Hispanic American Historical Review 91:4

Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press

Book Reviews
General and Sources
Maya Creation Myths: Words and Worlds of the Chilam Balam.
By timothy w. knowlton. Mesoamerican Worlds: From the Olmecs to the
Danzantes. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010. Illustrations. Appendix.
Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 231 pp. Cloth, $55.00.
In eighteenth- century Yucatn a Maya scribe made a copy of a document called
u kahlay cab tu kinil, a phrase that Timothy Knowlton translates as the world history
of the era ( p. 1). The scribes copy ran to about ten folios and is today preserved in the
larger colonial- era manuscript known to us as The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel.
This world history must once have been recorded in hieroglyphic script. But as a result
of the destructive hostility of Spanish church ofcials toward such script, it was written
down in alphabetic Yucatec Maya in the early colonial period (Knowlton persuasively
argues that it was rst done in the late seventeenth century). The subject of the docu-
ment is the creation of the world, the origins of humanity, the gods, the calendar, and
the rituals that must mark the passing of time and the worlds re- creation; in short, as
Knowltons book is titled, Maya Creation Myths.
To say that Knowltons book is a dissertation- based monograph on a ten- folio pas-
sage from an esoteric colonial Maya manuscript would be both accurate and mislead-
ing. For it is certainly that in the course of two hundred pages he carefully presents
and analyzes his own Maya transcriptions and English translations of the creation myth
passage but it is also much more than that. Every segment and subject of the document
is placed within the relevant historical and literary contexts, Maya and Spanish. Two
chapters explore the contexts of Maya cosmogony, primarily before contact, and the tur-
moil of colonial- era culture conict. Four chapters explore well- focused aspects of the
Chumayel mythography. For example, one chapter explains how a passage on the birth
of the uinal (or the 20- day Maya week) is an elegant case of syncrisis (the juxtaposition
of various points of view on a single object, p. 154), with the origins of the narrative
attributed both to the Old Testaments Melchizedek and to an enigmatic ancient Maya
priest named Na Puc Tun. Within the dialogized language of the text, there is even an
invented colonial Maya hieroglyph, a dialogized sign: the Western astronomical ideo-
gram for Sun converted into a Maya logogram for day.
Knowlton calls the Chilam Balam passages that are the books subject colonial cre-
ation myths, neither precise replicas of pre- Hispanic belief nor confused compromises
692 HAHR / November
of European religion; these myths, he argues, constituted the genesis of a heteroglot
colonial world of novel cultural categories and possibilities ( p. 6). His exploration of
that world is rewarding and fascinating, articulated with erudition and precision, with
jargon deployed carefully and judiciously.
This book would pair protably with other studies of cultural interaction in colo-
nial Yucatn, ranging from Inga Clendinnens Ambivalent Conquests (1987), to Victoria
Bricker and Helga- Maria Mirams An Encounter of Two Worlds (2002), to William Hankss
Converting Words (2010). Graduate seminar instructors and students could easily come
up with more creative pairings too; the book lends itself well to such imaginings. It is
obviously a book that is compulsory reading for all scholars of colonial Yucatn, of Maya
literature, and of Maya history before and after the Spanish conquests. But it will also be
of considerable interest to a wider group of specialists, including Mayanists of all stripes
and scholars of colonial encounters throughout the Americas.
matthew restall, Pennsylvania State University
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416675
Cancionero mariano de Charcas. By andrs eichmann oehrli. Madrid:
Iberoamericana / Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2009. Notes. Bibliography. Discography. Index.
778 pp. Paper.
This volume presents the study and annotated edition of 230 poems in Spanish about
the Virgin Mary, taken from musical polyphonic works in manuscripts at the Archivo
y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia (ABNB) in Sucre (formerly La Plata, capital of the
Audiencia of Charcas). These poems have been selected by the editor from some 13 hun-
dred music folders or items (dating from 1680 to 1820) that came to the ABNB from La
Plata Cathedral and from the Biblioteca of the Oratorio de San Felipe Neri ( Julia Elena
Fortn collection). Eichmann announces a future edition of poems about other topics.
This important book originated in the doctoral dissertation by Eichmann, who also
has other relevant publications about poetry and music in colonial Bolivia. In the present
volume he systematically studies texts sung in villancicos and similar genres and describes
the process (that he calls retroescritura) used to reconstruct the poems from their frag-
mentary presentation in different particellas (single, independent sheets of music with
the text underlaid for each voice of a polyphonic composition). For the reconstruction of
each poem, the author has followed three stages: (1) conguration of an initial text (base
textual), selecting the fragments of a poem from different particellas of the same piece
and giving the appropriate order to the fragments, a particularly difcult task if there is
not a previous musical edition of the work, as is the case with most of the poems selected
by Eichmann; (2) xing the text, which requires numerous editorial decisions regard-
ing suppression of unnecessary repetitions of words (usually generated by the musical
arrangement), reconstruction of the poems verses (notwithstanding irregularities and
polymetries), punctuation, accentuation, errata, and inconsistencies; and (3) to reach (as
Book Reviews / General and Sources 693
far as possible) to the version of a poem previous to its use in a musical score. Musi-
cologists who have edited Spanish texts of religious music from before 1850 have faced
the same process of reconstruction described by Eichmann, but their solutions have not
always been systematic. The methodology and examples presented by Eichmann provide
very useful guidelines for future editors of Spanish and Latin American villancicos and
related genres.
In a preliminary study, Eichmann places the poems in the Latin American cul-
tural and musical context, in particular that of the Audiencia of Charcas. Using Gaelle
Bruneaus unpublished doctoral dissertation (2006) and other works about musicians at
La Plata Cathedral, he brings together the biographical information about the compos-
ers who set these texts to music. Eichmann makes an effort to establish literary concor-
dances with Spanish and Latin American sources, although the bibliographic selection
he makes concerning the musical villancico is quite limited. From the literary point of
view, the poems are analyzed in great detail, focusing on the different themes within this
Marian repertoire (in which the works devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe, venerated at
La Plata Cathedral, take a place of honor); the important presence of classical mythol-
ogy; and the poetic forms represented in the collection. The 230 edited poems are num-
bered and classied according to themes (conception, nativity, presentation, ascension,
etc.); an appendix presents another 23 incomplete poems. The title given to each poem is
that of its rst line. The edition of the texts has been done with great care and the poems
are profusely annotated. There is an alphabetical index of rst verses, as well as an index
of main annotated terms.
