liberation camouflaged the survival of existing inequalities. Like much of the recent, cutting-edge social and cultural history of postrevolutionary Mexico, Smith’s fine monograph uncovers significant continuities with the Porfiriato, for example how the Socialists of the 1920s had a faith in science that rivaled that of Porfirian positivists, even if their social consciences were much more developed. It is hard to find fault with this bold, empirically grounded monograph. This book is not a social history of marriage, but it seems to me that because bad marriages are over-represented in the archives, we know much less about good ones. I wondered if the Mexican Revolution might have bettered some marriages indirectly or unintentionally, for instance by raising literacy rates, flattening some social hierarchies, or limiting parental interventions. Piedad Peniche Rivero and Kathleen R. Martín’s two essays contribute to understanding Yucatecas’ role in the larger process of state formation. Peniche examines the political leadership of Felipe’s sister Elvia Carrillo Puerto and her Feminist League “Rita Cetina Gutiérrez,” using Alain Touraine’s influential model of social movements. The League’s mainly middle-class members tried to educate and mobilize subaltern women from 1919 to 1924, with some success. More (in)famously, they launched a social reform or “moralization” project, including an explosive proposal to popularize birth control.



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Only brother and governor Felipe protected Elvia and her collaborators from a potentially violent reaction, not only from outraged Catholics but from many male Socialists. For me, Peniche’s greatest insight might well be her revealing analysis of how Elvia and other League leaders hoped to make marriage socialist by basing it on free unions unsullied by old prejudices like the invidious distinction between children born in and out of wedlock. Elvia’s contemporaries often misinterpreted the notion of free love, but Peniche shows its historical context in Yucatán: a crucial but long-ignored debate sparked by the Mexican Revolution over how to make marriage truly egalitarian. The polemic it ignited helps us understand why, after Felipe Carrillo Puerto’s death, his Socialist Party purged Elvia from congress and erased moderate feminist goals from its platform. Some of the “clubs de madres” Elvia and her League founded for campesinas probably survived and might well have shaped the life of another extraordinary Yucatecan woman, Felipa Poot. Born in 1903 to a Maya family trapped in peonage in Kinchil municipio in western Yucatán, she learned to read and write in Spanish with the help of a Oaxacan hacienda foreman who then sexually assaulted her after her family moved off the hacienda with the revolutionary abolition of peonage. Tragically, her family forced her to give up her first child and to become the common-law wife of a much older man, with whom she had a second child, all this while still in her teens. Martín argues that these personal traumas sharpened Poot’s budding political consciousness and years later encouraged her to take advantage of the limited political space opened when a young cardenista teacher came to Kinchil and started a federal school, set up a firewood cooperative, and tried to unionize workers in the mid-1930s. Novelist Martín Luis Guzmán and other historians (including this reviewer) have researched Poot’s political career and disputed the circumstances surrounding her dramatic, violent death in March 1936 during an electoral clash. Kathleen Martín contributes important local perspectives on Poot’s assassination and the collective memory of her life and death. But her work’s great value comes by showing how the personal injustices Poot suffered mainly because she was a woman encouraged her to become politically active in the cardenista left in Yucatán. Rather than choosing between the struggle for women’s rights, on one hand, or class vindication, on the other, Poot was uniquely positioned to fight for both. Martín explores the intersection of personal life and political activism through her adept use of oral history. In doing so, she suggests that gendered political consciousness can be generated from below. Like Vicky Funari and Jennifer Maytorena-Taylor’s film Paulina, Martín’s work suggests how young Mexican women were victimized by revolutionary violence and their own families, and how some resisted.

ben fallaw, Colby College doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-150




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Historia de Yucatán: Siglos XIX–XXI. By marie lapointe. Translated by ofelia maría del rocío alonzo cabrera. Mérida, Yucatán, México: Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2008. Photographs. Figures. Maps. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Indexes. 317 pp. La autora comienza diciendo que este libro es una “síntesis” de la historia de Yucatán en los últimos tres siglos y que podría ser interesante para los turistas que viajan por la Península sin saber que hay más que playas y sitios arqueológicos por conocer. En realidad, es un erudito texto de consulta para el especialista a cuya lectura el turista difícilmente se sentirá convidado. Efectivamente, con una avalancha de datos duros tomados de distintas fuentes, incluyendo archivos de Yucatán, México y Londres, compendia los proyectos hegemónicos presidenciales impuestos a la oligarquía de hacendados y políticos yucatecos de 1876 a nuestros días, a los que la autora llama “pactos de dominación”. Toma en cuenta todas las regiones socioeconómicas pero en realidad lo medular sucedió en la capital, Mérida, corazón de la región henequenera, al NW del Estado. Aquí, a fines del siglo XIX, comenzó a generarse gran riqueza gracias a la producción en haciendas de la fibra de la planta de henequén, utilizada para elaborar el hilo agrícola más barato hasta la invención de los plásticos. Y sucedió, en particular, por el enjuego de poder que representó el control monopólico del mercado de dicha fibra y luego de la cordelería (CORDEMEX). Marie Lapointe propone considerar dichos pactos con “perspectiva dinámica que permite comprender cómo los conflictos entre los poseedores del poder político y económico y sus intermediarios”, que se debían a sus propias clientelas, “han sido vividos, negociados e incorporados dentro de un conjunto de reglas de dominación administradas por el estado federal y la entidad federativa” (p.13). Sin embargo, dice aplicar el método del “análisis de contenido”, refiriéndose al uso de técnicas cuantitativas sociológicas, pues no presenta textos, discursos ni cultura popular. En efecto, después de los antecedentes de las Épocas prehispánica y colonial, la autora contrapuntea convincentemente entre México y Yucatán los detalles de los sucesivos pactos institucionales, a saber: el Porfiriato, el “Populismo revolucionario” de Salvador Alvarado y de Felipe Carrillo Puerto, relativamente independiente de sus patrones nacionales, los presidentes Carranza y Obregón, respectivamente, el “Corporativismo” cardenista, el “Proteccionismo” alemanista y el “Neoliberalismo” salinista. Así, este libro se inscribe entre el populismo y el revisionismo, corrientes historiográficas entre los años 1920’s-1960s que miraban a las instituciones y a los caudillos y las elites en su eterna lucha por dinero y poder, sin tomar en cuenta la participación de “los de abajo”, enfoque que ya tiene antecedentes en Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatán, 1876–1915, de Allen Wells y Gilbert Joseph (1996), libro que ha iluminado el Porfiriato yucateco. Congelado en el tiempo, sin perspectiva de género ni etnicidad, marcas también de la nueva corriente historiográfica de “neo-populismo” e historia cultural de México, la autora finca sus análisis implícitamente en la restauración de los oligarcas del Viejo Régimen mediante pactos



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con los oportunistas revolucionarios del Nuevo, sin ofrecernos, por cierto, un balance final para valorar los efectos de los sucesivos pactos en términos de acumulación. Es verdad, como dice Ben Fallaw, que la nueva historia de México todavía tiene que explicarnos el fracaso de las movilizaciones populares para arrancar más concesiones al estado, como la democracia y el sufragio femenino. De lo que él mismo respondió utilizado el papel del alcohol que el estado yucateco empleó ilegalmente entre los años 1920’s-1930’s para lubricar su maquinaria política, lo que a la vez atrasó y avanzó la historia. El hecho fue que por la significación cultural del alcohol entre los hombres, en medio de la corrupción o gracias a ella, su consumo, venta y destilación ilegales abrieron espacios a protestas sociales impensables antes de la Revolución, además de consolidar a una nueva clase política que se independizó de la elite de hacendados gracias al dinero clandestino. El costo fue alto: protección de cacicazgos locales y eliminación del vibrante movimiento feminista socialista que, entre tantos anhelos tuvo el de la temperancia. La democracia y el sufragio femenino fueron diferidos (LARR 37, 2002, pp. 39, 52–62). Quizá si Marie Lapointe se hubiese aproximado con enfoque antropológico al caciquismo y la corrupción, en particular cuando el estado tuvo el control del mercado del henequén entre 1938–1955, que la Revolución arrancó a la International Harvester y sus agentes locales, la “casta divina”, habría encontrado que trabajadores y campesinos utilizaron prácticas políticas cotidianas para negociar espacios y avanzar intereses locales poniendo límites, si no condiciones, a los términos de los pactos desde arriba. En todo caso, como ella concluyó, la flexibilidad a toda prueba que demostró la elite le permitió mantener su poderío económico, pero no el político.

piedad peniche rivero, Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-151

Yucatán through Her Eyes: Alice Dixon Le Plongeon, Writer and Expeditionary Photographer. By lawrence gustave desmond. Foreword by claire l. lyons. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009. Photographs. Maps. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxvii, 387 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Pioneering archaeologists have often made mistakes as great as their contributions. Yucatán through Her Eyes offers the case in point of Alice Dixon Le Plongeon (b. 1851), who worked side by side with her more famous husband Augustus as they carried out archaeological and photographic explorations of places such as Chichén Itzá and Uxmal. The book sandwiches her diary of adventures in Yucatán (1873–76) between more conventional biographies of her earlier and later years. Alice was the youngest daughter of a London photographer. Desperate for a life of adventure and authorship, she realized her dreams by marrying an eccentric gold miner turned archaeologist 20 years her senior. But it was a meeting of hearts as well as minds, and the Le Plongeons shared an affectionate marriage as they endured hardships unimaginable to most scholars today. In 1884 they relocated to New York City, where they spent the next two decades promoting




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fanciful theories about Maya peoples. Alice died of breast cancer in 1910, only two years after her husband’s own demise and a few months before Mexico went up in the smoke of revolution. This book by Lawrence Desmond succeeds in three areas. First, we get enough information on early archaeology to fill a mid-sized temple, and we gain a painfully clear notion of how difficult it was to carry out early excavations. The workers, tired of low pay and the Le Plongeons’ iron rations, often ran away or worked in low gear. In those days the question of who owns antiquities had yet to be resolved, and the Le Plongeons fell into a bitter quarrel with the nationalist Mexican government about rights to the reclining chacmool statue that they discovered. (Incidentally, it was the Le Plongeons who gave this iconic figure its name, still used today, after the Maya name for a type of jaguar.) To top things off, the couple had to live on snakes and wild turkeys that they managed to kill. Alice’s diary tells us much about the culture and folkways of nineteenth-century Yucatán. She paints vivid scenes of popular religion and neocolonial relations between Hispanics and Mayas. I appreciated her descriptions of sacatan drum dances, the rebels of Chan Santa Cruz, and the 1876 revolution of Teodocio Canto. Finally, and perhaps most surprising, Yucatán through Her Eyes provides a vivid account of the travails of yesteryear’s explorer-photographers. True to the training she received in her father’s shop, she worked with fragile wet collodion plates that had to be developed in the field. The cameras lacked shutters, and Augustus, who handled most of the picture taking, simply uncapped the camera lens for the time necessary. Chemicals often ran out or had to be iced down to functional temperatures. (It is worth mentioning that Le Plongeon learned the trade from no less than photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot.) The photographs included here are in a class by themselves as documents of 1870s Yucatán. Add to these contributions Alice’s lively voice and gift for pithy Victorian phrases, and you have a narrative considerably more interesting than the writings of the betterknown Augustus. If Alice Dixon Le Plongeon had so much to say, why are we only reading about her now? Desmond attributes Alice’s obscurity to her bottomless faith in and crusader’s dedication to her husband’s crackpot ideas. Augustus Le Plongeon went to his grave convinced that the Mayas of Yucatán represented a mother culture that had somehow brought knowledge and civilization to Egypt. He was also convinced of his own ability to read the Maya “alphabet” (even though little glyph writing survives at northern Early Postclassic sites such as Chichén Itzá, in large part because the invention of paper reduced the demand for more durable stone inscriptions). Even among the scientific community of his own day, this viewpoint soon became untenable, but neither husband nor wife ever considered that they might have been wrong. They also dealt heavily in spiritualism, reincarnation, dream revelations, and the lost continents of Mu and Atlantis. Alice found nothing inappropriate in publishing verse novels that celebrated Augustus’s bizarre theories. It was this Madame Le Plongeon that late nineteenth-century scholars knew and understandably chose to forget.



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Lawrence Desmond has made heroic attempts to synthesize the vast collection of Le Plongeon materials housed at the J. Paul Getty Museum. He ignores most recent scholarship on Yucatán, studies that would have provided a far deeper context to Alice’s observations. In some places the text remains underdeveloped. Material on Alice as early feminist and critic of social inequalities, for example, is less rich, perhaps because these concerns came late to her, and perhaps because they always remained secondary to the promotion of Maya diffusionist theories. Still, her voice and determination carries this book through to its conclusion. Bravery, wit, and careful observation inform every page. Maybe Alice Dixon Le Plongeon’s insistence that spirits communicate with the living was right after all.

terry rugeley, University of Oklahoma doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-152

Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity. By john mraz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 343 pp. Cloth, $84.95. Paper, $23.95. Looking for Mexico provides a narrative of the most important developments in the formation and makeover of Mexican culture through the visual arts, Mexican photography in particular and Mexican film to a lesser extent. Unveiling the connections between visual culture and the construction of Mexican identities at different moments in Mexican history, the author provides an insightful and at times provocative analysis of some of the most remarkable photographers of Mexican people and landscapes. From the author’s perspective, the formation of Mexican national identity has been “carried out largely through the modern visual cultures of photography, cinema and picture stories” (p. 2); consequently a dialogue with the history of images of Mexico enriches the analysis of the foundations of mexicanidad in modern times. Chapter 1 looks at the origins of photography in Mexico, from the mid-nineteenth century to the consolidation of the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship and the flourishing of commercial photography. Chapter 2 discusses visual culture in the revolutionary period (1910–40), featuring in detail the Casasola family’s entrepreneurial activities in those turbulent times as well as the emergence of artistic photography in the country with Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Chapter 3 deals with actors and directors of Mexican cinema and their contributions as icons of postrevolutionary Mexican nationalism in the 1940s and 1950s. Here the author also describes the first steps toward an independent and critical photographic practice made by Hector Garcia and the Mayo brothers, pioneers of critical photojournalism in Mexico. Chapter 5 offers a vivid narrative of contemporary developments in visual culture in accordance with the developments of new Latin American cinema and the new photojournalism. This chapter generously stretches to the first decade of the twenty-first century to discuss present-day trends.




