Kategoria BISAC: History >> Latin America - Central America

During Mexico's first century of independence, European and American explorers rediscovered its pre-Hispanic past. Finding the jungle-covered ruins of lost cities and artifacts inscribed with unintelligible hieroglyphs--and having no idea of the age, authorship, or purpose of these antiquities--amateur archaeologists, artists, photographers, and religious writers set about claiming Mexico's pre-Hispanic patrimony as a rightful part of the United States' cultural heritage.

In this insightful work, Tripp Evans explores why nineteenth-century Americans felt entitled to appropriate...

The Panama Canal has long been celebrated as a triumph of American engineering and ingenuity. In The Canal Builders, Julie Greene reveals that this emphasis has obscured a far more remarkable element of the historic enterprise: the tens of thousands of workingmen and workingwomen who traveled from all around the world to build it. Greene looks past the mythology surrounding the canal to expose the difficult working conditions and discriminatory policies involved in its construction. Drawing...

Though a 1996 peace accord brought a formal end to a conflict that had lasted for thirty-six years, Guatemala's violent past continues to scar its troubled present and seems destined to haunt its uncertain future. George Lovell brings to this revised and expanded edition of A Beauty That Hurts decades of fieldwork throughout Guatemala, as well as archival research. He locates the roots of conflict in geographies of inequality that arose during colonial times and were exacerbated by the drive to develop Guatemala's resources in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The...

During the height of the Guatemalan civil war, Tomas Guzaro, a Mayan evangelical pastor, led more than two hundred fellow Mayas out of guerrilla-controlled Ixil territory and into the relative safety of the government army's hands. This exodus was one of the factors that caused the guerrillas to lose their grip on the Ixil, thus hastening the return of peace to the area.

In Escaping the Fire, Guzaro relates the hardships common to most Mayas and the resulting unrest that opened the door to civil war. He details the Guatemalan army's atrocities while also describing the...

At the turn of the twentieth century, Honduras witnessed the expansion of its banana industry and the development of the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit into multinational corporations with significant political and economic influence in Latin America and the Caribbean. These companies relied heavily on an imported labor force, thousands of West Indian workers, whose arrival in Honduras immediately sparked anti-black and anti-immigrant sentiment throughout the country. Glenn A. Chambers examines the West Indian immigrant community in Honduras through the development of the...

As Brazil and other countries in Latin America turned away from their authoritarian past and began the transition to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, interest in developing new institutions to bring the benefits of democracy to the citizens in the lower socioeconomic strata intensified, and a number of experiments were undertaken. Perhaps the one receiving the most attention has been Participatory Budgeting (PB), first launched in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 1989 by a coalition of civil society activists and Workers' Party officials. PB quickly spread to more than 250...

This book analyzes the development of female prostitution in the Pacific port of Puntarenas, Costa Rica during the advanced stage of the coffee exporting economy (1880-1930), at the height of the consolidation of the liberal state. Hayes argues that prostitution in the port differed from that of the coffee producing highlands due to differential economic, social, and political development. In the periphery of Puntarenas, the development of prostitution reflected a less stigmatized view of sexual commerce than that of the highlands, where prostitution, although legal, threatened the tenets...

Ancient Maya ceramic economy during the Late to Terminal Classic Period (800-900 A.D.) is the focus of this book. The author employed ceramic thin section petrology, raw materials sourcing, and contextual archaeological analyses and samples from a variety of excavated sites in the Belize River Valley region were included: Pacbitun, Cahal Pech, Baking Pot, El Pilar, Xunantunich, Blackman Eddy, Floral Park, and Ontario Village. Standardized petrofabric descriptions enabled the definition of distribution spheres for the ceramics and the study uses intersite comparison of distributional...