Eichmanns thorough editorial work is of interest not only for philologists and
musicologists, but also for practical musicians, as can be shown with an example. The vil-
lancico Ah de la obscura, funesta prisin! ( poem no. 58, pp. 310 14) by the Spanish com-
poser Juan de Araujo (1646/48 1712) includes in the last two verses of the refrain (estri-
billo) a contrast between the darkness of Averno (Hell) and the planets of Empreo
(Heaven). However, in the wonderful recording of this work by the Ensemble Elyma and
La Matrise Borale, conducted by Gabriel Garrido (collection Les Chemins du Baroque,
K617124, 2001), the word Empreo is wrongly sung as Imperio (Empire). To sing
Imperio instead of Empreo (in every repetition of the refrain) is a small, almost
unnoticed mistake, but it changes substantially the literary and theological meaning of
the text. Good editions of poetic repertoires, such as the one published by Eichmann,
can be very helpful in order to contextualize the symbolic meaning of texts to be sung.
In all, Eichmanns volume is a relevant contribution to our knowledge of the poetry
in the musical repertoire of La Plata (Bolivia) during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and a stimulating call for interdisciplinary dialogue between philologists,
musicologists, and performers.
mara gembero- ustrroz, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Cientcas (CSIC), Barcelona
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416684
694 HAHR / November
El odio y el perdn en el Per: Siglos XVI al XXI. Edited by claudia rosas lauro.
Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Ponticia Universidad Catlica del Per, 2009.
Photographs. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. 356 pp. Paper.
Armar que la violencia ha marcado de manera decisiva la historia tanto distante como
reciente del Per no entraa novedad: la conquista espaola, el nacimiento y la agona
del dominio colonial, el surgimiento del estado- nacin, las disputas fronterizas y las con-
siguientes prdidas territoriales y, ms recientemente, los aos de la violencia terrorista,
son los hitos que se suelen evocar para trazar el recorrido histrico del Per. Las causas y
las secuelas de esta trayectoria han sido estudiadas en sus ngulos econmicos, polticos
y sociolgicos, pero las emociones que generaron entre sus protagonistas o las formas
en que agresores y agredidos se han relacionado a travs de varios siglos han sido apenas
analizadas. Este libro tiene como objetivo abordar esta problemtica. Por razones con-
ceptuales, metodolgicas y temticas, adems de la cronologa que se intenta cubrir, una
obra colectiva parece ser la va ms adecuada para acometer tan difcil tarea.
La obra editada por Claudia Rosas contiene diecisis ensayos distribuidos en seis
partes. Cada una de estas se reere a un perodo histrico o a un tema: las bases con-
ceptuales y metodolgicas para abordar los temas de que se ocupa el libro, el odio y el
perdn durante el perodo de la conquista, el signicado del odio durante las guerras de
independencia y la guerra con Chile, las experiencias de exclusin vividas por las mujeres
y algunas minoras, la manera cmo el odio y el perdn se han expresado en la cultura
material urbana, y diversas facetas de la violencia y la reconciliacin en el Per de los sig-
los XX y XXI. El libro se dirige a un pblico variado, prioritariamente universitario, y se
conecta con varios debates que comprenden desde la historia poltica ms reciente hasta
la manera como las lites han moldeado y administrado la memoria de perodos an muy
cargados de controversia, pasando por la pregunta historiogrca muy pertinente sobre
si es posible escribir una historia de las emociones en general, y especcamente, del odio.
La contribucin ms importante que este libro hace es plantear este ltimo problema.
Los conceptos, las teoras, la historiografa y las metodologas son abordados en
el estudio introductorio a cargo de Claudia Rosas. En este, hubiera sido deseable que
la autora explicara por qu contrapone odio y perdn, en la medida en que ambos no
mantienen una relacin de dependencia ni son comparables entre s. Queda por analizar
cul podra ser la diferencia entre la violencia y el odio. Sobre la primera se ha escrito
bastante y hoy en da nadie cuestionara que su historia pueda escribirse. No ocurre as
con el odio, que Claudia Rosas presenta como un sentimiento universal, algo que de suyo
sera materia de discusin.
Los estudios de caso permiten apreciar las posibilidades y los lmites que pro-
ponen los temas del libro. El odio y el perdn pueden estudiarse a partir de mecanismos
legales, como lo demuestra el documentado ensayo de Mercedes de las Casas sobre el
uso del perdn real durante las guerras civiles, o de manera ms predecible, a travs de
la actividad de individuos poderosos, como lo hace Pablo Ortemberg en su estudio sobre
Bernardo Monteagudo, activo promotor del odio contra los espaoles en la coyuntura
Book Reviews / General and Sources 695
inmediatamente posterior a la independencia. La memoria encarnada en discursos, ritu-
ales pblicos y monumentos puede alimentar tanto el odio como propiciar temporales
treguas, como lo demuestra Ivn Millones en su inteligente estudio sobre la actividad de
las elites limeas durante el perodo posterior a la guerra con Chile.
No todos los ensayos incluidos en esta obra se cien al tema del libro, si bien tratan
temas interesantes, como el estudio de Vctor Vich sobre los debates alrededor de la
ubicacin de la estatua del conquistador Francisco Pizarro en la ciudad de Lima durante
buena parte del siglo XX. Los ensayos dedicados al perodo ms reciente de violencia que
ha vivido el Per no siempre abordan situaciones, fuentes, ni problemticas originales.
Una seleccin ms rigurosa de las colaboraciones habra dado un perl ms denido a
este libro que tiene como mrito principal sugerir nuevos caminos para la investigacin
histrica.
gabriela ramos, University of Cambridge
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416693
The Jesuits in Latin America, 1549 2000: 450 Years of Inculturation, Defense of Human
Rights, and Prophetic Witness. By jeffrey l. klaiber, sj. St. Louis, MO: Institute of
Jesuit Sources, 2009. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. viii, 463. Paper, $28.95.