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Looking for Mexico presents the reader with a meticulous overview of the most prominent photographers in the country and their connections with contemporary social and political events. It is informative, written in an engaging style, and presented following clear and distinctive periods in Mexican cultural history. Unfortunately, the theoretical framework needed to analyze both visual arts and the processes of national identity formation seems to be somewhat missing from the picture. While the biographical information on photographers, filmmakers, and even movie stars and showbiz celebrities is abundant, the actual artwork and its analysis are not thoroughly represented. The manuscript reads at times as a collection of biographic/epic notes on different prominent figures of Mexican cinema and other artists, taking the reader on a guided tour of Mexican celebrities in cinema and photography. A similar problem affects the discussion of Mexican national identity in the book. While the connections between films, photography, ideologies, and identities are definitely an unexplored and intriguing area in Mexican culture, the process of identity formation through the visual arts is not addressed in the book. The author seems to be satisfied instead with the identification of different authors and their work in simple binary oppositions such as picturesque and antipicturesque, nationalist and nonnationalist, and folkloric and authentic. Issues of gender, ethnicity, class, and immigration are certainly missing in the discussion of different versions of mexicanidad, while the ideological/cultural lenses and filters of American photographers and filmmakers working in Mexico are rarely addressed. The photographic practices of women artists in Mexico — for instance, Mariana Yampolsky, Graciela Iturbide, or Flor Garduño — are either not analyzed or are easily dismissed as “exotic” or “driven for foreign audiences.” Moreover, the criteria for including some artists and media and excluding others seem to follow no particular consistency when it comes down to the connections with Mexican identity. If the book’s purpose is to unveil the foundations of Mexican national identity in visual culture, why are television and popular magazines not included, while photographers with little appeal for the general public are studied in detail? Who could argue that Televisa’s soap operas and sitcoms, and the Alarma or the Santo movies did not have a much more significant role in the construction of particular Mexican identities than for instance Edward Weston, Julie Taymor, or Paul Strand? It seems that the latter group has been pivotal in the creation of identities for those looking into Mexico, but not necessarily in the forging of Mexican identities for people of Mexican descent. A distinction between Mexicanists and Mexicans is never addressed in the manuscript. Nonetheless, John Mraz’s book constitutes a significant step in our understanding of Mexican photography in the twentieth-century Mexican landscape. The sections on contemporary photographers, from Hector Garcia to Pedro Meyer and from Manuel Alvarez Bravo to the rise of photojournalism in Mexico, are particularly noteworthy.

juan javier pescador, Michigan State University doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-153



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National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment. By roberto tejada. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 214 pp. Paper, $27.50. The history of photography and the analysis of photographic practices and experiences in modern Mexico are claiming a central place in the discussion of modernity and culture in Mexican society. Not so long ago, cultural and art historians summed up the contributions of photography to Mexican culture with the honorary mention of one or two photographers, after dedicating the most attention to the fabulous lives and deeds of the three great Mexican mural painters Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Roberto Tejada has written a book that effectively challenges the secondary position art historians have assigned to photography in the landscape of Mexican cultural history. Written as a collection of essays dedicated to pivotal figures in the development of Mexican photography — the Casasola family, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the Boystown collection — National Camera successfully expands the horizons of the debate on Mexican visual arts from a transnational/ transborder perspective. The book sets sights on repositioning photographic production in Mexico as a truly transnational practice where cultural exchange and border-crossing between Mexico, the United States, and Europe are integral components of a shared visual environment generated in Mexican territories by native and foreign artists. Starting with the Casasola family’s photographic experiences and finishing with the Boystown collection and its odd itinerary in American cultural institutions from its genesis on the U.S.-Mexican international border, Tejada provides a vibrant, complex, and passionate study. He argues convincingly that photography in greater Mexico provides a unique angle from which to analyze the emergence of cultural and intellectual modernity in the twentieth-century Mexican artistic landscape. Tejada’s ambitious essays document his quest to discuss and redefine the meanings of modernism and modernity in its Mexican version, while refusing to accept the position assigned to photography as a minor development in the national narrative of Mexican culture. He incorporates in a rigorous and lucid manner the ways in which cultural, national, gender, and sexual differences are embedded in the visual arts to generate a shared image environment floating along the porous border between Mexico and the United States. Tejada’s discussion and analysis of the images produced in Mexico by Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo provide a fresh and inspired view of the cultural landscape in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. The book is at its best when discussing the cross-fertilization of intellectual and artistic trends that shaped photographic artistry in the turbulent Mexico of that time. In a truly transnational and transcultural narrative, Tejada sheds light on the cultural and intellectual thread between Paris, New York, and Mexico City by which photography evolved and emerged. While always intriguing and compelling in their own right, not all the essays in




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the book are written with the same degree of analytical complexity and therefore are not equally persuasive or convincing. Moreover, in trying to connect photographic practice to contemporary positions on modernity, the argument follows sometimes unnecessarily long detours, taking the reader through philosophical and metaphysical debates from Mexican and European thinkers. Notwithstanding these points, National Camera expands the discussion of Mexican photography in innovative and insightful ways, providing the reader with a fresh and sophisticated interpretation of the artwork by some of the most prominent photographers of twentieth-century Mexican history. It represents an important contribution to the debate on Mexican intellectual and cultural modernity from the point of view of a transnational image landscape. It will certainly stimulate further research and discussion.

juan javier pescador, Michigan State University doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-154

Mexico since 1980. By stephen haber, herbert s. klein, noel maurer, and kevin j. middlebrook. The World since 1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xix, 244 pp. Cloth, $80.00. Paper, $23.95. Mexico since 1980 addresses a fundamental question: why have the profound economic, political, and social changes that have taken place in Mexico since the early 1980s not produced a major transformation of the country? To explain this paradox, the authors focus on how the lack of liberal democratic institutions in the postrevolutionary period fostered the formation of rent-seeking coalitions of asset holders and the government. In order to provide incentives for investors to channel capital to different economic activities, the government granted monopoly privileges or designed economic policies that curtailed competition in order to compensate for the risks of expropriation and the lack of enforcement of property rights. At the same time, the government implemented a patronage system to respond to the demands of peasants, urban workers, and bureaucrats in exchange of political support for the PRI, a party that remained in power until 2000. In economic and political terms, the authoritarian rule delivered stability and growth for a half-century. The GDP per capita increased on average 3.2 percent per year in the period 1932–81, while the PRI held sway in national and local elections. Yet the rent-seeking coalition reaped most of the economic benefits. In the early 1980s the Mexican economy was closed to foreign competition. Monopolies and oligopolies dominated the industrial structure, public enterprises participated in a wide range of sectors, and income distribution was ranked among the worst in Latin America. In the political arena, the PRI controlled the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches of government at federal and state levels. A quarter-century later change was apparent. The Mexican government liberalized



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its economy, signed a free trade agreement with the United States and Canada, fostered foreign direct investment, and privatized most public enterprises. From the mid-1980s on, opposition parties won elections in municipalities and states, and the presidency in 2000. The authors define these accomplishments as the “second Mexican revolution” because, taken together, they should be a milestone in Mexico’s history. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the overall outcome has been disappointing due to the extremely heavy burden inherited from the past. The rule of law and the enforcement of property rights fare poorly, and institutional arrangements still allow the discretion of public officials. The analysis of commercial and social policy, the performance of the banking sector, and the major trends in Mexican politics — central issues developed in chapters 3 to 6 — demonstrate that the depth and scope of reforms faced constraints rooted in the authoritarian regime. Therefore, shifts in policies were often incomplete, or worse, they replicated well-known patterns. For instance, the Mexican Telephone Company (Telmex) faced no competition after its privatization in 1990, and only recently new players are struggling to participate in the telecommunications sector. Likewise, trade liberalization represented a radical departure from the protectionism implemented since World War II, but “neither joining the GATT nor signing NAFTA was a panacea for Mexico’s diverse economic ills” (p. 82). The same holds true for reforms to the pension system, credit policy, mortgage market, and judicial system. However, the laggard economic growth of recent years and the failed or insufficient reforms should not discredit the efforts aimed at constructing institutions that strengthen the rule of law and the universal enforcement of property rights. Mexico needs to complete its “second revolution” under a new institutional arrangement capable of creating a truly democratic state. This book deepens our understanding of Mexico’s past and present. The authors carefully explain the connections of each piece of their analysis and shed light on broader issues of economic and political development in emerging economies. However, I believe there is an omission that requires attention to complete the picture: the influence of the external background. The foreign debt crisis, the end of the cold war, the currency crisis of the late 1990s, the globalization of financial and capital markets, to mention just a few, were influences that are overlooked. Although comparisons with Latin America abound, readers might benefit from direct references to how external events shaped internal affairs. True, Mexico had a revolution, but the world also experienced one. Scholars from diverse backgrounds will find Mexico since 1980 useful for its conceptual insights into how authoritarian regimes work; as an accessible account of a major economic, social, and political reform process; and as an outstanding synthesis of a puzzling period of Mexican history.

graciela márquez, Centro de Estudios Históricos, El Colegio de México doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-155




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Prostitución, honor y cambio cultural en la provincia de San José de Costa Rica: 1860–1949. By juan josé marín hernández. San José: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2007. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. xv, 445 pp. Paper. This work of social history seen from below is about women with stigmatized social identity who, along with other marginalized people and criminals, have usually been forgotten by traditional historiography. The theoretically and methodologically solid study of the province of San José between 1860 and 1949 is based on primary sources from newspapers and archives and a broad knowledge of literature produced in Europe and the United States that analyzes prostitution. This book, by Juan José Marín Hernández, received the Costa Rican Premio Nacional Aquileo J. Echeverría for history in 2007. Marin’s work does not entail moral or feminist dogmas. This allows the reader to understand the social phenomenon of prostitution from the perspective of social control. Starting from social control conceived as a social and cultural fact, it is possible to understand the mechanisms through which socially dominant groups establish basic control devices over prostitution as a social practice and over the social actors that are directly or indirectly related to it, such as the prostitutes and their clients, members of their communities, as well as medical doctors, lawyers, and police officers. Social control is not only a process imposed from above. The responses of popular groups are also important in this analysis, which mainly focuses on the relevance of their experiences and the cumulative cultural background that is valued in the light of everyday life and the thoughts of the community. The responses of popular groups in the end make up a collection of informal social-control mechanisms that cannot be ignored by dominant groups in their projects aimed at civilizing and changing the culture of popular groups. In consequence, the work deeply studies the function of the communities during projects intended to be imposed from above. The work goes far beyond those positions that see prostitution as pathology, a deviation, or a result of social anomalies. It also improves on approaches that blame prostitution on financial issues, more specifically on poverty, in order to attach importance to spaces and sociability networks, the family circle, job options for women, and ethnic and class jurisdiction, among other factors. Marín’s work evidences the plurality in the world of prostitution, where the different ways to represent prostitutes in a social environment affect the treatment they receive, with censorship and tolerance as the extreme limits. Content analysis, the case study, and prosopography are the main methodological supports of this research divided into six clearly delimited chapters. In the first chapter, the reader will find a contextualization of the changing economic, cultural, and social environments in San José during the period of the study. Chapter 2 deals with the analysis of penal codes, which, according to the author, have great influence on control systems and social justice. The third chapter focuses on informal mechanisms of social control and their dynamic relationship with the formal ones discussed in the previous chapter. Chapter 4 looks more deeply into the aforementioned relationship, emphasizing the connection between formal and informal social control, with the aim of clarifying the differ-



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ent symbolic aspects developed around prostitution. Chapter 5 centers on everyday life, evidencing the interest in valuing the impact of the different discourses on prostitution, on the prostitutes’ lives, and their adopted resistance strategies. The last chapter, more than a section of general conclusions, is an interesting proposal with regard to the structuring of social control in the space and time considered in this analysis. In summary, Marín’s work is an invitation to continue to research this topic from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, not only in the regional Costa Rican environment but in all Central America. This study on prostitution and socially marginalized groups should not be disdained by any professional in history who wishes to contribute to the construction of an improved society.

ana paulina malavassi aguilar, Universidad de Costa Rica doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-156

Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes. By arturo escobar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Figures. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvi, 435 pp. Cloth, $89.95. Paper, $24.95. Arturo Escobar has not produced a single-authored book in English since 1995, although he has a string of other publications. This book, magisterial in its command of an impressive range of theory and literature, is a provocative and cutting-edge guide to thinking about place, capital, nature, development, identity, and networks (the six main chapter titles). It was well worth waiting for. Escobar grounds his discussion of theory in the lived realities of Colombia’s Pacific coastal region and the Afro-Colombian social movements there that seek to protect territories, livelihoods (and indeed lives), ecologies, and cultural identities. He draws on some 15 years of working with these movements, especially the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN). Escobar’s key theme is the possibility of “alternatives to modernity,” ways of thinking and living outside of modernity that go even further than what Escobar terms “alternative modernities,” which, while they contest Eurocentric values of development do not necessarily challenge the entire concept of modernity. Modernity, for Escobar, is constituted through capitalism, colonialism, and racism. The colonial difference established by modernity generates subaltern spaces that cannot be reduced to their relationship of difference from the center. They encompass a potentially radical alterity and can generate critiques of modernity drawing on their difference. Critiques can seek to find a better place within modernity, construct alternatives within it, or envisage alternatives to it. The latter, utopian option — and there is a streak of utopianism running through Escobar’s book — is a mode of critical imagination. The movements Escobar analyzes only provide glimpses of this vision. But the vision can drive activist work that seeks to restrain rampant capitalist exploitation and destruction of black and indigenous territories in the coastal region, and to resist the encompassment of local dwellers within state-run development projects.




