In the dozen years Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977) lived in a Sao Paulo, Brazil, shanty slum, she survived by rummaging for junk. She also kept a diary of her abject poverty. Black, illegitimate, and poor, she suddenly became at age forty-six Brazil's best-selling author when a book drawn from her diaries appeared in 1960. An English translation, "Child of the Dark," was published in 1962 and sold over 300,000 copies in the United States in a decade. "Newsweek" heralded her book as "a desperate, terrifying outcry from the slums of Sao Paulo . . . one of the most astonishing documents...
In the dozen years Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977) lived in a Sao Paulo, Brazil, shanty slum, she survived by rummaging for junk. She also kept...
Connections between what people eat and who they are--between cuisine and identity--reach deep into Mexican history, beginning with pre-Columbian inhabitants offering sacrifices of human flesh to maize gods in hope of securing plentiful crops. This cultural history of food in Mexico traces the influence of gender, race, and class on food preferences from Aztec times to the present and relates cuisine to the formation of national identity. The metate and mano, used by women for grinding corn and chiles since pre-Columbian times, remained essential to preparing such Mexican foods as tamales,...
Connections between what people eat and who they are--between cuisine and identity--reach deep into Mexican history, beginning with pre-Columbian inha...
A contemporary of Columbus noted "those crazy Spaniards have more regard for a bit of honor than for a thousand lives." This obsession flourished in the New World, where status, privilege, and rank became cornerstones of the colonial social order.
Honor had many faces. To a freed black woman in Brazil it proscribed spousal abuse and permitted her to petition the Church for permission to leave her husband. To a high church official charged with sodomy in Alto Peru, honor signified the privileges and legal exceptions available to those of his background and social position. These nine...
A contemporary of Columbus noted "those crazy Spaniards have more regard for a bit of honor than for a thousand lives." This obsession flourished i...
An imbalance of power and a sense of unresolved tension have long plagued relations between the United States and Latin America. This book offers an important new synthesis of that complex relationship by studying how actions and policies of the United States have been interpreted and played out in Latin America.
Beginning with the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States unilaterally asserted its right to protect the hemisphere against foreign intervention. But what began as a policy boldly proclaiming hemispheric security soon led to direct intervention by the United States in...
An imbalance of power and a sense of unresolved tension have long plagued relations between the United States and Latin America. This book offers a...
In this new and masterful synthesis, Wasserman shows the link between ordinary men and women-preoccupied with the demands of feeding, clothing, and providing shelter-and the elites' desire for a stable political order and an expanding economy.
The three key figures of nineteenth-century Mexico-Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, Benito Juarez, and Porfirio Diaz-are engagingly reinterpreted. But the emphasis in this book is on the struggle of the common people to retain control over their everyday lives. Concerns central to village life were the appointment of police officials, imposition of...
In this new and masterful synthesis, Wasserman shows the link between ordinary men and women-preoccupied with the demands of feeding, clothing, and...
In overturning Spain's control of the Americas, such great military leaders as Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin unleashed both civil wars and revolutions between 1810 and 1824. Sixteen nations emerged from these violent and cataclysmic wars. The liberators set themselves up to govern the new states they created but quickly failed as rulers. They succumbed, in part, to changes resulting from independence itself-a new political order. Military campaigns directed against Spain split the colonists into royalists and patriots, resulting in a decade of civil wars. The newly formed nations...
In overturning Spain's control of the Americas, such great military leaders as Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin unleashed both civil wars and revo...
This broadly gauged, synthetic study examines how the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire (called Tawintinsuyu) in 1532 brought dramatic and irreversible transformations in traditional Andean modes of production, technology, politics, religion, culture, and social hierarchies. At the same time, Professor Andrien explains how the indigenous peoples merged these changes with their own political, socioeconomic, and religious traditions. In this way European and indigenous life ways became intertwined, producing a new and constantly evolving hybrid colonial order in the Andes.
After...
This broadly gauged, synthetic study examines how the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire (called Tawintinsuyu) in 1532 brought dramatic and irreve...
This abridged edition of Boyer's award-winning examination of bigamy in colonial Mexico reveals the lives, routines, and networks of ordinary people caught in extraordinary historical circumstances. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the Inquisition held the power to investigate breaches of the law on monogamy and to recommend punishment for violators. The pursuit of bigamists provides a fascinating picture of both Catholicism and the colonial state.
The author, drawing from his close reading of Inquisition files, includes extensive testimony of defendants, plaintiffs,...
This abridged edition of Boyer's award-winning examination of bigamy in colonial Mexico reveals the lives, routines, and networks of ordinary peopl...