The Society of Jesus established its rst mission in Brazil in 1549, a scant nine years
after the founding of the society itself. Between that date and 1767, when the society
was suppressed in the Americas, the Jesuits built a reputation as educators, missionaries,
entrepreneurs, and advisers to royal authorities. The Jesuits also stood out among the
other religious orders for their independence; the close relationship they often enjoyed
with authority was not always smooth. On their arrival in Spanish Florida in 1566, they
became embroiled in a controversy over their right of removal, or their authority to
decide the movement of missionaries, claimed by the Spanish Crown under the terms of
the royal patronage. The rst Jesuits to arrive in Peru publicly criticized the rst viceroy,
Francisco de Toledo, over the execution of Tpac Amaru, the last Inca monarch, and
engaged in a struggle over the responsibilities they would take on. Jesuit missions in
Mexico and Peru were often seen by local property owners as rivals for workers. The
Jesuits defense of the natives in the 30 missions established among the Guaran at the
intersection of present- day Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina created controversies with
both Portugal and Spain, which led to their expulsion from the Americas.
On the restoration of the order in 1814, the Jesuits returned and resumed many
of their former activities in a changed America. In the nineteenth century, Jesuits suf-
fered, along with the Catholic Church in general, from the anticlerical bias of liberal
politicians. They were expelled a second time from several countries, and their activities
were censured in others. However, the Jesuits persisted, returning to former missions
and reestablishing themselves as leaders in education. Questions of social justice became
important motivators in the twentieth century, although not without some controversy
696 HAHR / November
within the order itself. The second Vatican Council began a new era for the Jesuits in
which they were inspired to return to their role of the early mission days as defenders
of the Indians. This and the ideas of liberation theology led Jesuits in Latin America
to focus on social problems and to promote practical solutions for them. Just as in the
early days of the order, this was not implemented without controversy, particularly when
Jesuits became embroiled in the often violent politics of the day and with revolutionary
movements. These changes evolved at a time when the number of men seeking to join
the order declined.
The Jesuits in Latin America is a history of the order, based on author Jeffrey Klai-
bers thorough reading of the secondary literature, punctuated by short sketches of the
lives of some of its most inuential and often controversial members. The authors point
of view is that the Jesuits have from the beginning been distinguished by a sensitivity
and openness to other cultures, attitudes which he traces to their origins in Renaissance
humanism. This sensitivity informed their defense of native peoples and other margin-
alized groups and inuenced their approach to missionary work. Klaiber balances this
view with the recognition that the Jesuits were often social conservatives and shared the
prejudices of their times, but he clearly sees the former as the dening character of the
order. The rst four chapters of the book are devoted to the Jesuits in the colonial period,
with a particular emphasis on the missions until the expulsion in 1767 and less empha-
sis on Jesuit institutions of learning. This part of the book also includes an interesting
chapter on four of the exiled Jesuits, their role as educators about their homeland to a
Europe that was often ignorant or misinformed, and their contribution to the creation of
an American identity separate from that of Europe.
The ve succeeding chapters are devoted to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Klaiber argues that in this period the Jesuits became leading protagonists of social and
political change in Latin America ( p. 23), often in the face of resistance by conservatives
within and without the order. He sketches the Jesuits involvement in movements and
events such as Catholic Action, the Mexican Cristero Rebellion, liberation theology, and
revolutionary movements, to name a few. The material is organized by country, allowing
for easy reference.
The treatment of the various periods of the Jesuits history in Latin America is well
balanced and provides a good overview of the history of the Society of Jesus in Latin
America. This work is also a tribute to many of the signicant members of the order and
an excellent point of departure for the study of these men and their contributions to the
history of the Jesuits.
charlotte m. gradie, Sacred Heart University
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416702
Book Reviews / General and Sources 697
Slavery in Brazil. By herbert s. klein and francisco vidal luna. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi,
364 pp. Paper, $28.99. Cloth, $95.00.
Slavery in Brazil is a comprehensive and useful survey of this most inuential of Amer-
ican institutions in one of the countries of the Americas where its demographic and
social impact was greatest. Masterful in its scope, appealing in its style, and timely in its
appearance, this book should prove both a crucial addition to undergraduate reading lists
and a very useful guide for scholars and researchers working in the eld.
The books rst part examines the development of slavery chronologically, from its
early use in the Portuguese trading empire to its adaptation in colonial Brazil, and the
sugar, mining, and coffee cycles from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. A
nal chapter in this section then assesses broader themes in the economic history of Bra-
zilian slavery. While the narrative is, appropriately, driven by the export cycles, consid-
erable space is also devoted to the role of slavery throughout the internal economy. This
helps emphasize the sheer diversity of tasks for which slaves were used, from whaling to
mule trains to escravos ao ganho (slaves who worked on their own account and paid a day
wage to masters). Extensive cross- regional coverage is also provided, with the main story
owing, as we might expect, from northeast to southeast, but with peripheral eco-
nomic areas such as the South, which also depended heavily on slave labor, given plenty
of space. The authors certainly more than fulll their promise to bring us an overview
of the many regional and thematic schools in slavery studies (demographic history in
Minas, social history in Rio, economic history in So Paulo) that have developed across
this country of continental proportions.
The second part provides a detailed overview of some of the main themes that have
exercised Brazilian scholars of slavery over the last couple of decades: population stud-
ies, resistance and rebellion, and slave family and culture. A chapter on the free people
of color gives this group, which was crucial for dening the particular characteristics of
Brazilian slave society, the attention it deserves and does not always receive from slavery
scholars. A nal chapter discusses slaverys ending and also briey moves beyond 1888,
sketching post- emancipation labor, migration, and ongoing racism into the twentieth
century.
The books greatest strength is that it eminently fullls its purpose of bringing the
wealth of slavery scholarship coming out of Brazil every year to the attention and use
of an international readership. This provides an immense service to the scholarly com-
munity both within and outside Brazil, forging further ties between Brazilian- based and
international scholars, helping scholars of slavery who are not based in Brazil to keep
abreast of new developments, and giving new researchers entering the eld an excel-
lent starting point in coming up to speed with recent Brazilian literature. The extensive
references and bibliography include numerous recent Brazilian masters theses and PhD
dissertations, usually available online, as well as papers presented at recent Brazilian con-
ferences on slavery and population studies.