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Colombia’s Pacific coast provides fertile ground for this analysis, given the speed of capitalist encroachment on this relatively uncapitalized region and the devastating paramilitary and state violence wreaked on local communities in the last 15 years. The state has been eager to extend multiculturally sensitive governance into the region, while the PCN has focused on constructing ethnic territories that will protect human and biospheric diversity. Escobar fully recognizes that social movements are heavily mediated by the forces they seek to oppose — in a word, by modernity itself. In a chapter on capital, he argues against the power of capitalism to transform everything it touches, insisting instead on uncovering grassroots economic diversity. To this end, Escobar examines a cooperative shrimp-farming enterprise undertaken by local Afro-Colombians. He acknowledges that the project occurred in a context saturated by the institutions and discourses of the state, capital, and civil society, admitting that the co-op’s embracing of aims such as defense of ethnic territories was “thoroughly permeated by expert discourses” (p. 98). Yet Escobar refuses to reduce the enterprise to these influences and discourses. Through their practice, project leaders “skillfully disclosed” new ways of being, rooted in particular places and lifeways, and thus created a diverse economy not driven entirely by capitalism (p. 100). Equally, while he recognizes that the black social movements of the Colombian Pacific coast and Colombia more widely can be seen as heavily mediated by what Charles Hale has called neoliberal multiculturalism, which appropriates and even constructs ethnically defined and self-regulating communities in pursuit of governance, Escobar again insists on the agency of the movements themselves and their ability to produce knowledge about themselves, including in ways that shape state policy (for example, in relation to biodiversity). Similarly, the PCN, while participating heavily in transnational social movement networks, has been determined to establish a line of pensamiento afro (Afro thought) that insists on difference. Some readers might find a paucity of ethnography here; but the ethnography is of activists and movements rather than everyday life among ordinary coastal dwellers (acknowledging that the activists are also ordinary dwellers in many respects). Other readers might find a tendency to romanticize the social movements, perhaps touching too lightly on internal conflicts and co-optation and focusing on activists and projects that suit the author’s purpose. But in the sheer power, depth, and complexity of the analysis and in the author’s ethical engagement and belief in the possibility of “worlds and knowledges otherwise,” the book is a superb achievement.

peter wade, University of Manchester doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-157



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Struggles of Voice: The Politics of Indigenous Representation in the Andes. By josé antonio lucero. Pitt Latin American Series. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. Maps. Tables. Bibliography. Index. xvi, 236 pp. Cloth, $65.00. Paper, $25.95. Both Bolivia and Ecuador have long been home to strong and well-organized social movements that have repeatedly challenged elite domination of state structures. Based on extensive field research and probing participant observation spread out over the past decade, together with a broad reading of the social science literature, this book by political scientist José Antonio Lucero examines recent indigenous movements in these two Andean countries to examine how representative voices in social movements are constructed. Lucero raises two key questions: why are some movements more unified than others, and why are some voices more representative than others? Lucero frames his discussion of representation in the context of parallel electoral campaigns in Bolivia and Ecuador. In 2005, Evo Morales won the presidency of Bolivia with a historic majority of the vote. The following year, longtime Ecuadorian indigenous leader Luis Macas polled a dismal 2 percent of the presidential vote in that country’s elections. This appeared to represent a dramatic reversal in the fortunes of indigenous movements in the two countries, as in the 1990s movements, which were fragmented in Bolivia but strong and unified in Ecuador. Nevertheless, Lucero illustrates how the “fragmented social movement environment in Bolivia proved to be more politically effective than a unified one in Ecuador” (p. 4). Although activists often seek to find strength in unity, this conclusion parallels an observation made by anthropologist Carol Smith that in Guatemala it was precisely ethnic diversity that complicated elite attempts at domination and hence allowed subaltern cultures to not only survive but thrive. Lucero cautions that unity should not be interpreted as success, nor should fragmentation be seen as a sign of failure. Most studies of current indigenous politics focus on high-profile and well-known organizations, such as the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE). One of the most useful contributions of Lucero’s work is that he points to the diversity and multivocality of indigenous organizing efforts. His study underscores the reality that there is not one indigenous movement in the Andes, but many different movements that coexist, with often intersecting and sometimes conflicting interests and agendas. Lucero charts the shifting positions and prospects of the Council of Evangelical Indigenous Peoples and Organizations of Ecuador (FEINE), which initially placed itself in opposition to CONAIE’s confrontational politics but later also engaged in the electoral process through the running of candidates with its political party Amauta Jatari. Social movement organizations, Lucero observes, “often engage in pragmatic mixes of contestation and negotiation” (p. 170). The results can be unpredictable. Lucero draws innovative and thought-provoking parallels between FEINE and the experiences of the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyo (CONAMAQ) in Bolivia. Whereas FEINE “Indianized Protestant Evangelicalism,” CONAMAQ “trans-




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nationalized communal authority structures” (p. 155). Lucero expertly draws parallels between the two organizations to interrogate questions of authenticity and representation. Seemingly moving in reverse of the fortunes of indigenous presidential candidates in the two countries, the “unlikely” FEINE realized more political success in Ecuador than the more “likely” CONAMAQ in Bolivia. It is not always possible, Lucero notes, for activists to know which political strategies will be successful. As one example of competing arenas of representation, Lucero points to the Council for the Development of Ecuadorian Nationalities and Peoples (CODENPE), a government development agency that worked in rural communities in Ecuador. CONAIE successfully argued that representation in CODENPE should be by indigenous nationality and people rather than by organization, thereby assuring its domination at a cost to competing voices such as FEINE and the Federation of Peasant, Indigenous, and Black Organizations (FENOCIN). Such a strategic construction resulted in an underrepresentation of the densely populated highland province of Chimborazo, which, not incidentally, has a high percentage of indigenous evangelicals and hence was a strong base of support for FEINE. The story of CODENPE illustrates that the politics of representation can have very material ramifications. Lucero concludes that in the 1990s CONAIE was able to capitalize on the discursive language of nationalities in order to advance its agenda, until it made the fateful decision to ally with 2000 coup leader and later presidential candidate Lucio Gutiérrez, which unraveled the organization’s apparent hegemonic representative voice. At the same time, in Bolivia, water wars in Cochabamba and gas wars in La Paz led to a collapse of neoliberal multiculturalism that opened up political spaces and allowed for the rise of Evo Morales. Lucero’s work is an important and thoughtful contribution to the study of contemporary indigenous mobilizations in the Andes, with broad theoretical contributions to important issues of representation, how voices are constructed, and whose interests they serve.

marc becker, Truman State University doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-158

Indios y cristianos: Entre la guerra y la paz en las fronteras. By silvia ratto. Nudos de la historia argentina. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2007. Illustration. Maps. Notes. Bibliography, 214 pp. Paper. This book is a compelling study of indigenous politics in the first half of the nineteenth century in Argentina. Author Silvia Ratto tries to argue against most accepted historical interpretations of the political and ethnic relationships between Mapuche people and Argentineans in the frontier region of Buenos Aires. In general, historiography on colonial and early national ethnic relationships in Chile and Argentina is based on a dichotomy of war and peace. Some historians say Mapuches and creoles from both countries were permanently engaged in war and violence. Other historians have said that war



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among Mapuches and Spanish descendants is a myth, and that frontier regions were built on peaceful commercial and cultural exchanges. Ratto, in contrast, argues that ethnic relationships in the frontier regions were complex and diverse, not just a matter of war and peace but a sophisticated web of social practices and political negotiations based on interethnic marriages, commercial trade, and indigenous labor in the estancias near Buenos Aires. These relationships were not necessarily peaceful or violent but developed according to events and political alliances that were formed during the processes of independence and nation building in Argentina. Ratto embraces some interesting debates on contemporary historiography by showing how Mapuche people in the frontier region of Buenos Aires became crucial actors in political negotiations with provincial leaders from the Confederación Argentina. She suggests that this was due to the fact that the Confederación Argentina needed to establish peaceful relationships with Mapuches in order to guarantee their security in the war the Confederación was waging against Buenos Aires. In turn, she also shows that these northern, regional political configurations mattered in the politics of alliances and rivalries that Mapuche leaders held deep into the Southern Argentinean and Chilean pampas. In this way, Ratto tentatively explores a kind of horizontal and transnational kin analysis of indigenous politics. Breaking with traditional, national-border-centered interpretations of Mapuche history, Ratto is able to map the complex political negotiations that Mapuche leaders established on both sides of the Andes. She also illustrates how Mapuche people used war strategies in order to force negotiation and political agreements with creoles. These political complexities are crucial if we seek to understand the Argentine state’s position with regard to the Mapuche people during the José Manuel de Rosas period and the strategic shift Argentine politics would take in the Bartolomé Mitre period, when the state moved toward a militarized invasion of indigenous territory. Ratto argues that this change in Argentinean politics occurred after 1859 and the triumph of the Confederación Argentina, which ended the role Buenos Aires played in the competition for indigenous allies in the pampas. This post-1859 scenario, and its powerful new political order, imposed negotiation on indigenous leaders at the same time that Argentinean politics toward indigenous communities and their leaders also changed. In this new political order, indigenous people were not to be strategic allies anymore. Instead, they now became an expensive diplomatic item in the government’s budget, and the idea of territorial expansion became more attractive and suitable for the provincial and national governments. Silvia Ratto tells a very clearly written and thoughtful story. Her analysis moves back and forth in historical time, making the story very attractive to read. She creatively inserts interesting documents into the narrative of the book, avoiding long citations and unnecessary details, while providing enough information to keep the plot going. That being said, she should have presented a detailed description and identification of the primary sources that her work is based on. Most of Ratto’s bibliography is from Argentina and Chile; however, in my opinion, it would have been a good idea to discuss or at least address some of the literature related to frontier history in other Latin American coun-




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tries, such as Mexico or Brazil, in order to expand the analysis and posit more theoretical questions. I think this book has great potential to assist new researchers on Argentinean and Chilean history who would benefit from a better understanding of the complex period of caudillos in Argentina. It is also helpful in shedding some light on how political alliances and war among indigenous groups and provincial leaders worked in Argentina. However, the author does not theorize or provide a deep analysis of interethnic relationships between Mapuches and Argentineans in the frontier region of Buenos Aires. Therefore, this study needs to be placed into a broader historiographical dialogue.

claudio barrientos, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-159

Mentalidades y políticas wingka: Pueblo mapuche, entre golpe y golpe (de Ibáñez a Pinochet). By augusto samaniego mesías and carlos ruiz rodríguez. Colección América. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2007. Tables. Notes. 440 pp. Paper. In this book, Augusto Samaniego Mesías and Carlos Ruiz Rodríguez attempt to reveal the mentalities, politics, and policies of the Chilean state and governing sectors toward the Mapuche throughout much of the twentieth century. They start by uncovering the fiction that the Chilean nation-state is a unitary one with a homogenous citizenry. This conception has generally not allowed for the collective rights or alternative practices of a group such as the Mapuche. Instead, the Mapuche people have had to conform to liberal conceptions of individual personhood and private property, even as they have often been understood as a distinct group. Through their work, Samaniego and Ruiz hope to contribute to current efforts to change this dynamic in order to achieve the “effective development of democracy” (p. 14). In developing this approach, Samaniego and Ruiz invert what has generally been the focus of studies on the Mapuche population. Instead of analyzing the “indigenous problem,” an approach which seeks to categorize, diagnose, and administer Chilean indigenous groups, Samaniego and Ruiz concentrate on the problem of the wingka, the Mapuche word for the nonindigenous. This permits the authors to make important interventions in both contemporary debates and the historiography surrounding relations between groups of the Mapuche and the Chilean state. Unfortunately, however, it also contributes to certain shortcomings in their analysis. The book provides an excellent overview of the general discourses behind the policies of the Chilean state during the rise and fall of “indigenism,” a conception that Samaniego and Ruiz define as “thoughts and practices that are pro-indigenous, but that don’t include them” (p. 14). In terms of policy, this ostensibly pro-indigenous framework led to efforts to integrate and assimilate Mapuche communities between the 1920s and 1980s. Samaniego and Ruiz skillfully demonstrate how Chile’s diverse presidencies implemented these efforts based on conceptions that cast the Mapuche as unfit to fulfill the duties of modern citizenship.



