Anselm Verener Lee Guise was a young British mining engineer ap pointed to the post of assistant manager of a tin mine in the first d cades of the twentieth century in Bolivia. Six Years in Bolivia: The Adventures of a Mining Engineer (1922) was the result of his experiences and contact with the Bolivian landscape and people. His travel book underlines Guise's concerns with cultural, economic, and gender differences while presenting a personal transformation forced by his adaptation to new ways of life, which compelled him to perform activities far beyond his knowledge.

Deviant and Useful Citizens explores the conditions of women and perceptions of the female body in the eighteenth century throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru, which until 1776 comprised modern-day Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Mariselle Melendez introduces the reader to a female rebel, Micaela Bastidas, whose brutal punishment became a particularly harsh example of state response to women who challenged the system. She explores the cultural representation of women depicted as economically productive and vital to the health of the culture at large. The role of...

Mariselle Melendez studies the dynamics of colonial subject identity construction as elaborated in the exemplary eighteenth-century travel book, El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (A Guide for Inexperienced Travelers ). She analyzes elements of race and gender to argue that they become essential parts of the colonialist project which the author articulates throughout his travel diary by means of the voices of his two narrators: the Spanish Visitador Alonso Carrio de la Vandera and his companion and amanuensis, Calixto Bustamente Carlos Inca. Melendez shows how racial and cultural...