698 HAHR / November
Another great strength of the book is in providing a unique and thoroughgoing
survey text for undergraduate use. For broad courses on slavery and emancipation in the
Americas or Atlantic World, the book makes the important argument that, since most
other American territories based their own slave systems to some degree on those devel-
oped early on by the Portuguese, the study of Brazilian slavery is crucial to understand-
ing the operation of slavery elsewhere in the Americas. Thus the authors place Brazilian
slavery squarely at the heart of American and Atlantic slavery and emancipation studies.
The most effective use of the book in seminars and lectures, however, will require
additional context on the seminal political developments in Brazilian history that were
linked to the economic, demographic, and social trends that are the books focus. The
chapter on the nineteenth century, for example, does not discuss the advent of Brazilian
independence and thus does not address the growing Brazilian literature on issues of race,
slavery, and citizenship in the 1824 constitution, for example. The chapter does not men-
tion the downfall of the monarchy and institution of the republic in 1889, or consider the
1850 abolition of the trade and the 1871 Free Womb law as the key watershed moments
in (inter)national politics that they were. Students, then, will need to be directed to other
readings to remind them of the important links between slaverys economic and social
impact in Brazil and the political life and broader development of the nation. Leaving
this comment aside, this original volume is an impressive and very welcome addition to
the elds of Brazilian and Atlantic slavery and emancipation.
camillia cowling, University of Edinburgh
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416711
A son de caja de guerra y voz de pregonero: Los bandos de buen gobierno de Mrida, Venezuela,
1770 1810. By edda o. samudio a. and david j. robinson. Fuentes para la
historia colonial de Venezuela. Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 2009.
Notes. Bibliography. 392 pp. Paper, $19.95.
It has now been 40 years since David Brading famously labeled the Bourbon Reforms a
revolution in government. This pliable framework has undergirded much subsequent
scholarship, being used variously to reify notions of the Bourbon state as a despotic cen-
tralizing force that ultimately drove creole independence fervor, to analyze the variable
impact of Enlightenment rationality across the empire, and, increasingly, as an incom-
plete process often challenged by local elites and subalterns.
Edda O. Samudio and David J. Robinsons study, which forms part of a series on
colonial Venezuelan history published by the Academia Nacional de Historia, represents
a new addition to this corpus generally emphasizing the rst two frameworks. The book
focuses on orders designed to regulate public behavior and manage the urban economy
in the Venezuelan city of Mrida during the last third of the eighteenth century. While
most studies of this era emphasize major capitals, Mrida was only a minor town of
approximately 4,000; however, the authors have signicantly uncovered hundreds of such
Book Reviews / General and Sources 699
measures publicly read by a town crier accompanied by military drums, the son de caja de
guerra of the books title. This surprisingly extensive series of proclamations echo similar
regulations passed in other Spanish American cities. They include the prohibition of
public drunkenness, the expansion of taxation on informal bars known as pulperas, and
assaults on empty plots called solares that often served as informal vegetable gardens or
grazing land in the heart of the city. The authors read these measures as indicative of a
broader centralization of power in the cabildo by the local elite, an effort framed as a local
manifestation of the broader centralizing efforts of the imperial state.
This thesis is developed through an introductory study that courses through much
of the recent scholarship on both the Bourbon Reforms and their effects on cities across
the empire. The authors then deliver a close reading of the orders themselves; these
are also reproduced in their entirety. This analysis emphasizes the linkages between
urban spatial organization and elite constructions of civility. Drawing especially upon
the insights of Juan Pedro Viqueira Albns study of propriety in Bourbon Mexico City,
Samudio and Robinson underscore the degree to which the tightening of social mores
represented an assault upon subaltern culture and society. This is particularly demon-
strated by the preoccupation with public drunkenness reected in the bandos themselves,
at least half of which focus upon regulating the consumption and sale of alcohol.
Unfortunately, the authors miss a chance to deeply explore the local social and
political context that inspired these decrees. While Viqueira Albn demonstrates that
subalterns recognized the oppressive nature of such regulations and consistently pushed
back through direct and indirect action, for example, Samudio and Robinson pay little
attention to plebeian responses to these new regulations. Reading against the grain of the
sources themselves, however, suggests that Mridas popular classes continually aunted
elite attempts to control their daily activities. More could also be made of the importance
of the well- known comunero insurrection of 1781, which is glossed over toward the end
of the introductory study, a somewhat surprising decision given that most of the decrees
were passed after this demonstration of subaltern political will. The authors also fail to
address the particular composition of the cabildo itself, whose obsession with regulariza-
tion not only echoed metropolitan discourses but presumably also reected local elite
worries regarding a very present and potentially violent underclass. Examining the eco-
nomic and political background of its members would have greatly expanded the studys
introduction of the acts as a local manifestation and refraction of metropolitan discourse.
Detailing the biographies of the procuradores sndicos, legal representatives charged with
publishing and implementing these orders, would have been particularly useful.
These criticisms aside, the opening monograph provides a ne survey of current
scholarship and a close reading of the documents that demonstrates the expansive reach
of Enlightenment principles even in a peripheral eighteenth- century city like Mrida.
The reproduction of the orders themselves is particularly welcome as they are clearly a
valuable resource. Moreover, their reproduction highlights the wealth of materials that
reside in local archives throughout Latin America, which ought to be further mined to
expand scholarly understanding of the transfer of knowledge to all corners of the Span-
700 HAHR / November
ish Empire. The authors and the Academia Nacional de Historia of Venezuela should be
commended for making these ordinances available to the public and reminding scholars
of the fruitful possibilities of archival research in once micropolitan centers like Bour-
bon Mrida.
ernesto capello, Macalester College
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416720
In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes. By alberto ores galindo.
Edited and translated by carlos aguirre, charles f. walker, and
willie hiatt. New Approaches to the Americas. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2010. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Glossary. Index. xxix, 270 pp. Paper, $21.99.
Cloth, $75.00.
Alberto Flores Galindo is remembered as one of Perus nest political essayists. Over
the course of a life cut tragically short at age 41, Flores Galindo (also called familiarly
Tito) produced a body of work that ranges across most of the major topics of Peruvian
history. Tito was an activist, rst as a student who was dedicated to political activity and
later as an independent intellectual with socialist convictions. His work became a kind of
index of the topics that attracted the interest of the intellectual left. He wrote uidly and
gracefully and had a capacity for work that the rest of us found difcult to imagine.