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In analyzing the debates and conflicts over state policy that have taken place, Samaniego and Ruiz insightfully explore how Chile’s competing ideological frameworks have approached Mapuche populations. Their examination of the Chilean left is particularly strong. In contrast to many recent studies, Samaniego and Ruiz develop how the left did not entirely subordinate Mapuche demands to assumptions about the inevitability of class struggle and proletarianization (p. 171). While they admit that the left often did not adequately take Mapuche concerns into account, they also recover significant leftist perspectives that sought to approach the Mapuche flexibly and recognize their particular grievances and circumstances. One fascinating chapter analyzes the speeches and publications of Alejandro Lipschutz Friedman, a Marxist who argued for Mapuche autonomy as part of a heterodox struggle for socialist transformation (pp. 169–86). This chapter, and the book as a whole, reproduces a number of primary sources that can serve as useful references for interested scholars and students. While Samaniego and Ruiz devote the vast majority of their 440-page text to the most influential sectors of Chilean society, they eventually take on recurring issues that involve the actions of the Mapuche themselves, including land tenure practices, political representation, and social activism. At times, Samaniego and Ruiz draw insightful conclusions about these issues. They generally fail, however, to adequately develop an analysis that supports their arguments, and at times they contradict themselves. In one passage, Samaniego and Ruiz criticize Florencia Mallon and José Bengoa for arguing that Mapuche leaders in the first part of the twentieth century adopted a strategy of “defensive integration.” In this understanding, Mapuche leaders accepted modes of assimilation while maintaining certain forms of autonomy and rights for the Mapuche (pp. 166–68). Samaniego and Ruiz base their criticism on the speeches and actions of one Mapuche leader, Manuel Manquilef. Yet they neither situate Manquilef’s views among those of other Mapuche leaders nor contextualize his actions within the Mapuche community itself. Elsewhere, they state that Mapuche organizations have long sought to gain access to government services such as schooling, health clinics, land rights, and lines of credit. This has been necessary since many Mapuche have not had the means to support themselves within Chile’s capitalist development (p. 242). But because Samaniego and Ruiz focus on the wingka, they are unable to develop how Mapuche activism and demands may have also partially shaped state practices. Ultimately, Samaniego and Ruiz provide an analysis that insightfully uncovers the mentalities behind many of the destructive policies of the Chilean state. Yet they fail to move much beyond an elitecentered interpretation, despite their expressed desire to build a politics and a perspective that includes Mapuche claims to be treated and recognized differently.

edward murphy, Michigan State University doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-160




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El día que se inventó el peronismo: La constucción del 17 de octubre. By mariano ben plotkin. Nudos de la historia argentina. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2007. Illustration. Bibliography. 217 pp. Paper. There are few events in the history of Argentina that have been more studied than those of Juan Perón’s dramatic release from prison on October 17, 1945. This is hardly surprising, given the significance of that date to the rise of Peronism and the carefully crafted self-image that Juan and Evita Perón molded over the following years. Any new work on the subject requires particular attention to the existing historiography and a careful articulation of the author’s own position. In his new book, Mariano Ben Plotkin embraces these requirements, expanding on his excellent earlier work while succinctly synthesizing the multiple interpretations of the events of October 17. The result is an interweaving of historical narrative, basic analysis, and historiography that introduces the reader to one of the most controversial movements in Latin American history. After an introduction that lists the chief questions related to October 17 (Why was it celebrated? Who controlled the celebration? Ultimately, should it be celebrated?), the first section of the book (chapters 2–9) deals with the rise of Perón following the coup of June 1943. The second section (chapters 10–17) addresses the events of October 17 proper, and the third (chapters 18–25) discusses the aftermath and efforts to control the meaning of the day. Within each, Plotkin intertwines accounts from newspapers, memoirs, and both scholarly and literary work. In this way Plotkin outlines the multiple interpretations of October 17 in a fashion that is both approachable and complex. For example, in the first segment, Plotkin sketches the motivations of Perón’s allies and opponents. In doing so, he reiterates the familiar argument that Perón only became the “first worker” of Argentina because he failed to build a sufficient support base among other social classes. This helped to set up the dichotomy between the Peronist and antiPeronist definitions of the “pueblo.” The former ultimately defined the “pueblo” as workers, while the latter favored intellectual and cultural elites, though they included “good” workers as well. Both sides, therefore, claimed the right to be the “pueblo” and characterized their antagonists as illegitimate usurpers of the nation — a divide that came to define subsequent debates. In the second section, Plotkin outlines the actual events of October 17, 1945, and the classic scholarly viewpoints. Plotkin demonstrates that the struggle to define Peronism had antecedents in the political debates prior to October 17, and that in the aftermath of Perón’s release that debate became even more concrete, as first journalists and then politicians argued over the meaning of the day. Subsequent scholarship took up this argument, starting with Arturo Jauretche, who depicted Peronism as part of a “pendulum swing” in Argentine history (p. 126), and Gino Germani, who saw Peronism as a “pathological” need for a caudillo among the rural migrants who disrupted Argentina’s modernization (p. 129). Jauretche’s view places Peronism firmly on the side of the “pueblo,” while Germani clearly does not; yet both locate Peronism within a certain historical continuity. Plotkin shows that those who follow Jauretche’s line tend to



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link October 17 to the more positive aspects of Argentine history, such as independence from Spain, while Germani’s descendants link Perón to the rise of caudillos such as Juan Manuel Rosas. In the final section Plotkin describes the competition, both within and outside of Peronism, to control the meaning of “Loyalty Day” (including the right to name the commemoration). Through newspapers, Domingo Mercante, Ángel Borlenghi, Cipriano Reyes, and Evita Perón all presented their versions of the events of October 17. The opposition, meanwhile, used the dwindling resources at their disposal (mainly allegorical stories such as those of Jorge Luis Borges) to continue their denunciations of Perón and the mob that had backed him that day. The short-term outcome of this struggle was that Perón successfully transformed what had been a “ritual of inversion” into a “ritual of reinforcement” in order to sustain the charisma that was “born” on October 17 (pp. 206–7). While Plotkin succeeds in creating an intricate portrait of Peronism’s defining moment, his desire for brevity occasionally leaves gaps in the narrative. For example, he does little to explore the nature of the benefits Perón provided unions, making it difficult to comprehend why the workers were willing to rally around Perón following his arrest. Furthermore, while clearly stating the major analytical questions related to October 17, Plotkin does not explicitly reveal his own opinions of those major issues. His opinions are merely implied in the issues he raises. For example, Plotkin highlights that “Loyalty Day” became a celebration of “the people towards Perón, who redeemed them,” while the “thread of historical accounts” suggest that it should have been about “the loyalty of Perón to the people who freed him” (p. 155). While this lack of clear analysis is frustrating, Plotkin nevertheless succeeds in creating an excellent introduction to one of the major events of Argentine history.

gregory hammond, Colgate University doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-161

Buenos Aires en armas: La revolución de 1880. By hilda sabato. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2008. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. 333 pp. Paper. This book stands out among the best in recent years on nineteenth-century Argentina, remarkable for its detail and documentation and for its literary clarity. It narrates the immediate causes and the events of the brief civil war of 1880, which originated as a dispute over the status of Buenos Aires in the national union and over the presidential succession, and resulted in the designation of the city of Buenos Aires as the federal capital. Hilda Sabato’s narrative addresses a ten-month period starting in late 1879, focusing on a conflict pitching the forces of President Nicolás Avellaneda and his successor, General Julio A. Roca, against those of Carlos Tejedor, the governor of Buenos Aires. The conflict climaxed in mid-June 1880 in two battles at Puente Alsina and Los Corrales on the southwest side of Buenos Aires, when the regular army fought the provincial militia hand to hand, leaving some two thousand men dead over two days.




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As the first (and by far the best) author for some time to write up a history of the episode, Sabato tells her story exceptionally well, tracing step by step how a political and constitutional dispute lurched with seemingly inexorable certainty into an armed clash the province appeared destined to lose. She has drawn upon private papers, contemporary newspapers, many other archival sources, and numerous secondary sources, including eight short inserts on such issues as the regular army and the provincial militias, patriotic sentiment in Buenos Aires, and the nature of “revolution.” To my surprise, the narrative dwells very little on the figure of Bartolomé Mitre, the foremost porteño politician in the late nineteenth century. Mitre renounced his candidacy for the presidency in 1880 (leaving the field to Tejedor), having failed to win the election of 1874 and having then led an unsuccessful rebellion. In Sabato’s account, questions linger about Mitre’s background role in 1880 and the extent to which the rebellion represented a form of mitrismo, particularly since a substantial proportion of Tejedor’s followers had mitrista origins. Mitre’s position raises the related question of the continuities between the 1880 movement and those of 1852, 1861 (in the battle of Pavón), 1874, and 1890, in which Mitre played a crucial role. Sabato’s constrained chronological focus prevents her from depicting the broader tapestry of porteño politics in order to display Mitre’s position more comprehensively. Taking a broader view would shed still more light on some of the author’s favorite topics: the organization and composition of political factions; the formation of factional alliances; the instances when party feuds degenerated into violence and progressed into so-called revolutions; the broader relationship between Buenos Aires and the provinces; and the influence of other key figures like Adolfo Alsina, who died in 1877 and played no part in the events of 1880. When seen as part of a recurrent pattern, the 1880 movement appears neither unusual nor unique, since Mitre and his proxies spent almost 40 years plotting rebellions, raising supporters, and carrying them out. Nearly all the “revolutions” of 1852–90 followed a similar course. They originated in the “rights” (meaning privileges) of Buenos Aires, by far the largest and richest of the provinces, within the emergent national union. They provoked escalating political confrontation lasting up to a year that ended in military mobilization. They culminated in fighting and in substantial loss of life (as in 1861, 1874, and 1890). The “violence” of 1880 should come as little surprise since the use of force had become a routine ingredient of politics. Sabato explains the violence of 1880 as stemming from a mythic concept of unity in Buenos Aires (p. 296), but her argument remains ethereal and unconvincing. Moreover, a broader focus, not necessarily at the expense of a detailed study of 1880, would have shown how many of the issues that arose in Buenos Aires under Tejedor were rooted in the political failures of mitrismo in the 1860s. The book lapses at times into an unnecessarily prolix précis of newspaper articles. As an alternative, Sabato might have analyzed further some of the peculiarities of politics in Buenos Aires. The tactic of “abstention” (refusing to vote in elections), for example, developed before 1880 and remains inexplicable in the narrow framework of her analysis. (Mitre borrowed the ruse from Leon Gambetta under the French Third Republic.)



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Political coercion in rural and small-town areas through the juez de paz, a method widely used by Tejedor to pack the provincial legislature in 1880, has a long history that this study might have better helped to address. Local government stands out as one of the crucial agencies of “top-down” politics in Argentina almost throughout the country’s history. The etymology of the term “revolution,” meaning the right of resistance to threats against rights, also requires broader discussion. By definition, a book titled Buenos Aires en armas does not address the Argentine Republic in its entirety. Still, a complete account of the 1880 rebellion would include a wider analysis of the regional bases of power outside Buenos Aires that produced the institutional oxymoron known as the Partido Autonomista Nacional. In 1880 Tejedor (like Mitre before him) controlled the allegiances of Buenos Aires only in part, with the remainder supporting outside provincial politicians headed by Avellaneda and Roca. Socalled autonomismo, a movement pledged to the local rights of Buenos Aires but opposed to Mitre, whose members were willing to make deals with outside provincial leaders, represents a major part of the story in 1880, although in Sabato’s account the identity and objectives of autonomistas remain unclear. The author scarcely mentions the “Conquest of the Desert” led by Roca in 1879, which strengthened affiliations between many autonomistas and the leaders in the outer provinces. In a period of economic expansion assisted by railroad building, many porteño entrepreneurs were looking for opportunities to buy and speculate in land in the newly conquered territory beyond Buenos Aires and therefore rejected the myopic allegiances represented by Tejedor. These issues bore strongly on the formation of political alliances in 1880 and on the rebellion’s outcome.

david rock, University of California, Santa Barbara doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-162

¡Mueran los salvajes unitarios! La Mazorca y la política en tiempos de Rosas. By gabriel di meglio. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2007. Illustration. Notes. Bibliography. 215 pp. Paper. Rosas bajo fuego: Los franceses, Lavalle y la rebelión de los estancieros. By jorge gelman. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2009. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. 218 pp. Paper. These short monographs address the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the governor of Buenos Aires almost throughout the period 1829–52, providing new and fascinating detail on the period of the French blockade at the end of the 1830s. French naval intervention, meant ostensibly to ensure that French citizens and French commerce were accorded treatment equal to British, plunged Buenos Aires into commercial depression and encouraged uprisings and invasion by Rosas’s enemies, the “Savage Unitarios.” Following prolonged crisis, the French failed to achieve their objectives as Rosas rode out the blockade and defeated his enemies. The blockade of March 1838–January 1840 trig-




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gered the rural uprising known as the Revolución de los Libres del Sur in November 1839 and indirectly provoked two spates of political assassination by Rosas’s supporters in Buenos Aires in October 1840 and April 1842. As Jorge Gelman shows, numerous estancieros in areas close to the southern frontier, who had hitherto supported the Rosas regime, enlisted in the rural revolt. The rebellion marked cattle ranchers’ reaction to the disruption of exports and illustrated how the blockade affected state finances by forcing Rosas to impose higher land taxes and change the land laws. The movement lasted only two weeks before loyalist forces defeated the insurgents and executed their leaders. As Gabriel Di Meglio shows, the urban repression was tied in the first instance to the invasion of the province of Buenos Aires during the blockade by Unitarios led by General Juan Lavalle, and in the second instance to a brief Unitario takeover of the neighboring province of Entre Rios in the blockade’s aftermath. Rosas’s secret police, known as the Mazorca, assassinated his alleged opponents by cutting their throats. Most of the murders occurred in the homes of the victims at night, but on occasion, particularly during the second episode, the victims met their fate in the streets in broad daylight. The crimes of the Mazorca forged the reputation of the Rosas regime as a terrifying tyranny. Readers may wish to compare the scale of repression under Rosas in the early 1840s with that of the late 1970s under the so-called process of national reorganization. The similarities lay in the existence of state-orchestrated but secretive organizations and in their often random actions and victims. The differences lay in scale and duration. In the early 1840s, the executions by the Mazorca occurred during two months separated by an interval of around a year and a half; Di Meglio estimates their victims numbered fewer than 50. The repressive episodes of the late 1970s, by contrast, lasted for more than two years and at a minimum claimed ten thousand dead. Di Meglio and Gelman both assess the popular components of the Rosas regime (including the role of African-Argentine associations) but arrive at different conclusions. Di Meglio focuses on the Sociedad Popular Restauradora, viewing the Mazorca as a component of the Sociedad although also linked closely to the police. He discerns a strong popular component in rosismo from its beginnings, tracing its origins partly to the Revolution of May 1810 and partly to associations formed during the struggles of the 1820s in Spain between conservatives and liberals. In addition to some detailed analysis of the period 1838–42, he provides an adept description of the political battles of 1833 in Buenos Aires, when Rosas briefly abandoned office and the Sociedad was formed with the support of Encarnación Ezcurra, the ex-governor’s wife. By contrast, Gelman, whose focus is rural, argues that rosismo developed a strong popular emphasis only after 1840 following the rebellion of Los Libres. In his view, the regime’s popular support became a substitute for that of the rural elite, whose loyalties had proven fickle during the blockade. To Gelman, partly inspired by the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon by Karl Marx, the evolution of the Rosas regime appears reminiscent of that the French Second Empire, although few similarities existed between French rural society and the province of Buenos Aires.



