Kategoria BISAC: History >> Latin America - General

"Latina Performance is a densely theorized treatment of rich materials." --MultiCultural Review

"Arrizon's important book revolves around the complex issues of identity formation and power relations for US women performers of Latin American descent." --Choice

Latina Performance examines the Latina subject whose work as dramatist, actress, theorist, and/or critic further defines the field of theater and performance in the United States. Alicia Arrizon looks at the cultural politics that flows from the intersection of gender, ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality.

Slavery and Identity narrates a peculiar sort of history of the "peculiar institution." Not about slavery per se, it looks at urban slavery in an Atlantic port city from the vantage point of enslaved Africans and their descendants, examining their self-perceptions and self-identities in a variety of situations. The book offers a new window on slave life in 19th-century Salvador, Brazil, and illustrates the difficulty of generalizing about New World slave societies. In Salvador, slaves owned slaves and even participated in the transatlantic slave trade. Africans who were removed from Africa...

During the 1990s Argentina was the only country in Latin America to combine radical economic reform and full democracy. In 2001, however, the country fell into a deep political and economic crisis and was widely seen as a basket case. This book explores both developments, examining the links between the (real and apparent) successes of the 1990s and the 2001 collapse. Specific topics include economic policymaking and reform, executive-legislative relations, the judiciary, federalism, political parties and the party system, and new patterns of social protest.

Beyond its empirical...

During the Cold War era, the United States faced the prospect of expanding its power in Central America. But we miscalculated--grievously. After 1945, Central America teemed with leaders willing to alter the region's quasi-colonial status. Some, like Fidel Castro, sought out revolution to shatter the status quo. Others, like Anastasio Somoza Garcia, attempted to seek out new directions along more subtle paths. Nicaragua subsequently challenged American hegemony in a manner at once more deliberate and more dangerous than any other effort in the hemisphere. The Somoza regime, unlike its...

In the midst of the culture wars raging in the United States, this book recovers a part of U.S. history that some wish to forget--the war of 1898. With the war, U.S. policymakers terminated more than four centuries of Spanish colonial rule in the region and launched a paradigm for U.S.-Latin American relations that dominated the 20th century. The war inaugurated an era of profound change not only in U.S. policy toward Latin America, but also in regional cultures and identities within the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

Virginia M. Bouvier underscores the...

This volume deals with the history of organized labor in all of the countries of the English-speaking West Indies. It is the fourth in a series of histories of the organized labor movement in Latin America and the Caribbean. Alexander traces the countries' origins, early struggles, experiences with collective bargaining, and the key roles in the politics of their respective countries, particularly their participation in the struggle for self-government and independence. He also examines the international organizations of trade unions in the West Indian area, and their association with the...

Bolivia was the center stage for one of the most important Latin American social revolutions of the twentieth century, one that occurred amid a sea of tremendous political instability. The expansion of organized labor that occurred during the 1920s was met with multiple government reprisals and was largely curbed by the Chaco War with Paraguay of 1932-1935. Nevertheless, despite being compelled to operate illegally, the labor movement found support in several political parties, the most successful of which was the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, a powerhouse in the miners'...

Within a few years of their liberation from Spanish rule in the 1820s, several of the new Spanish American republics floated loans in London's financial market. All the debtor nations, from Mexico to Chile, had defaulted within five years, a situation which resulted in their exclusion from European capital markets for much of the 19th century. Most studies of such debt approach the subject from the debtor's viewpoint, some arguing that the British government was an economic imperialist. Concentrating on Mexico, this book provides an important corrective, focusing on the creditors, the...

When Mayan leaders protested the celebration of the Quincentenary of the "discovery" of America and joined with other indigenous groups in the Americas to proclaim an alternate celebration of 500 years of resistance, they rose to national prominence in Guatemala. This was possible in part because of the cultural, political, economic, and religious revitalization that occurred in Mayan communities in the later half of the twentieth century. Another result of the revitalization was Mayan students' enrollment in graduate programs in order to reclaim the intellectual history of the brilliant...

Between 1890 and 1930, the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, experienced a liberal revolution and a worker's movement--key elements in shaping the Ecuadorian national identity. In this book, O. Hugo Benavides examines these and other pivotal features in shaping Guayaquilean identity and immigrant identity formation in general in transnational communities such as those found in New York City.

Turn-of-the-century Ecuador witnessed an intriguing combination of transformations: the formation of a national citizenship; extension of the popular vote to members of a traditional underclass of...

Providing an extensive introduction to cultural studies in general, regardless of chronological or geographic focus, and presenting provocative, essential readings from Latin American writers of the last two centuries, Reframing Latin America brings much-needed accessibility to the concepts of cultural studies and postmodernism.

From Saussure to semiotics, the authors begin by demystifying terminology, then guide readers through five identity constructs, including nation, race, and gender. The readings that follow are presented with insightful commentary and encompass...

The globalization of media industries that began during the 1980s and 1990s occurred at the same time as the establishment of or return to democratic forms of government in many Latin American countries. In this volume of specially commissioned essays, thirteen well-known media experts examine how the intersection of globalization and democratization has transformed media systems and policies throughout Latin America.

Following an extensive overview by editors Elizabeth Fox and Silvio Waisbord, the contributors investigate the interaction of local politics and global media in...

Ideal for student research and debate, this is the first single-volume reference work to examine, country by country, the history of U.S. involvement in 24 Latin American and Caribbean nations. It will help students to understand and debate the role of the United States in Latin America since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and whether in the long run U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American governments has been counterproductive. Each country and its relations with the United States is analyzed succinctly in an individual chapter. Dent, a noted expert on inter-American...

As a history of family life in the squatter settlements of Rio de Janeiro from the 1940s to the 1960s, this study shatters the myth of household disorganization said to be the norm among the urban poor. Using quantitative evidence, field reports by social workers, newspaper accounts, and the recollections of the squatters themselves, the study dissects household structure, economic activity, living standards, and political participation among the one million "favelados" (squatters) living in Rio by 1960, singling out three favelas for comparative analysis. "Favelados" prized family life,...

The persistence of a raced-based division of labor has been a compelling reality in all former slave societies in the Americas. One can trace this to nineteenth-century abolition movements across the Americas which did not lead to (and were not intended to result in) a transition from race-based slave labor to race-neutral wage labor for former slaves. Rather, the abolition of slavery led to the emergence of multi-racial societies wherein capital/labor relations were characterized by new forms of extra-market coercion that were explicitly linked to racial categories. Post-slavery Brazilian...