In Search of an Inca was rst published in Spanish in Havana in 1986 and won the
essay prize awarded by the Casa de las Amricas that year. The work is essentially a col-
lection of essays, some of which were originally written for other purposes and some spe-
cically composed for this book. The common theme is the vision of a return of a golden
age of prosperity for the Andean native people under the leadership an Inca leader who
would lead his people to victory over the descendants of the Spaniards who invaded the
Andes in the sixteenth century. The rst four chapters examine indigenous struggles and
revolts of the colonial period, followed by the racism and authoritarian traditions of the
nineteenth century (the anti- utopia). The chapters that follow focus on the republican
period, examining the rise of indigenous mobilization, populist political movements,
and the challenges to authoritarian rule in the 1920s and 30s, with the supremely hier-
archical and authoritarian model of the Shining Path, the organization that plunged the
country into a civil war that lasted until 1995, four years after Flores Galindos death,
and left an estimated 60,000 dead and disappeared, most of them Quechua- speaking
peasant farmers from the poorest regions of the country.
The academic quality of the chapters varies considerably. Some of the essays, for
example the sweeping introductory chapter and the discussion of racism in chapter 7
(A Republic without Citizens), are broad and essentially general, while others such as
chapter 3, on the eighteenth- century rebellion led by Juan Santos Atahuallpa, meet all
of the academic standards for thorough research and careful argument. Readers may
nd the English version of the book a little stilted in places, but the translators are to be
Book Reviews / General and Sources 701
commended for their efforts, for Tito wrote more like a poet than a historian, and his
translators faced a formidable challenge. His shorter work, written as newspaper articles
and commentaries, is stimulating and thought- provoking, worth reading and debating
by students as well as by general readers interested in the Andes, both past and present. I
suspect that readers new to Peru and to Flores Galindos work will nd the essays in this
book more stimulating if introduced by someone who can provide an introduction to
Flores Galindos turbulent life and times, but in any case, the book is an important addi-
tion to the literature in English available to readers and hopefully an incentive to those
able to take on his essays in Spanish.
It is not easy to evaluate the importance of this publication, in part because Flores
Galindos work in its entirety represents something more than the production of an aca-
demic historian. Much of his work was an exciting rst pass at a topic that engaged
many in Peru. Tito did not seek to write denitive studies, but to provoke discussion
and debate. He was a ne researcher and a thoughtful analyst, but he did not exhaust his
subjects, and wrote more to generate debate than to end it. His work spoke to the current
concerns of his society, and he expected to be a part of the struggle for a more humani-
tarian and humane politics that was always his principle objective. It was our loss, as well
as his countrys, that those expectations were cut tragically short.
But even if later historians write more complete and denitive studies on the topics
he studied, Titos work represents the best and most optimistic of the intellectual produc-
tion of a period that may well be remembered as one of the most difcult and dangerous
in Perus history. At a time when the tendency to act in terms of prefabricated ideologies
and slogans and to propound tried, if hardly true, solutions to his countrys problems was
overwhelming, Tito stood out as one of a small group of people who argued for a human,
creative solution to the chaos of his time. In a testament he made public shortly before he
died, he urged people to take a stand against authoritarianism and murder in the name
of the left as well as the right. And he insisted, this young man for whom the future had
suddenly run out, that the future stands open to those who will swim against the current
and seek new alternatives. We should listen.
karen spalding, University of Connecticut and Ponticia
Universidad Catlica del Per
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416729
702 HAHR / November
Colonial Period
The War for Mexicos West: Indians and Spaniards in New Galicia, 1524 1550.
By ida altman. Dilogos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010.
Illustrations. Map. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xx, 340 pp. Paper, $28.95.
This is a lucidly argued book about a dark period in Mexican history. In the years after
the fall of the Aztec Empire, disease ravaged the native population. To make matters
worse, the crown granted sweeping governmental powers to soldiers of fortune. These
men had little interest in the rule of law and a very great interest in getting rich. The
chaos that ensued has been almost as disorienting for historians as it was for those who
lived through it. Altman does a masterly job of combing through the tangled documen-
tary record of this period, exploring New Spains emergence from chaos, and showing
how a functioning colony was established.
The early chapters draw on the voluminous records of three residencias, or royal
investigations of the colonys early rulers, to narrate the conquest and settlement of
Nueva Galicia. These chapters focus on two related stories. The rst is that of Spanish
conquistadors trying to impose colonial order by violent means, only to nd that vio-
lence brought about greater disorder than before. Nuo de Guzmn plays a leading role
in this tale; Altman nds little to contradict Bartolom de las Casass view that he was a
wicked man. Guzmn was brutal to his indigenous enemies and a much more serious
strategic error cruel to his Tlaxcalan allies as well. By the time the Mixtn rebellion
erupted in 1540, Guzmn had been removed from ofce. But his legacy of violence lived
after him, depriving settlers of much needed local allies.
The second story Altman tells is that of ordinary people struggling to form com-
munities in the midst of chaos. Altmans expertise in the formation of colonial towns in
central Mexico affords her exceptional insight on this topic. Much of what she argues
is surprising. A semifunctional colonial society emerged in the 1520s and 1530s. The
encomienda system worked. Indians paid tribute. Products were exchanged in networks
of long- distance trade. Settlers founded towns and formed households with native
women. They cultivated the land, learned local languages, and had mestizo children,
all despite the storm of violence raging around them. Though Altman does a superb job
of documenting these complicated years, it is still hard for the reader to imagine what it
was like to live in such a world, where both cultural mixing and endemic violence were
the norm.
Altmans chapters on the Mixtn uprising conrm much of what is already known
about it. The rebellion was provoked by the cruelty of the Spanish, was well planned,
and involved many native communities ghting for a common cause. The novelty of
Altmans account lies in her authoritative establishment of the basic facts and in the
rich detail she has mined in the archives. Altman shows, among her many discover-
ies, that Zacateco Indians from the north played a role in uniting Cazcan communities
against the Spanish. The Zacatecos also spread an anti- Christian ideology among the
Book Reviews / Colonial Period 703
rebels. Altman goes on to show that Viceroy Antonio Mendoza was the key gure in
the suppression of the revolt, and that his skillful acquisition of native allies was decisive
in securing victory. If there is one disappointment in these chapters, it is that Altman
does not explore the Andalusian roots of Mendozas behavior. The Mendoza family was
deeply involved in the governance of the formerly Muslim Kingdom of Granada, and
one wonders how the viceroys experience of imperial alliance- making there inuenced
his treatment of native peoples in Mexico.