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Both authors make excellent, original contributions to the political history of the Rosas era. Di Meglio illuminates the activities of the innkeepers and storekeepers known as pulperos and documents the way a few of them joined the Mazorca. Gelman illustrates the role of the jueces de paz in rural counties. Both books contain innovative data on local government institutions as well as on the police and the militia; both historians have worked, with excellent results, with original or rarely utilized sources in the archives of Buenos Aires. Di Meglio’s book reads smoothly and marks out its author as a historian of narrative and analytical skill. Gelman, another very talented archival historian, relies too much on authorities such as Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Pierre Bourdieu and fits them into his interpretation with difficulty.

david rock, University of California, Santa Barbara doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-163

Women Build the Welfare State: Performing Charity and Creating Rights in Argentina, 1880–1955. By donna j. guy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi, 252 pp. Cloth, $79.95. Paper $22.95. In her latest opus, Donna Guy traces the evolution of social welfare policy in Argentina from the 1880s through the first Peronist era ending in 1955. Focusing on child welfare and family law, Guy stresses broad continuities in the approach to social issues not only across the decades but between social groups commonly assumed to be on opposite sides of most questions in Argentine history. While insisting that women’s social work is crucial to the development of welfare states, Guy raises any number of interesting questions about the Argentine case. Of course there were differences in ideas about family and society, and Guy’s subtitle points to the two groups of women deemed most instrumental to the development of the welfare state. On the one hand, middle- and upper-class women performed charity to benefit children in need, and on the other, feminist women sought to create legal and economic rights. Philanthropic women gained status through the large institutions they administered and the number of children they aided. Guy starts from the interesting observation that in nineteenth-century Argentina, these married women had more rights over the orphans in their asylums than over their own biological children. Feminists sought to create rights for mothers and provide education for them and their children as a means to prevent abandonment, delinquency, and institutionalization. While carefully analyzing these differences over time, Guy’s emphasis remains on the role of women in elevating social policy to the national level, and she asserts that “analyzed as a group, their combined activities provided a blueprint of social policies for the subsequent formation of a Peronist welfare state based upon concerns for children and mothers” (p. 57). Her discussion of the performance of charity is important and leads to irresistible comparisons with Eva Perón as the performer of public love. Yet the primary element of continuity throughout the period is the support among all manner of




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social agencies, public health officials, sociologists, and others from all political parties for increasingly large state subsidies to private benevolent groups to manage the care and feeding of abandoned children, orphans, and delinquents and sometimes their defective relations with parents. Along with the growth of various philanthropic endeavors, Guy documents the shifting political and legislative changes that eventually brought about reform of patria potestad, legalization of adoption, regulation of child labor, criminalization of child abuse, and increasing rights first for single mothers and then married women. The turning point of the Great Depression enabled this transition even as state welfare remained reliant on subsidized philanthropy through the early 1940s. The beginning of the end to massive subsidies came in 1943 with the creation of the National Directorate of Public Health and Social Assistance. As new state agencies began to emerge from the welter of private benevolence, Guy explores the manner in which the work of both philanthropic and feminist women was absorbed and co-opted by Peronism, arguing that the new welfare state was labeled Peronist because that party was finally able to get the legislation passed. The “new Peronist family in fact owed its origins to a composite of conservative, feminist, socialist, and radical plans to reform the civil code” (p. 184). In the end, the Eva Perón Foundation was swept as inexorably as the institutions of the Society of Beneficence into a masculinized welfare bureaucracy. Given the number of complex strands that Guy weaves into her chapters, her book will be most enjoyable to students who bring a familiarity with Argentine history to their reading. One need not be entirely persuaded of all of Guy’s claims in order to derive important insights from her work. Her scholarship combines a sweeping command of the literature on gender and welfare with an intimate understanding of the Argentine particulars based in an incredible wealth of archival research. For these reasons the book may be profitably read by analysts of gender, of welfare states, and of Argentine social politics.

karen mead, University of California Education Abroad Program doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-164

La alta sociedad en la Buenos Aires de la Belle Époque: Sociabilidad, estilos de vida e identidades. By leandro losada. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2008. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxx, 445 pp. Paper. This book by Leandro Losada associates him with a new spirit pervading Argentine historiography, one that revises the traditional portrayal of the elites who had a leading role in and benefited from the “conservative order.” Losada shows the heterogeneous composition of high society, made up of families with different trajectories and historical or even regional origins, and reveals its sociocultural transformations. After pointing out that Buenos Aires did not have a real aristocracy with “solid distinguishing features,” Losada gives a detailed analysis of the construction process of this group’s distinction.



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This social history of the elites reveals that high society’s privileged position was gradually molded on a daily basis through the adoption of a number of patterns of behavior and consumption. Between 1880 and 1900, Buenos Aires’s elite embarked on a project to “Europeanize” their lifestyles in an attempt to differentiate themselves from other groups and from their own rustic and provincial past. According to Losada, this project had reached its greatest splendor by 1900 and started to decline after WWI, as the country underwent political, demographic, social, and cultural changes. What features did high society adopt in its attempt to become aristocratic? What practices and consumption patterns characterized it? Losada describes them by reconstructing residential patterns and characteristics of the new mansions (chapter 2); educational institutions and gendered social expectations (chapter 3); and the new codes, rituals, and spaces of sociability of Buenos Aires’s elite (chapters 4 and 5). By making frequent comparisons with analyses of other Latin American cases and the United States, Losada defines the specific local characteristics of a distinction process that was taking place among a large number of Western elites at the time. If they shared the aim to adopt French manners and tastes for decoration, art, and food, and English habits for sport and sociability in clubs, Argentina’s great economic prosperity made it possible to reach remarkably high levels of consumption and sophistication. Cosmopolitanism allowed an early secularization of the higher sectors’ social life; at the same time, social conditions of mobility and the “republican and egalitarian matrix” encouraged, along with an increase in gestures of distinction, the construction of a sui generis idea of “patriciado” that aimed at essentializing the group’s differences. One of the book’s highlights is that it points out that there were different “ways of understanding the distinguished condition” within high society (p. 252). Some attributed an intellectual emphasis to social distinction (for example, sharing musical or literary tastes); others identified it with an aristocratic way of life characterized by refined manners and opulent consumption. What was considered “distinguished” was a matter of dispute among those who claimed to embody distinction. Losada stresses that such dissonances and diverse emphases were “the result of different sensibilities, family traditions and personal trajectories” (p. 254). Together with new tastes and customs in high society, the book describes the fears that the rules of social closure and exclusiveness tried to ward off. Fear of “social climbers” was key to the behavior of an elite that shifted from resenting the incorporation of arrivistes to fighting emulation or avoiding any social contact as the century went by and social mobility increased. The result was withdrawal from life in society, which was exacerbated when they turned into a closed and isolated group by the 1920s. To reconstruct these social rules, aspirations, and lifestyles, the author uses multiple sources such as family archives, private correspondence, memoirs, biographies, and local literature. Successfully keeping away from mere anecdotal narration, Losada reflects on the rhythms and meanings of the changes in this social world. At the same time, he reconstructs contemporary views of high society through the analysis of travel books and the elite press of the time. Travelers’ accounts allow him to discern how foreigners




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judged the “social learning” of Buenos Aires’s elite, while the press and its social sections would draw attention to the risks of trying to become a “social group of reference,” which implied being exposed to imitation, moral criticism, and ironic views. The interest of this original contribution to the social and cultural history of the elites and their identity and representations is not reduced to a specific period, region, or theme. The book poses questions and levels of analysis that invite further comparison with other national and regional cases and that are worth considering in other historical contexts and for the study of other social groups. Finally, it addresses those who study the present time, encouraging reflections on long-standing and still current social stereotypes and aspirations.

magdalena candioti, Universidad Nacional de San Martín / CONICET doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-165

Madness in Buenos Aires: Patients, Psychiatrists, and the Argentine State, 1880–1983. By jonathan ablard. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press / Swallow Press, 2008. Photographs. Map. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi, 319 pp. Paper, $32.00. Madness in Buenos Aires is a convincing and carefully researched study of Buenos Aires psychiatric institutions between the 1880s and 1980s. The author distances himself from recent studies that have discussed mental hospitals as very effective social control institutions. On the contrary, Jonathan Ablard’s main argument underlines the weakness of the Argentine state and its mental institutions in their intended policing and coercive functions. In a broader perspective, this book is another example of the current postFoucauldian trends that mark most (not all) of the Latin American historiography on disease and health. Ablard re-elaborates some of his previous published work and reveals himself to be a cautious historian, able not only to imaginatively weave together primary and secondary materials but also to use with care fashionable theoretical frameworks. In this respect he joins a list (not that long) of fine scholars in Europe, the United States, and Latin America who have been trying to develop a more empirically grounded and locally specific approach while dealing with issues of mental health and madness in historical perspective. This book is less a history of psychiatry in the Argentine capital than an effort to connect the discipline, its institutions, and the experiences of people involved in them with the making of the modern state over a century-long period. Ablard uses the history of psychiatry as a way to examine not simply the provision of mental health care (one that he consistently evaluates as insufficient and inadequate) but also some features of the ambitious and not very successful effort of designing and governing Argentine modernity. In this project, Madness in Buenos Aires is not in line with other interpretations, mainly using discourse analysis, that have found a strong, effective, and perdurable authoritarian tradition omnipresent in the making of modern Argentina.



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The book is organized in five chapters with an introduction and conclusion. Chapters 2 to 5 cover from the last third of the nineteenth century to the mid-1940s. Chapter 6 deals with early Peronism to the end of the last dictatorship in 1983. The conclusion, cleverly titled “Social Control in a Weak State,” reinforces in a tight narrative the key arguments. Ablard clarifies the geographical scope of his book (Buenos Aires) without giving in to the temptation common in Argentine historiography to dissolve the country’s regional differences in the experience of its national capital. He also succeeds in avoiding both a focus on institutions void of common people, and the assumption that history of discourses is synonymous with history. With these premises, the author examines the complex web of relations among physicians, administrators, patients, and patients’ relatives that saturate the life of these psychiatric institutions. In so doing, he discusses mental hospitals as spaces marked more by patient overpopulation, routines, inertia, neglect, and bureaucratic incompetence than by a well-planned strategy to keep patients enclosed. At the end, Ablard offers to the reader a world of conflicts and negotiations among those involved in these institutions that reveals how fragile and difficult it was to fully exercise control over their functioning. Other merits of the book are its engaging and accessible narrative as well as an effective use of photographs of patients and institutions. As always, there are some shortcomings. The attention paid to patients and their relatives negotiating with doctors and institutional administrators could have benefited from discussion with other already published works focused on the limited but real agency TB and cancer patients had in Buenos Aires at certain junctures during the twentieth century. Something similar occurs when Ablard equates mental hygiene with public health, concluding, for instance, that from the end of the nineteenth century to the arrival of Peronism in the 1940s the public health situation had been stagnant (p. 48). Even taking into account the limitations of an emerging, weak, and fragmentary welfare state, it is undeniable that many of its public health interventions have played some role toward lowering general mortality and specific morbidity rates. In other words, although Ablard convincingly demonstrates that stagnation has been a dominant feature of mental hygiene matters, this was not necessarily the case in other public health realms. This confusion of mental health with public health might result from a lack of dialogue with the available and fast-growing literature on public health. (In contrast, Ablard carries on a very fluid and productive conversation with most available studies on mental health issues.) Overall, Madness in Buenos Aires is a valuable contribution to the subfield of mental health history that both scholars and students will find very useful. It is another scholarly work that underlines the need of dealing very carefully with the complex issue of social control in history.

