The Eisenhower administration's intervention in Guatemala is one of the most closely studied covert operations in the history of the Cold War. Yet we know far more about the 1954 coup itself than its aftermath. This book uses the concept of counterrevolution to trace the Eisenhower administration's efforts to restore U.S. hegemony in a nation whose reform governments had antagonized U.S. economic interests and the local elite.
Comparing the Guatemalan case to U.S.-sponsored counterrevolutions in Iran, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Chile reveals that Washington's efforts to roll back...

Latin American intellectuals have traditionally debated their region s history, never with so much agreement as in the fiction, commentary, and scholarship of the late twentieth century. "Collisions with History" shows how fictional histories of discovery and conquest, independence and early nationhood, and the recent authoritarian past were purposeful revisionist collisions with received national versions. These collisions occurred only because of El Boom, thus making Latin America s greatest literary movement a historical phenomenon as well. Frederick M. Nunn discusses the cataclysmic view...

Throughout the 1980s, "Barricada," the official daily newspaper of the ruling Sandinista Front, played the standard role of a party organ, seeking the mobilize the Nicaraguan public to support the revolutionary agenda. "Beyond the Barricades," however, reveals a story that is both more intriguing and much more complex. Even during this period of sweeping transformation and outside military siege, another, more professional agenda also motivated Barricada s journalists and editors.
When the Sandinistas unexpectedly fell from power in the 1990 elections, "Barricada" gained a substantial...

Gabriela Mistral is the only Latin American woman writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even so, her extraordinary achievements in poetry, narrative, and political essays remain largely untold. Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler explores boldly and thoughtfully the complex legacy of Mistral and the way in which her work continues to define Latin America.

Edited by Professor Marjorie Agosin, Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler addresses for the first time the vision that Mistral conveyed as a representative of Chile during the drafting of the...

Winner of 2002 Costa Rican National Monograph Award During the last two decades, a decline in public investment has undermined some of the national values and institutions of Costa Rica. The resulting sense of dislocation and loss is usually projected onto Nicaraguan immigrants.
"Threatening Others: Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica" explores the representation of the Nicaraguan other in the Costa Rican imagery. It also seeks to address more generally why the sense of national belonging constitutes a crucial identification in contemporary societies....

Portuguese and Brazilian slave-traders shipped at least four million slaves to Brazil in contrast to the five hundred thousand slaves that English vessels brought to the Americas. Controlling the vast number of slaves in Brazil became of primary importance. "The Unpast: Elite Violence and Social Control in Brazil, 1954 2000" documents the ways in which the brutal methods used on plantations led directly to the phenomenon of Brazilian death squads.
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The Unpast" examines how and why, after the abolition of slavery, elites in Brazil imported new methods of killing, torturing, or...