However one answers that question, Altman shows that the Mixtn War changed
the colony in profound ways. The Spanish learned that there were limits to the utility of
violence and that basic institutions of law and government were needed for the colony
to function. More importantly, the colonizers learned that they needed allies among the
native peoples in order to survive. The native societies of western Mexico were trans-
formed by the war. Driven into the hills, cities, and mining towns, many rebel Indians
survived, but their distinctive cultures were all but wiped out. As Altman tells it, the
history of Spanish failure and adjustment in Nueva Galicia, and of native rebellion and
fragmentation, was complicated, important, and bitterly sad. The War for Mexicos West
sheds a brilliant light on these dark years. Advanced undergraduates, graduate students,
and scholars of Mexican and borderlands history will prot from reading it.
raphael folsom, University of Oklahoma
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416738
Cimarrones de Panam: La forja de una identidad afroamericana en el siglo XVI.
By jean- pierre tardieu. Tiempo Emulado. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009.
Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. 288 pp. Paper, $46.67.
Jean- Pierre Tardieu builds on several generations of Panamanian scholarship, such as
that of Armando Fortune, Mara del Carmen Borrego Pl, and Luis Diez Castillo, to
offer readers the most thorough study to date of sixteenth- century maroon community
formation anywhere in the Americas. He begins with the standard narrative of Span-
iards caught between their desire for African laborers and the territorys ability to con-
ceal runaways. The Castilla de Oros unique economic geography, with the key ports of
Nombre de Dios and Panam situated on opposite sides of the isthmuss unsettled and
difcult-to-traverse interior, facilitated cimarrn disruption of valuable convoys of Peru-
vian silver, regional gold, and metropolitan goods. The fact that slaves were the majority
population only exacerbated the situation. The novelty of Tardieus study is in analyzing
the reality of negotiation in tandem with the common discussion of maroon resistance.
He details the conditions that forced the contending parties to the bargaining table. The
meaning of autonomy was as varied for runaways as were European positions on control-
ling them. The crown, the Consejo de Indias, the Real Hacienda, local cabildos, clerics,
merchants, and individual slave owners brought different philosophies and strategies to
bear in addressing the cimarrn challenge.
704 HAHR / November
Despite the persistent colonist requests for military intervention, metropolitan
administrators initially were slow to act and proposed alternatives to the prohibitive
costs, high European death rates, and frequent ineffectiveness of such intervention. In
observing the colony from abroad, the early crown response contended that modication
to owner behavior would be the most cost- effective strategy for ameliorating conditions
for the enslaved and limiting their ight. However, peninsular ofcials from the Real
Hacienda sought more aggressive approaches. And local cabildos organized and paid for
their slave- catching expeditions. By contrast, more conciliatory clerical involvement was
also key in the process of understanding cimarrn behaviors and in attempting to negoti-
ate their eventual inclusion into the imperial system.
Tardieu highlights several moments of either maroon capture or negotiated settle-
ment. One such event was the 1555 destruction of the community led by the legendary
hero Bayano. Tardieu explicitly addresses the surrounding mythology. It is noteworthy
that the captors could not overtake the community by force but delayed for months to
disingenuously build cimarrn trust before luring their victims into a trap. Here Tardieu
also demonstrates the willingness with which this particular group of runaways sought
to reposition themselves as free associates of Spanish forces. Tardieu then interprets
their naivete and legitimate desire for integration into a grander military system to com-
pare Bayanos imprisoned fate with that of Saint Domingues Toussaint Louverture.
Tardieu more provocatively considers the internal political and ideological struc-
tures of the maroon domain. He notes a complex governmental hierarchy that allowed
for the diffused control of an extensive territory. Tardieu also describes the develop-
ment of a religion nacinal que adopt por mimetismo los ritos y la liturgia cristiana
( p. 98). This view is inconsistent with generations of scholarship indicating the inten-
tional selectiveness that usually accompanied the syncretism of African and Catholic
practices. Tardieus heavy reliance on the late sixteenth- century regional history of Fray
Pedro de Aguado for this interpretation requires some caution, as Aguado was not a
direct observer of the community and wrote with the cultural limitations of his period.
The famous Drake raids of 1572 and 1573 taught both peninsular and local authori-
ties that cimarrn alliances with foreign privateers were not only nancially costly but
also threatened imperial integrity and required immediate redress. Tardieu outlines
the changing course of Spanish imperial responses over this period, from local military
confrontation, to royal offers of amnesty and community recognition, and to a massive
regional military action. Tardieu attributes the nal selection of peace to the astute-
ness of maroon leaders. These seasoned soldiers accepted the futility of endless wars and
acquiesced to the Spanish resettlement plans. In providing demographic details about
these settlements, Tardieu moves beyond at images of cimarrones to provide a valuably
nuanced picture of early free black community formation.
karen y. morrison, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416747
Book Reviews / Colonial Period 705
Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World. By mara m. portuondo.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Plates. Illustrations. Tables. Figures.
Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 335 pp. Cloth, $45.00.
The Iberian expansion overseas had profound repercussions for the historical and intel-
lectual transformations that took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Although the impact of the discovery of a new continent populated by hitherto unknown
(to the Europeans) peoples, plants, and animals has long been acknowledged by scholars,
the specic mechanisms by which information about the new lands was gathered and
processed has only recently been brought to the fore in the English- speaking world,
thanks to the work of historians such as Antonio Barrera- Osorio, Jorge Caizares-
Esguerra, Ruth Hill, or Daniela Bleichmar, to name just a few. To this group of impor-
tant works we must now add Mara M. Portuondos Secret Science, a book devoted to
the cosmographic and cartographic activities developed in Spain after the discovery of
America. Following a tendency in recent studies on early modern scientic practice in
the Iberian world, Portuondo sees the different cartographic and topographic efforts
deployed by cosmographers in sixteenth- century Spain not as isolated endeavors, but
rather as coordinated scientic practices performed to the service of the state and its
imperial ambitions. Portuondo focuses on three loci of cosmographical practice the
Casa de Contratacin, the Consejo de Indias, and the court and probes the institu-
tional development of cosmography and cartography in each of these places and the work
of some of their more important practitioners. Although the books title alludes directly
to the secrecy imposed by Philip II on cosmographical practice and information one of
the reasons why so few early modern Spanish maps have survived to our days the story
that Portuondo tells in her carefully researched book has more to do with methodological
changes and epistemological shifts than with the crowns policy towards cosmography.