diego armus, Swarthmore College doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-166




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Intimidad, divorcio y nueva moral en el Uruguay del Novecientos. By josé pedro barrán. Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 2008. Notes. 383 pp. Paper. It would be hard to overstate the importance of José Pedro Barrán’s contributions to Uruguayan historiography. In some ways, he is Uruguayan historiography. When Professor Barrán passed away in September 2009 at the age of 75, his death made headlines rarely afforded to scholars in the United States. “José Pedro Barrán has died and history will never be the same,” declared the Uruguayan paper La República. The author or coauthor of at least 30 volumes of Uruguayan history since the mid-1960s, Barrán’s work with coauthor Benjamin Nahum started with the seven-volume Marxist-oriented Historia rural del Uruguay moderno (Montevideo, 1967–78), followed by the eight-volume dependista-influenced Batlle, los estancieros y el Imperio Británico (Montevideo, 1979–87). At this point, Barrán’s scholarship took a more cultural turn, focusing on themes such as religion, medicine, sexuality, crime, and intimacy. Intimidad, divorcio y nueva moral y el Uruguay del Novecientos continues in this same vein, further probing the author’s fascination with the history of private life and the emergence, evolution, and impact of the “new morality” in early twentieth-century Uruguay. This last work is something of a patchwork, with much corresponding unevenness. But for scholars interested in the history of family, sexuality, and especially divorce in Latin America, this book has much to offer. Intimidad, divorcio y nueva moral continues to chart the liberal challenges to what Barrán calls the “puritanical” views of the old Catholic patriarchal model during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like most of Barrán’s earlier work, this book focuses on the so-called época batllista, an era named for José Batlle y Ordóñez, president from 1903 to 1907 and 1911 to 1915 and the political figure most associated with a series of reforms that established Uruguay as a model of progressive social and political reform in the Americas. Batlle’s strongest supporters — Barrán calls them the “radical Batllistas” — were proponents of what the author calls the “new morality,” which was strongly anticlerical and valued both individualism and a so-called vindication of the flesh. The Uruguayan case is interesting in this regard because it was arguably the first Latin American country where this “nueva moral” was reflected in national policy. This study opens with several theoretical chapters discussing intimacy, privacy, and perception of the self, but the most interesting parts come in the latter half, when Barrán begins his empirical survey and analysis of legal and cultural changes in three principal areas: divorce, birth control, and the rights of illegitimate children. As the title implies, the author devotes most of his attention to the issue of divorce, including the unique and unprecedented 1913 law granting divorce on the “simple will of the woman.” Barrán’s detailed overview of Batllista divorce legislation, the debates surrounding the various divorce laws, and the actual impact of these legal changes on everyday behavior is insightful and fascinating. Barrán is also at his best when discussing the ideology and contradictions of radical Batllismo in the area of family, sexuality, and intimacy. As an example of the “coexistence of liberation and new repression” within Batllismo (p. 238),



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the author cites the pro-natalism that informed and in some cases worked to undermine claims to support personal liberty and autonomy (most notably in areas of birth control, but also in some cases of divorce). The book also helpfully underscores the selfidentification of Batllismo with the ideals and tradition of the French Revolution. The Francophilia of fin de siècle Latin American liberal elites is well known, but the degree to which radical Batllistas saw themselves as direct heirs to the French Revolution is quite interesting, and Barrán is correct to highlight it. The gender analysis in Intimidad, divorcio y nueva moral, however, is at times rather weak, and Barrán could have done more to acknowledge the ways Uruguayan women engaged in these debates. Barrán discusses, for example, the ways that the divorce question fractured the Uruguayan political landscape; yet he barely mentions the Liga de Damas Católicas, Uruguay’s first important politically oriented women’s association, created largely out of the antidivorce mobilization of conservative Catholic women. Finally, the volume contains an appendix with a number of previously unpublished primary documents from the period. The memoirs of Adriana Bustamante, the daughter of a prominent Colorado politico who grew up in late nineteenth-century Uruguay, offers much of interest to scholars of gender, family, and political culture in Latin America. The 1912 manuscript of leading Catholic political leader Joaquín de Secco Illa, recounting the death of his young son from complications of appendicitis, is a moving, rare, and valuable document speaking to issues of masculinity, religion, and medicine during this era.

christine ehrick, University of Louisville doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-167

La actualidad del pasado: Usos de la historia en la política de partidos del Uruguay (1942–1972). By josé rilla. Montevideo: Editorial Sudamericana, 2008. Notes. Bibliography. 525 pp. Paper. Perhaps the highest accolade a book can receive is that it renders intelligible things that had not made sense previously. José Rilla has written such a book, decoding a number of mysteries of Uruguayan history, politics, and historiography. In part this achievement owes to Rilla’s thesis that history, politics, and historiography are inseparable, that writing history in Uruguay is always a partisan act, and that Uruguayan politicians have forever been obsessed with creating historical narratives, myths, and traditions in which to insert themselves. While none of these insights is entirely original (indeed, Rilla spends 60 pages tracing methodological antecedents in the recent historiographies of France, Italy, Zapatista Mexico, and post-Communist Rumania, among other places), it is his balanced and profound command of Uruguayan political history that makes Rilla such a sure-footed guide. The book operates on two levels. At one level, Rilla examines the 30 years from 1942 to 1972, starting with the restoration of democracy after the Gabriel Terra dictatorship and ending in the demise of the “Uruguay clásico” of Batllista/Colorado reform-




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ism (“the Switzerland of Latin America”) and Blanco/Nationalist coparticipation. To account for the slow death of Uruguayan democracy, Rilla eschews economic or cold war explanations to focus instead on how Uruguayans came to doubt the guiding historical mythologies that had underpinned the democratic restoration and the hegemony of the two traditional parties. As the Tupamaros and Frente Amplio attacked from the left and the ruralist movement of Benito Nardone attacked from the populist right, intellectuals across the spectrum lost faith in the Uruguayan experiment and its vision of the past. In the end democracy fell or was brought down, in Rilla’s words, “porque (casi) nadie creía en ella” (p. 487). But it is at the other level, in its exegesis of the countless opposing renderings of Uruguayan history, that the book makes a truly invaluable contribution. Because Rilla analyzes political uses of the past, his gaze extends all the way back through the nineteenth century to José Gervasio Artigas (honored by all sides, if for different reasons), Fructuoso Rivera and Manuel Oribe (founders of the two traditional parties), the Guerra Grande, Oribe’s alliance with Juan Manuel de Rosas and Rivera’s with France and Brazil, the never-forgotten executions at Quinteros in 1858, Aparicio Saravia’s guerrillas of 1904, and just about every other key moment of contention in partisan memory. Again and again, Rilla explains things that politically aware Uruguayans know from childhood but are opaque to the outsider. He reconstructs the creation of official histories by and for the two traditional parties, each with its own set of heroes and villains, unspeakable outrages by the other, and betrayals from within. Colorados, for example, propagated an official public narrative of civilization versus (Blanco) barbarism that drew a direct line from the Defense of Montevideo in the 1840s to the reforms of José Batlle y Ordóñez (the collegial executive, the 8-hour day), to the statist developmentalism of Luis Batlle Berres in the 1950s. Blanco narratives, written at a greater distance from state power, were more fragmented and self-consciously revisionist, emphasizing the party’s long struggle for fair elections and minority representation, against Colorado pretensions to permanent rule. But Rilla is equally deft in laying out the critiques of those official histories, whether from various generations of principled independents (principistas), critical of caudillo parties without ideas, or from opposing ideological factions within each party. Those who want to get a handle on the schisms between Herreristas and Independent Nationalists, Batllistas, and Riveristas, or to understand the political thought of José Pedro Varela, Carlos María Ramírez, or Lorenzo Carnelli (to name only a few) may find in this book their Rosetta stone. Just make sure not to skip the explanatory footnotes. Finally, Rilla provides a comprehensive guide to twentieth-century Uruguayan historiography. A major chapter is devoted to Eduardo Acevedo and Juan E. Pivel Devoto, one Colorado and the other Blanco, both recognized as giants and as key contributors to Uruguay’s competing national narratives. But Rilla goes on to discuss a long list of other historians, both those who helped create the classic Colorado and Blanco histories and those who called those stories into question. People who seek to understand the ideas of Francisco Bauzá, Angel Floro Costa, Roberto Giudice and Efraín González Conzi,



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Antonio Grompone, Luis Alberto de Herrera, Martín C. Martínez, Mateo Magariños, Eduardo V. Haedo, Alberto Methol Ferré, Carlos Quijano, Vivián Trías, Carlos Real de Azúa, Roberto Ares Pons, or Germán Rama may begin here. Students with little knowledge of Uruguay will find the book inaccessible, and scholars enmeshed in the historiographical debates that Rilla chronicles may well take issue with some (or many) of his conclusions and characterizations. But to those who know Uruguay well enough to find its political history utterly baffling, this book brings wonderful clarity.

david s. parker, Queen’s University, Canada doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-168

International and Comparative Spanish Women and the Colonial Wars of the 1890s. By d. j. walker. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 158 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Paper, $17.95. Historians of Latin America may be surprised to find that D. J. Walker’s Spanish Women and the Colonial Wars of the 1890s is a study of women in Spain rather than women of Spanish descent in the colonies. Moreover, Walker’s background as a scholar of Spanish rather than of history means that the types of sources used and their employment also stand out from other works of history. Yet her project reveals new insights into how women’s actions in Spain informed the politics of war both in the 1890s and more broadly in historical investigation. Walker begins by scrutinizing the historical role of women as related to war in the popular discourse of the nineteenth century. Women initially appear as heroines who sacrifice their home, families, and happiness on the altar of nation when they cheerfully send their sons to war. Women’s actions that might appear at odds with such a notion, like those of the Lieutenant Nun, Catalina de Erauso, become, by the 1890s, representative of service on behalf of empire and are thus sanctified, as are those of Spain’s heroic mothers and wives. Although popular discourse may have portrayed the women of Spain in one way, their actions in the Americas and Europe did not reflect those ideas. In fact, social commentary lamented the role of women in the Paris Commune and left Spaniards deeply suspicious of women who desired to participate in public life, a notion perfectly in keeping with the Catholic Church and others advocating the maintenance of traditional standards regarding the place of women. Within such a context, women’s demonstrations against conscription proved especially troubling. Focusing her analysis on the 1896 women’s demonstration in Zaragoza, Walker notes that women who opposed their sons’ conscription broke with a number of deeply held convictions about women’s place in society as patriotic mothers and as a collectively submissive group. Consequently, the larger society would have to find some way to rationalize their activities. Support from



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anarchist and socialist quarters, among others, did little to bring women’s opposition position into the mainstream of Spanish society, although their cries were heard beyond their shores, as when Cubans desirous of independence sympathized with the poor mothers of Zaragoza. Recognition of their relative impotence would lead women and other marginalized groups like the working class to think about the nature of institutions and practices that constrained their existence, among them suffrage. Walker is correct to note that women’s lack of access in the public realm led to their marginalization. Suffrage practices, which were not particularly inclusive of any Spaniard, male and female alike, inhibited women’s ability to effect change. Additionally, the continuing influence of the Catholic Church and the Spanish legal code’s circumscription of women’s rights and position further blocked women’s advances. Educational practice was another area in which women had great strides to make in order to effect changes in their influence and standing. Such important issues as the institutionalization of women’s repression and the gradual shifts in those practices are deserving of more in-depth treatment than they are afforded in this work. What is perhaps most significant to scholars of Latin America (and others) is Walker’s treatment of “women’s voices.” She notes that “women marching in public places continue to embarrass and inconvenience those in power” (p. 66). Walker sees threads of continuity between women’s actions in Zaragoza and those in the Plaza de Mayo. The Zaragoza protests entered the realm of invalidity due to the presence of old women and girls, or those whose age precluded their having sons facing conscription. Conversely, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo are validated though biology, and consequently their activities affirm differences between the sexes. Thus those sorts of protests enter the realm of the acceptable and have greater impact. Such a notion could be tested in the numerous social moments of the last century in Latin America and might reveal new insights. Historians will note a lack of archival sources in favor of published primary sources (newspapers, theatrical works). Walker writes that women’s voices are largely missing from her analysis, a situation she views as stemming from women’s extremely high rates of illiteracy in Spain generally and especially among the demonstrators of Zaragoza. As a result, her sources are mostly published and mostly authored by men. It is undoubtedly difficult to uncover women’s voices, but as numerous historians of women and gender have shown, this can be accomplished through careful archival work. Spanish Women and the Colonial Wars of the 1890s will likely prove quite useful to students both for its relative brevity and its particularly excellent and lengthy appendix in which Walker provides a number of excerpts from the sources she cites in both the original Spanish and in English translation. The work’s insights into the nature of women’s protests will likewise be useful for scholars.

sarah l. franklin, University of Southern Mississippi doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-169



