Kategoria BISAC: History >> Latin America - Mexico

On an August evening around AD 600, residents of the Ceren village in the Zapotitan Valley of what is now El Salvador were sitting down to their nightly meal when ground tremors and loud steam emissions warned of an impending volcanic eruption. The villagers fled, leaving their town to be buried under five meters of volcanic ash and forgotten until a bulldozer uncovered evidence of the extraordinarily preserved town in 1976. The most intact Precolumbian village in Latin America, Ceren has been called the "Pompeii of the New World."

This book and its accompanying CD-ROM and website...

Paris Monographs in American Archaeology 32

Western values imposed on pre-Columbian practices are obstacles in the understanding of the relationship between the 'skull-rack' (tzompantli) and the 'ball-court'. The impact of a long-held interpretation which stems from the belief that in the ball-game the loser was beheaded is probed, once the activities related to both sacred spaces are surveyed, to examine the genesis of an unfounded proposal. The research shows it is the product of the reminiscence, particular to each epoch, that views the pre-Columbian world from its own conception...

Mexico's past is riddled with stories of struggle--military battles, internal rebellions, revolutions, and drug wars. This in-depth reference provides a complete military history of that country since its War of Independence in 1810 through the present day. From the evolution of combat in the region, to the motivations and tensions behind recurrent conflicts, to the dubious beginnings of drug gangs and warlords, this is the only book of its kind to explore Mexican warfare in such great depth.

This detailed study consists of an alphabetical compilation of roughly 300 entries dealing with...

Beginning in the sixteenth century, ecclesiastics and others created religious texts written in the native languages of the Nahua and Yucatec Maya. These texts played an important role in the evangelization of central Mexico and Yucatan. Translated Christianities is the first book to provide readers with English translations of a variety of Nahuatl and Maya religious texts. It pulls Nahuatl and Maya sermons, catechisms, and confessional manuals out of relative obscurity and presents them to the reader in a way that illustrates similarities, differences, and trends in religious...

The definitive history of the drug cartels, Narcoland takes readers to the front lines of the "war on drugs," which has so far cost more than 60,000 lives in just six years. Hernandez explains in riveting detail how Mexico became a base for the mega-cartels of Latin...

Our hero, let's call him Freddy for the sake of confusion, treks to the land of his forebears that unique land of many names, but to the confused and disillusioned, we know it as Mexico. Why is he there? That is the question He suffers many diversions, many distractions. Many deceptions and many disillusions befuddle his perceptions of this land of mystery: it is lush and lovely, hellish and horror-filled, full of music and full of muckrakers...
It also turns out that he is there as an illegal alien while searching for the answer to a mystery. But Freddy doesn't know he is there...

Jose Vasconcelos--lawyer, politician, writer, educator, philosopher, prophet, and mystic--was one of the most influential and controversial figures in the intellectual life of twentieth-century Mexico.

Vasconcelos was driven by the desire to gain a complete and comprehensive vision of reality, employing his own aesthetic-emotive method and a poetic mode of expression. The complex philosophical system that resulted is what he called "aesthetic monism." But this is only one side of the man. Vasconcelos was also vitally interested in both the proximate realities and remote possibilities...

In the Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico's Southern Highland region, three facets of sociocultural life have been interconnected and interactive from colonial times to the present: first, community land as a space to live and work; second, a civil-religious system managed by reciprocity and market activity wherein obligations of citizenship, office, and festive sponsorships are met by expenditures of labor-time and money; and third, livelihood. In this book, noted Oaxacan scholar Scott Cook draws on thirty-five years of fieldwork (1965-1990) in the region to present a masterful ethnographic...

Few episodes in Texas history have excited more popular interest than the Mier Expedition of 1842. Nineteen-year-old Joseph D. McCutchan was among the 300 Texans who, without the cover of the Lone Star flag, launched their own disastrous invasion across the Rio Grande.

McCutchan's diary provides a vivid account of his experience--the Texans' quick dispatch by Mexican troops at the town of Mier, the hardships of a forced march to Mexico City, over twenty months of imprisonment, and the journey back home after release. Although there are other firsthand accounts of the Mier Expedition,...