To be sure, Portuondo does address the fact that, while cosmography was considered a
secret of state under Philip II, under his successors the cosmographical work undertaken
at the Consejo de Indias began to be published. But the narrative thrust of the book
comes from the internal changes of the discipline from a Ptolemy- based humanist
cosmography, in which descriptive techniques and historical narratives dominated the
discourse, to a mathematically based cartography and geography and the disciplinary
separation of cosmographer and chronicler at the end of the sixteenth century.
In the rst chapter, Portuondo describes the evolution of what she terms Renais-
sance cosmography from the mid- fteenth century to 1530. The different intellectual
and practical traditions that informed the discipline are analyzed not only in the seminal
texts of cosmography (Ptolemy, Apian, and the like) but also in two places of knowl-
edge production: the University of Salamanca and the Casa de Contratacin. Whereas
at Salamanca, cosmography was understood as an ongoing dialogue with the classics in
a curriculum in which mathematics made only small advances, at the Casa de Contra-
tacin cosmography . . . became the handmaid of navigation ( p. 61). If cosmography
was in a good measure dened by these two institutions, by the second half of the six-
706 HAHR / November
teenth century, ofcial cosmographical knowledge production was being conducted at
the Casa de Contratacin, the Consejo de Indias, and, to a lesser degree, at the court. In
fact, as one reads the book, it become increasingly clear that the Consejo and the court
were beginning to dominate the ofcial practice of cosmography to the detriment of the
Casa de Contratacin. Chapter 2 focuses on the royal cosmographer Alonso de Santa
Cruz and on Juan de Herrera, advisor to Philip II, who sought to advance the mathema-
tization of cosmography. Chapter 3 focuses on Juan de Ovandos reform of the Consejo
de Indias and its inuence on cosmographic practice, in particular during the tenure as
cosmographer- chronicler of Ovandos protg Juan Lpez de Velasco, who implemented
the information- gathering process known as the relaciones geogrcas. Lpez de Velascos
career is the theme of chapter 4, and his relaciones geogrcas as well as his project to
observe lunar eclipses around the world are discussed in chapter 5. The book concludes
with the transition from the secretive cosmographic practices to the more open policies
of Philip III, as embodied in the work of Andrs Garca de Cspedes, whose Regimiento
de navegacin (1606) was the rst cosmographic work published by the Consejo de Indias,
thus marking the end of cosmography as a secret science, an end also marked by the dis-
missal of classically rooted Renaissance cosmography for the less descriptive and more
mathematically oriented methodology favored by Garca de Cspedes.
Overall, Mara Portuondos Secret Science makes an important contribution to our
knowledge of Hispanic science in the sixteenth century, in particular regarding its insti-
tutional side. Although it could be argued that a good deal of cosmographic practices
occurred outside the institutional settings described in the book, particularly in Amer-
ica (and, therefore, not necessarily subject to the disciplinary changes described in the
book), Portuondos carefully documented book illuminates the intricacies of the practice
of science within an ofcial setting in sixteenth- century Spain.
andrs i. prieto, University of Colorado at Boulder
doi 10.1215/00182168-1416756
Death and Conversion in the Andes: Lima and Cuzco, 1532 1670. By gabriela ramos.
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Maps. Tables. Appendixes.
Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi, 356 pp. Paper, $39.00.
This book studies how the conversion of the Andean populations to Catholicism was
achieved from a particular perspective: changes in attitudes toward death ( p. 1). Gabri-
ela Ramos declares her intentions clearly from the very beginning, as what the title states
is exactly what potential readers of this book will nd throughout its almost four hun-
dred pages. The focus is clear from the start: the process of Christianization of death.
The book poses spatial and temporal restrictions: the Peruvian cities of Lima and Cuzco
from the early days of the conquest until well into the eighteenth century. This book
never deviates from these goals. Contrary to what it may seem, the complexity of the
topics covered in this book does not represent an obstacle to the audience. This is partly
Book Reviews / Colonial Period 707
achieved by the clarity of the writing and by the books solid structure. Many types of
readers, ranging from specialists to historians, or simply newcomers, will feel welcomed
to read Ramoss study.
How does the author achieve her goals? As briey indicated above, language is a fac-
tor. Although originally written in Spanish, the use of language in this English version
runs parallel to the general tone of the book. The writing is clear, free of jargon, and it
is difcult to nd irrelevant information. The solid, balanced, and informative structure
of the book also directly contributes to understanding the general argumentative thread.
The six chapters of this book always stem from a thesis statement, solidly elaborate on
this thesis, and close with relevant concluding remarks. In addition, each new chapter
recovers some of the basic points of the previous one in order to make it clearer to the
audience. The book is complemented by a selection of appendixes. The corpus of foot-
notes is generous and the extensive list of bibliographical references supporting Ramoss
arguments indicates a methodology solidly grounded in documentary evidence.
This book is especially relevant from the standpoint of historiographic signicance.
The author herself states that the study of religion in the Andes has already been well
researched and analyzed by other scholars. However, Ramoss main contribution lies in
the incorporation of an innovative methodology. She draws on historical, archaeological,
and anthropological research with a special focus on the wills and testaments of indig-
enous Andeans. From this perspective, the book explores a signicant number of issues.