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La diplomacia española en Uruguay en el siglo XIX: Génesis del tratado de paz de 1870. By bárbara díaz. Montevideo: Científica de la Universidad de la República, 2008. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. 406 pp. Paper. This book describes different aspects of Spanish-Uruguayan relations from the 1830s to the 1880s. It was based on Spanish sources stored in the Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, the Archivo Histórico Nacional, and the Archivo Histórico de la Administración; and Uruguayan sources kept in the Archivo General de la Nación, the Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, and the Archivo del Museo Histórico Nacional. The author also took advantage of Spanish and Uruguayan parliamentary records and the press. In this work, Bárbara Díaz has made a successful effort to interweave discussion of bilateral foreign policy concerns with the topics of domestic politics, both Spanish and Uruguayan. She has also managed to show the pronounced differences between Uruguay’s capital city, Montevideo, and the rest of the country, the campaña oriental, and the influential role of those differences in Uruguayan foreign policy toward Spain. To study the bilateral relationship, the author focuses on three points: Spanish and Uruguayan foreign policy aims and mutual perceptions, the special interest groups such as Spanish traders operating in Montevideo, and the activity displayed by both sides’ diplomats. Díaz also considered the influence of international law, through statements made by Latin American jurists like Juan Bautista Alberdi, Andrés Bello, and Carlos Calvo. This last point is especially valuable, because it is common to find works that deliberately disdain contemporary international law regarding past events, considering it as an irrelevant sort of superstructure. Authors doing so forget that there always are two kinds of powers in the international arena: those states that can shape international law according to their national interests (or defy internationally accepted rules at a negligible cost, if any) and those states that cannot influence international rules and that only can defy international law at a high cost. But, as international law includes widely accepted rules of ideal behavior, it proved to be a double-edged sword. Stronger states, which model international law into expressions of their convenience, usually help to enact rules that afterward can be used by weaker states to defend themselves from excessive claims. In this context, the story emerges of Spanish-Uruguayan negotiations up to the exchange on October 9, 1882, of ratifications of the treaty signed in 1870. There are a few elements that could be improved for a new edition. For example, the absence of sources from the Archivo General de Indias deserves an explanation. José Presas’s Juicio imparcial sobre las principales causas de la revolución de la América española ought to have been quoted directly from the easily available original edition (p. 33), and the viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was not founded in 1777 but in 1776 (p. 65). Moreover, although Díaz’s story starts in 1833 (p. 27), books such as Edmundo A. Heredia’s Planes españoles para reconquistar Hispanoamérica (1810–1818) and especially José M. Mariluz Urquijo’s Los proyectos españoles para reconquistar el Río de la Plata (1820–1833) could have helped to trace and identify more acutely the forces profondes, following Pierre Renouvin




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and Jean Baptiste Duroselle (p. 19). Thus, the Spanish Crown’s attempt to have its debt in Hispanic America recognized by the new states could illustrate how Fernando VII’s shadow reached Spanish policy toward a former possession like Uruguay, at least until 1882. In sum, Bárbara Díaz’s La diplomacia española en Uruguay en el siglo XIX provides a useful analysis of the relationship between Spain and Uruguay in the nineteenth century.

paulo antonio zappia, Universidade de Brasília doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-170

Conquistadors of the Sky: A History of Aviation in Latin America. By dan hagedorn. Washington, DC: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum / Gainesville: In association with the University Press of Florida, 2008. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. xvi, 587 pp. Cloth, $39.95. This book provides a much-needed overview of the development of aviation in Latin America. It examines military and civil aerial endeavors and captures the seductive glamour of the commercial air industry. It both reminds us that air power is intimately connected to political power and motivates us to take the transformative work of artificial flight seriously. The romance of the air colors most aviation histories. Narratives tend to focus on the seemingly magnificent feats of pilots, planes, inventors, and entrepreneurs from the United States and Western Europe. In Conquistadors of the Sky, Dan Hagedorn centers his analytical lens on Latin America to draw attention to the important ways that historical agents from the global South helped to give rise to “one of the greatest technological developments of humankind” (p. xi). For example, the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont, and not the noted Wright brothers, was the first to successfully lift and sustain in the air a heavier-than-air craft in public. Interrogating agents such as Santos-Dumont alongside actors such as the Wright brothers illuminates the monograph’s point. Hagedorn wants to augment, boost, and disrupt dominant narratives, but he does not want to dismantle and topple them. In other words, he tries to alter historiographic conventions by inserting the aerial accomplishments of Latin American men and women into established frames. As he puts it, “This work is intended as a chronological account of the growth of aeronautics in a region, a long-overdue addition to the literature, and, hopefully, an enrichment of the understanding of the subject as a whole” (p. xiii). Conquistadors of the Sky complements and challenges other aviation histories with its comparative and regional approach. Its chronological scope is extended and linear, which allows the narrative to progress from myths and legends through pioneers, world wars, and into the beyond. Histories of aviation often open with the failure of Icarus and close with the promise of space tourism. Shaking the foundations slightly, this book begins with pre-Columbian belief systems, including references to wind gods and the Nazca



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Lines. These are “added to the pantheon of aeronautical legend and mythology” (p. 4). It ends optimistically, as Hagedorn hopes that the airplane will eventually undo what it currently helps to enable: the movement of “illicit cargoes through well-developed distribution systems” (p. 540). Each chapter examines how a particular theme unfolds in different, seemingly discrete national contexts. For example, chapter 4 highlights the development of commercial carriers and foreign interests in countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Honduras, Panama, Venezuela, and Paraguay. While other works tend to focus solely and deeply on one or two national contexts, this book’s regional commitment ensures that readers receive a wide-ranging review of a complex transportation and communication network. Notwithstanding its rewards, the regional perspective raises questions. How does one define and delimit the contours of a region? Are the contours historically contingent? Do the constituent countries change? What is Latin America? Where is Latin America? These questions are about elision and distortion. In this book, the Caribbean appears and disappears. Island nations such as Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, and colonies such as Trinidad and Jamaica surface and fade under the rubric Latin America. Maps from the 1930s and 1940s show airline routes that used Caribbean places to link North, Central, and South America. A postwar map depicting the shortening of travel times between the 1920s and 1950s erases the islands; literally, they are no longer there. A foregrounded and sustained consideration of the Caribbean would prompt analysis of the competing imperial agendas that shaped how aviation developed in the Americas. Relentless oscillation between the centering tendency of regional frames such as Latin America and the sideways glance of diasporic optics such as the Atlantic World would help us glimpse racially, economically, and politically oppressed people affecting aeronautics. These are things that this book does not but should do. A compelling book, Conquistadors of the Sky urges us to realize that the history of aviation does not have to embody the image of the artifact it remembers. It does not need to appear boundless and groundless like an elevated airplane in motion. The stories we tell about the evolution of artificial ascent can start in different places and have other heroes.

chandra d. bhimull, Colby College doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-171

Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos. By louis a. pérez jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Illustrations. Notes. Index. xii, 333 pp. Cloth, $34.95. It is not often that one scholar contributes as many seminal works to a field as Louis Pérez has done in both Cuban history and in Cuban-U.S. relations. Just as significant are the many ways in which his corpus has influenced the research agendas of others in these




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fields. Cuba in the American Imagination, Pérez’s most recent study, summarizes themes in his other works and also moves in a postmodern direction to assay the role of language in the North American view of Cuba. In earlier works, Pérez sought to establish the imperial nature of the relationship, examining everything from U.S. investments to baseball. As a scholar he is an omnivore, keen to gather political, economic, social, and cultural evidence. Pérez has gradually moved on from revisionist political history to such recent work as On Being Cuban. In that book he challenged traditional nationalist and anti-imperialist perspectives to describe a Cuba with its own powerful attraction to the United States. This new effort to view the U.S. image of Cuba through an analysis of discourse is, despite some difficulties, another example of Pérez extending the frontiers of the field. In this work, Pérez studies indirect forms of evidence: metaphors and their expression in North American rhetoric, images, films, novels, monuments, ceremonies, and memorials. He uncovers in them ideas about Cuba that clothe U.S. actions in benevolent terms and allow Americans, despite the historic impact of their policies, to see themselves as liberty’s crusaders. In the nineteenth century, Cuba was thought to be vital to the security and success of the promise of America: a neighbor so close that it must become part of the union; a ripe fruit that would soon fall (from the dying hand of Spain) into the arms of its protector; a place where North American destiny would be made manifest. Briefly, in 1898, Cubans too seemed to play the role of liberty’s crusaders; but once the United States occupied the island, the metaphors were elaborated in a way that placed Cubans on the dependent side of a series of relationships. They were now seen as a “mongrel” population, childlike, lacking discipline, uncivilized, seductive (the women), and dangerous (the men). The view from the North was that the United States would have “given” them independence, but they were not yet deserving of it. Each of these images of Cuba would be realized if the United States lived up to its self-appointed image as parent, liberator, civilizer, modernizer, stabilizer, selfless teacher, and disciplinarian. Anyone familiar with the rhetoric and images regarding Cuba in the North American media will not be surprised at the wealth of metaphors presented by Pérez. The influence of these ways of understanding Cuba shows up in everything from sugar investments to baseball, from tourism to CIA subversion. When Cubans began to challenge these metaphors in the early years of the 1959 revolution, Americans were shocked at their ingratitude and perplexed to see their wards challenge a century-old idea of inevitable gravitation by accepting the protection of the United States’ global antagonist. No doubt the rich and complex history of the relationship between the United States and Cuba is not explained by metaphor alone. Pérez acknowledges this point but still demonstrates, I think, the deep emotional power of these images and the ways in which they influenced the actions of the United States. Still, some aspects of U.S. views of Cuba do not easily fit the array of metaphors presented. Metaphors best explain the “No Transfer” resolution; the failure of efforts earlier in the nineteenth century to pur-



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chase or annex the island; the fear of another Haiti; the role of slavery in Cuba (that cut through metaphors with sectional disputes); or the tenets of North American antiimperialism, especially the Teller Amendment. The century-long willingness of Washington to accept Spanish rule, especially during the first independence war and in the early years of the 1895 rebellion, indicated a pragmatism that metaphor does not allow. Finally, certain metaphors seem ambiguous, such as those that seem to undergird both racial fears and racial confidence. Early chapters attempt to explore the role of metaphor, especially in terms of selfjustification and self-representation. The weaknesses of the analysis are those of the mode of interpretation in general. Hegemonic discourse hides in plain sight, and postmodern tools may be necessary to bring it to light. But hegemony is always contested internally and externally. The ways in which these contests challenge, reinforce, or give rise to shifts in metaphor are not well explored in this volume; perhaps Pérez can lead the field in this direction as well.

jules r. benjamin, Ithaca College doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-172

Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa. By allen wells. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxxi, 447 pp. Paper, $27.95. Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosúa, 1940–1945. By marion a. kaplan. New York. Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2008. Illustrations. Map. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiii, 256 pp. Paper, $19.95. The drama that unfolds before us in these two volumes opens at Evian Les Bains, France, in July 1938, at the international conference convened by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to find havens of refuge for the multitude of victims of Nazi persecution in the enlarged Third Reich. There, in the presence of representatives of 31 other nations, who each declared why they could not do anything on behalf of the refugees, Virgilio Trujillo Molina, the brother of the Dominican Republic’s dictator Rafael Leonid Trujillo, announced that the Dominican Republic would open its doors to many persecuted Jews and non-Jews. The following month, at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee created by the Evian Conference, Trujillo’s representative mentioned one hundred thousand as the number of refugees that his country was willing to accept. Trujillo immediately gained the applause of all the governments, first and foremost that of President Roosevelt, who had convened the conference without any intention of announcing a change in the United States’ extremely restrictive immigration policy or of using U.S. influence with the Latin American or other nations. Since then, the Dominican Republic and the settlement there of Jewish refugees has been an outstanding chapter in the history of rescue attempts during the Holocaust.




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In the first part of Tropical Zion, Allen Wells puts all the actors on the stage: Trujillo, FDR, and his President’s Advisory Committee for Political Refugees, as well as James Rosenberg and Dr. Joseph Rosen, who, on behalf of the American Joint Distribution Committee and with its funds, established the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA) in December 1939. On January 30, 1940, at Ciudad Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s capital (known until 1938 as Santo Domingo), in a ceremony most lavishly organized by Trujillo, the formal agreement between the Dominican Republic and DORSA was signed. Trujillo donated 26,000 acres of his recently acquired property at Sosúa, on the northern shore of the republic, to establish the agricultural colony. DORSA’s emissaries in Europe started to select the pioneers who were to set the foundations for the large project. Its initial phase was planned to include two hundred families. But the war did not wait. When the founding ceremony at Ciudad Trujillo took place, the war in Western Europe was still the “Phony War”; one hundred days later, on May 10, 1940, the Germans invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg and soon broke into France. Wells analyzes in detail the U.S. State Department’s change of attitudes regarding the immigration of refugees into the western hemisphere, and particularly to the Dominican Republic. The suspicion that German spies had infiltrated the refugees brought about the prohibition against selecting candidates for Sosúa from among those who needed it most — the persecuted Jews in the Third Reich and in the occupied countries. Selection was thus limited to refugees who had found asylum in Switzerland, in Italy (until June 1940 when it entered the war), and in Great Britain. Only a few candidates were selected in France during or soon after the debacle. Some 750 Jews arrived at the Dominican Republic throughout the years of the war; fewer than half of them were settlers. The others lived at Sosúa as supported temporary residents. Wells’s father was one of the first settlers. The Dominican Republic saved his life, and his grateful son now provides us with this thorough, serious, and extremely well-documented and well-researched study. It describes in detail the many efforts to establish partly collective “homesteads,” the initial difficulties and later success of developing a dairy farming industry, the vicissitudes of the administration of the colony and its conflicts with the settlers, and so on. The author does not stop at the end of the war. He traces the development of the colony throughout the two generations that followed, down to the time when it ceased to exist and became the private property of some of the descendants of the old-timers. Wells also researched the relationship between DORSA’s leaders and Trujillo many years after the war, when the dictator, still in power, had lost his importance and fallen out of grace with the American administration. A few months before his assassination in May 1961, they still felt indebted to Trujillo and were ready to help him, as they had actually done 20 years earlier. Or, with Sosúa even then under his grip, were they, as in the beginning, hostages in his hands? The author does not ponder this possibility. Two shortcomings should be mentioned. Wells does not draw the reader’s attention sufficiently to the coincidences in time between Sosúa’s story and the history of the Holocaust and of the Joint Distribution Committee’s rescue efforts. He thus fails



