Kategoria BISAC: History >> Latin America - South America

This remarkable book lets readers hear Maya myths as they are told today in the mountains of Guatemala. First published in 1993, Breath on the Mirror is now available only from UNM Press.

"A fascinating literary and anthropological excursion into the mental universe of the modern Quiche Maya and their forebears. The stories and myths so compellingly recounted here turn our own world upside-down and remake it in the Maya image. Reading this, one can understand why and how Maya culture has survived five centuries of oppression."--Michael D. Coe, Yale University, author of...

Amazonian Caboclo Society is concerned with peasant society in Brazilian Amazonia. Most anthropological work in Amazonia has focused on Indian groups, and caboclos (peasants of mixed ancestry) have generally been regarded as relics of the haphazard development of Amazonia and have received little serious attention. This volume aims to analyze the reasons for the relative 'invisibility' of caboclo society. It traces the development of caboclo societies and argues that much of the current discussion of 'sustainable development' fails to recognize the important legacy of historical caboclo...

Pierre Clastres (1934-1979) was one of the most respected political anthropologists of our time. Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians is an account of his first fieldwork in the early 1960s--an encounter with a small, unique, and now vanished Paraguayan tribe. From -Birth- to -The End, - Clastres follows the Guayakis in their everyday lives, determined to record every detail of their history, ritual, myths, and culture in order to answer the many questions prompted by his personal experiences. Now available for the first time in English in a beautiful translation by the novelist Paul Auster,...

No writer of his time exerted the magical appeal of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In this long-awaited autobiography, the great Nobel laureate tells the story of his life from his birth in1927 to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to his wife. The result is as spectacular as his finest fiction.
Here is Garcia Marquez s shimmering evocation of his childhood home of Aracataca, the basis of the fictional Macondo. Here are the members of his ebulliently eccentric family. Here are the forces that turned him into a writer. Warm, revealing, abounding in images so vivid that we seem to be...

Published for the first time in the U.S.--one of the two diaries on which the movie The Motorcycle Diaries is based--the moving and at times hilarious account of Che Guevara and Alberto Granado's eight-month tour of South America in 1952.

In 1952 Alberto Granado, a young doctor, and his friend Ernesto Guevara, a 23-year-old medical student from a distinguished Buenos Aires family, decided to explore their continent. They set off from Cordoba in Argentina on a Norton 500cc motorbike and traveled through Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. The duo's adventures vary from the...

In this unique memoir, Marjorie Agosin writes in the voice of her mother, Frida, who grew up as the daughter of European Jewish immigrants in Chile in the World War II era. Woven into the narrative are the stories of Frida's father, who had to leave Vienna in 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer; of her paternal grandmother, who arrived in Chile later with a number tattoed on her arm; and of her great grandmother from...

President Hugo Chavez openly defies the ruling class in the United States, daring to advance universal access to health care and education, to remove itself from the economic orbit dominated by the United States, to diversify its production to meet human needs and promote human development, and to forge an economic coalition between Latin American countries.

But as Bush Versus Chavez reveals, Venezuela's revolutionary process has drawn more than simply the ire of Washington. It has precipitated an ongoing campaign to contain and cripple the democratically elected government of...