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to question the investment of some three million dollars in colonizing so few people at a time when that money was so much needed in Europe. He also overemphasizes the alleged opposition of the “Zionists” to Sosúa, without showing any original Zionist documents to sustain this claim. Nevertheless, the author fulfills the claim of the subtitle of his book: he provides us the story of Trujillo, the United States, and the Jews in America and at Sosúa. His research reads very well and is an important contribution to the history of American Jewry, the history of the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, and the history of the Dominican Republic. Marion Kaplan’s book is also the product of thorough academic study. Its publisher, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, produced a comprehensive exhibition on Sosúa, DORSA, and the Dominican Republic, with Kaplan as its researcher. Her purpose was “to write a history of the settlers from the grassroots, observing their expectations upon arrival and their adjustment to a new country . . . their achievements and their problems,” and “to trace how and why the Sosúa settlement came together and grew, and then, how and why most of its Jewish population eventually left” (p. 4). The period covered in this volume is limited to the years of War World II. It is based, like Allen Wells’s book, on the Joint Distribution Committee’s and Hias-Hicem’s archives in New York, as well as on the remnants of the documentation that could be still found at Sosúa in the possession of the local Museo Judio. Kaplan also benefited from the testimony of the surviving ex-settlers. The numerous illustrations taken from many and various collections provide the reader with important insights to the written material. The book is printed on paper of an extremely high quality, as befits a volume that accompanied the exhibition and serves as the enduring evidence of its creation. The establishment of DORSA and Sosúa were intended to accomplish the rescue of many persecuted refugees, but this main aim was achieved for only a handful of people who were selected for the settlement during May and early June 1940 in France and in Italy. The other settlers were brought to the Dominican Republic from their safe havens in Switzerland and in Great Britain. As far as the Germans were concerned, the possibility of rescue through emigration from the Third Reich and from the occupied countries in Western Europe existed until October 1941. But both studies indicate that due to the U.S. State Department’s attitudes, these opportunities were not taken. The two volumes contain, as a result, the story of the failure of the Intergovernmental Committee and its American sponsor to save the persecuted Jews, while using DORSA and Trujillo’s Dominican Republic as a facade for their inaction. The two studies also provide us the full story of a group of middle-class German and Austrian Jews who were challenged to become farmers in an underdeveloped Caribbean nation ruled by a dictator.

haim avni, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-173




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A Nation of Emigrants: How Mexico Manages Its Migration. By david fitzgerald. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Photographs. Illustrations. Figures. Map. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 243 pp. Paper. The field of migration studies is dominated by examinations into how immigrant-receiving countries grapple with social problems ranging from border control to immigrant incorporation. David Fitzgerald challenges this tendency and offers what is, to date, one of the most comprehensive looks into the politics and administration of emigration. A Nation of Emigrants is about the consequences and opportunities that mass labor emigration poses to emigrant-sending nations and how such nations attempt to limit the negative consequences and leverage the opportunities of emigration. Focusing on Arandas, a small rural county in Jalisco, Mexico, the book tells the story of how state, civic, and religious institutions within Arandas and greater Mexico attempted to maintain ties with migrants from Arandas living in the United States. Fitzgerald uses this locale to examine the evolution of local experiences with absent community members, the national tensions between administering a territory and managing citizens, and the international dimensions of labor migration. The three primary content chapters are organized according to systems of emigration control and management. Chapter 2 examines federal efforts to manage mass labor migration to the United States. Chapter 3 focuses on how the Catholic Church adjusted to the rise of mass migration to a Protestant nation. Chapter 4 discusses how hometown associations emerged to encourage and coordinate emigrant investment in municipal projects within Mexico. Each of the chapters follows a similar historical arc by examining how institutions opposed to mass labor emigration during the early twentieth century had, by the early 1990s, actively embraced Mexican nationals living in the United States. Municipal governments, parish churches, and the federal government all balanced courting emigrant workers’ earnings with anxieties regarding the reincorporation of emigrant citizens. Each of these chapters serves as evidence for Fitzgerald’s primary intellectual objective, which is to critique theories regarding the erosion of nation-states and the rise of transnational subjects. “The Westphalian system of sovereign states is not in decline,” argues Fitzgerald. “In fact, it is so robust even when confronted by mass international migration that it has shaped a new social contract between emigrants and their home country that I call citizenship a la carte” (p. 154). Fitzgerald’s concept of “citizenship a la carte” suggests that Mexico — a nation of emigrants — has adjusted to the rise of mass emigration by extending to citizens abroad opportunities for ongoing economic, cultural, social, and even political engagement with Mexico. Citizens abroad, in other words, may leave Mexican territory but remain Mexican subjects. Yet, argues Fitzgerald, citizenship a la carte limits how governments can exercise authority over citizens outside the national territory and the ways in which emigrant citizens can pick and choose benefits of citizenship without obligations. In particular, explains Fitzgerald, states lose the option of coercive force when citizens exit the national territory, and emigrants participate from afar in Mexican politics, culture, and



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society but are exempt from living according to conditions that they help to create. A Nation of Emigrants raises important questions regarding the reach of national authority, the substance of citizenship, and the everyday physical realities of life in an era of mass migration. The book sharply outlines its theoretical framework and will prove useful in graduate courses on state power, transnationalism, and citizenship. Fitzgerald’s historical approach promises a provocative analysis of changes that have taken place in Arandas since economist Paul Schuster Taylor conducted interviews there for his 1933 book A Spanish-Mexican Peasant Community: Arandas in Jalisco, Mexico, but it provides merely a general tour that lacks empirical and analytical substance. For example, archival resources are not always contextualized, and Fitzgerald tends to deploy single primary sources without considering contradictions and contingencies. Further, he misses opportunities for deeper analysis. For example, Fitzgerald provides new information on the Catholic Church and its role in managing Mexican emigration, but he discusses religion, families, and migration without attention to the gendered dimensions of work, mobility, and authority, and without any significant analysis of how the rising number of female migrants might have impacted the Mexican state’s assumption of a more protectionist stance toward its citizens abroad during the 1990s. Still, with these quibbles aside, A Nation of Emigrants raises critical new questions that will lead migration scholars to more thoughtfully consider the emigration story that unfolds alongside immigration history.

kelly lytle hernandez, UCLA doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-174

On the Move: The Caribbean since 1989. By alejandra bronfman. Global History of the Present. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing / London: Zed Books, 2007. Maps. Notes. Further Reading. Index. 131 pp. Paper. In On the Move: The Caribbean since 1989, Alejandra Bronfman synthesizes a vast array of materials on the Caribbean into a general overview that captures the essence of the region along with its complexities. Although this book is aimed at an undergraduate audience, scholars of the Caribbean and Latin America should be able to enjoy this contemporary and timely piece of scholarship. Bronfman sets out to dispute a flat rendering of the region that makes it a victim of circumstances. For this, she employs a series of vignettes and interpersonal histories of ordinary and well-known persons to demonstrate the region’s agency as market forces and mostly U.S. policy respond to Caribbean attempts to participate in globalization. She argues that the region is connected through the circulation of commodities and thus has participated in the formation of globalization. The author uses interesting and thought-provoking examples to stretch our imaginings of the region as a whole and of certain key countries in particular. She carefully tracks global transformations over time to render a complex understanding of the ten-




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sions, both local and transnational, that affect the area. The first three sections focus individually on Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica; the fourth section encompasses several islands in its scope. Bronfman’s examples are relevant in that they provide a strong cross section of the existing linguistic and political spectrums. The book concludes with a discussion of historical memory and who controls it. Throughout the book, the author analyzes the circulation of people, capital, contraband, and information. Bronfman does a thorough job of researching and exploring these circulations and includes a variety of examples of documentary evidence and resources, which she convincingly weaves together. In exploring transnational identity and citizenship, she chooses Haiti as her lead example. A sharp picture emerges of a transnational identity embedded in a global community, illustrated through personal choices, political campaigns, and alliances. Identity is more than a monolithic expression of nationality and becomes both dynamic and circular as sending and receiving countries engage in a variety of cultural exchanges, both intentional and inadvertent. Cuba takes center stage in an exquisite discussion of foreign capital and control. Citing several key factors including colonial legacies, the world market, and U.S. policy, Bronfman outlines the structural successes and failures of the island in counteracting overdependence on former colonial powers. She takes a critical look at Cuba’s pursuit of economic alternatives to balance foreign investment with ideology. Her discussion of the circulation of contraband in Jamaica also has a prominent place in the book. In a manner similar to Sidney Mintz’s analysis of the role of sugar in the triangular slave trade, Bronfman connects the dots provided by a variety of scholars and demonstrates the interlocking connections between the criminalization of marijuana and cocaine, the domestic and international distribution and consumption of these substances, and the push and pull of migration factors. In the final chapter, Bronfman examines information technologies, discussing access to and control of communication technologies and the role these technologies play in unifying the region while also creating new inequities. In Bronfman’s book, the Caribbean is represented as moving beyond its role as a dependent stepchild to become fully engaged in a transforming global setting.

shawn alfonso wells, Carnegie Mellon University doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-175

Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. By david luis-brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ix, 340 pp. Cloth, $89.95. Paper, $24.95. In this groundbreaking book, David Luis-Brown methodically and convincingly turns postcolonial studies and American studies on their heads and casts a keen, hemispheric eye on the anticolonial discourses of author-activists like José Martí (Cuba), Claude McKay (Jamaica), and W. E. B. DuBois (United States). With a North-South gaze, he



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transcends the limits of the nation and reveals his understanding of how the work of certain Cuban, Californio, Mexican, Jamaican, and U.S. writers exemplify the antiracist, anti-imperialist, local/global struggles that were being taken up by discriminated and displaced peoples in the Americas during the 1880s–1930s. Luis-Brown presents the essays, novels, and poetry of Martí, McKay, and DuBois, along with authors like Nicolás Guillén and Jesús Masdeu (Cuban), María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (Californian), Helen Hunt Jackson (U.S.), and Miguel Ángel Menéndez (Mexican) to expose the sociocultural and politico-economic aftermath of the “American century,” the period of territorial expansion to the west and southwest (after the United States annexed Texas in 1845 and provoked the Mexican-American War in 1846–48), and to the south and the Caribbean (after the Spanish-American War of 1898). This expansion inspired the aforementioned writers and others to contribute to a rich production that reflects and promotes a sentimentalist but universalizing and relational approach to indigenismo, negrismo, mestizaje, and to the problems of racism, human rights, and decolonization. After solidly establishing that DuBois and Martí “construct history as a story of successive waves of decolonization and democratization,” Luis-Brown goes on to examine how this transnational framework reveals how writers and thinkers from across different national, linguistic, and politico-cultural boundaries strove to establish the concept of hemispheric citizenship as the one unifying idea that could bring together and empower diverse groups of disenfranchised people. In chapter 1, Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885) are shown to expose and critique conflicts over land, class, and race in the United States, all in the context of other U.S. sentimentalist writing by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, and Alexander Kinmont. In chapter 2, Martí and DuBois are shown to promote civil rights, a “human brotherhood” that extends beyond race and speaks of a need for “broader unities.” Chapter 3 contextualizes works by Mexicans Manuel Gamio, José Vasconcelos, and painter Diego Rivera, Dominican essayist Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Jamaican Claude McKay, Cubans Jesús Masdeu and Nicolás Guillén, and U.S. writers and intellectuals Langston Hughes, Carleton Beals, and Katherine Anne Porter. It recasts in transnational terms Mexican indigenismo and negrismo and the Harlem Renaissance, which were initially seen as distinct national and ethnoracial discourses, to combat what these authors saw as a neocolonial “co-opting” of primitivism as a weapon against European-style “civilizing” discourse. Chapter 4 examines the work of German American anthropologist Franz Boas, Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio, American sociologist Robert E. Park, and American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston to reveal how they theorized race, hybridity, and migration and created virtually a “new ethnography” for the modern city. In the book’s final chapter, Luis-Brown brings the reader to the first decade of the twentyfirst century to illustrate how contemporary immigrant activist groups throughout the Americas are deploying hemispheric citizenship as a strategy to address the economic, political, and racial problems facing migrants in the United States and elsewhere.




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Waves of Decolonization is convincing in its argument for a transnational, decolonizing approach to American studies. It is accessible, grounded, and thorough. It will equally captivate researchers and students of this hemisphere and anyone interested in an alternative understanding of this hemisphere’s intertwined history and destiny. Luis-Brown’s approach is a refreshing and very necessary shift away from the national, ethnolinguistic, and racial boundaries that have most often defined American, African American, Latino, Mexican, Mexican American, Cuban, and Caribbean studies. Furthermore, it is equally important that his recasting of the ethnic and nationalist discourses of the 1880s–1930s has crucial relevance for today, a time of intense world migration and globalization. Contemporary discourses that address the borderless nature of human migration and capital most certainly have their roots in the thinkers and writers of this earlier period, an era whose production Luis-Brown captures and examines masterfully.

kenya c. dworkin y méndez, Carnegie Mellon University doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-176