The issue of the appropriation and reorganization of space is key to understanding the
further process of Christianization of death. The emergence of cities as institutional
platforms occupies a central position in this book. The concepts of body and the idea
of self in the Andean contexts are also central in the development of the book. This
study is also full of examples of ritual practices. All these issues help to redene the
typical image of conquistadors as representatives of violence and death. There was also
an implicit process of rationalization behind the conquest. First there was a process of
immersion in the culture of the natives. Then conquistadors had to become familiar with
the culture of the natives. The implicit idea is that the conquest was much more than a
simple exercise of annihilation. The conquest also developed along a rational scheme.
alberto zambrana, IES Francisco Rodrguez Marn, Osuna (Sevilla)
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416765
708 HAHR / November
Indians and Mestizos in the Lettered City: Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Political
Culture in Colonial Peru. By alcira dueas. Boulder: University Press of Colorado,
2010. Illustrations. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 269 pp. Cloth, $65.00.
While historians of colonial Peru are well acquainted with native authors Felipe Gua-
man Poma and Inca Garcilasco de la Vega, Alcira Dueass new work brings together a
larger body of similar texts in order to outline a critical mass of indigenous Peruvians
who brought formal written complaints about their mistreatment to the courts in Lima
and Madrid. Dueas argues that these men used their literacy skills to gain access to
the lettered city inhabited by elites, ecclesiastics, and bureaucrats. In so doing, they
relied on transatlantic networks of information, support, and legislation that brought
some of them all the way to the Royal Court in Madrid. The book shows that Andean
protests against Spanish rule were far from silent in the years between the defeat of the
Inca at Vilcabamba in 1572 and the Tpac Amaru and Tpac Katari Rebellions of the
early 1780s.
As a group, Dueass Andean authors sought to prove that Spanish abuse of defense-
less Indians caused disorder in the viceroyalty. They charged that corrupt priests incited
natives to run away from Spanish towns, that corregidores overcharged for tribute, and
that Spaniards seized native land. To combat such misdeeds, the authors in question
argued that the Indians were in fact gente de razn, or human beings endowed with the
same capacity for reason that Europeans enjoyed, so that the Spanish had no rightful
basis from which to exploit them.
Like Guaman Poma himself, many of Dueass Andean writers attained their lit-
eracy skills under the supervision of the Catholic Church. Juan de Cuevas Herrera, an
indigenous priest from Charcas, wrote his report on priestly misdoings based on what
he himself witnessed during the extirpation campaigns of the early 1600s. Fray Calixto
Tpac Incas Representacin Verdadera ( printed in Lima in 1749) drew on the Bibles
Book of Lamentations in order to compare the destruction of the Inca state with that of
Jerusalem.
A key issue these men fought for was equality in the Catholic Church. Though
Rome and Madrid endorsed Andean participation in the priesthood, Dueas shows that
in Peru, church ofcials repeatedly blocked indigenous access to all but the most sub-
jugated clerical positions. She convincingly argues that this was the result of a colonizers
quandary: in the early stages of Spanish colonization, the church needed neophytes in
order to legitimize its mission of conversion. But once it had made sufcient inroads in
America, Indians had to be reclassied as permanent neophytes in order to secure the
churchs position of dominance.
Although the transatlantic networks these authors utilized were central to their
cases, Dueas provides frustratingly little detail about who actually belonged to them
or how they operated. The reader learns about Don Vicente Morachimo, an elite Indian
from Lambayeque, whose Maniesto de agravios y vejacines was printed under the
auspices of the crown and widely circulated in Madrid as further evidence of why admin-
Book Reviews / Colonial Period 709
istrative reform was necessary in eighteenth- century Peru. Yet, we hear nothing of where
the copies were sold, who purchased them, or whether Morachimo supported the crowns
co- optation of his work. With the notable exception of Juan de Padilla, a creole member
of Limas audiencia who wrote a treatise on Indian exploitation, the vast majority of the
legal advisers, ecclesiastics, and notaries who assisted these men remain nameless, and
the author fails to speculate about how they might have participated in the process of l-
ing grievances. Presumably, research in national, departmental, or municipal archives in
Peru could have helped to develop this line of inquiry.
Dueas admirably addresses the complex problem of the colonial politics of iden-
tity. However, her insistence on discovering trans- culturation and ethnogenesis in
her subjects writings creates methodological challenges. Although her Andean authors
were elites who were educated by and lived among Europeans, Dueas fails to consider
how, as such, they were also familiar with Spanish intellectual culture. She readily links
their treatises to the work of Guaman Poma and other sixteenth- century indigenous
authors but fails to locate this genre in the arbitrista tradition of seventeenth- century
Spain. Likewise, Dueas might have discussed how the informal circulation of the tracts
in question was part of a much larger Spanish tradition of having important political
commentaries corre manuscrito, or circulate in a manuscript form that contemporaries
thought to be more veriable.
In sum, this book brings to light these indigenous intellectuals dynamic efforts
to shape their own social and political status in the Spanish Empire. For the historian
of colonial Spanish America or Peru, it provides an enticing overview of a transatlantic
political discourse and suggests interesting avenues for future research.
emily berquist, Dibner Research Fellow, Huntington Library
doi 10.1215/00182168-1416774
Esclavos de la ciudad letrada: Esclavitud, escritura y colonialismo en Lima (1650 1700).
By jos ramn jouve martn. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005. Notes.
Bibliography. 205 pp. Paper.
Jos Ramn Jouve Martn has a bold purpose: to understand how Afro- Peruvians, a pre-
dominately illiterate group in the colonial era, employed the practices of writing and
powerful written records ( la Angel Ramas Lettered City) in order to negotiate their
symbolic and political positions in the viceregal capital of Lima in the seventeenth cen-
tury. By exploring the everyday role of legal writing in the citys black community, Jouve
Martn proves that enslaved and free men and women of color, who may not have been
able to read or write, would have experienced literate discourse when clerics read out
loud to them during religious indoctrination ( p. 60), or when a notary read an agree-
ment back, allowing illiterates to participate in the composition of the document and
thus allowing their integration into literate society ( p. 82). According to Jouve Martn,
certainly scribes and notaries shaped the words of Africans and their descendants, but
710 HAHR / November
the act of writing was not solely making marks on paper but inserting the marks into a
relevant social, legal, and political context.
The book is an exciting advancement in the still nascent eld of Afro- Andean his-
tory. While knowledge is growing regarding the legal agency of urban people of color
(see works by Carlos Aguirre, Maribel Arrelucea Barrantes, Sherwin Bryant, Christine
Hnefeldt, Michelle McKinley, and Tamara J. Walker), determining how colonial Afro-
Peruvians gained access to these judicial venues is where Jouve Martn has advanced the
scholarship. By employing wills, contracts, ecclesiastical judicial material, notarial records,
and literary texts, Jouve Martn demonstrates that even though people of African descent
were, in principal, excluded from receiving a formal education (including learning Latin),
a rare number ( perhaps as servants or slaves to clerics) did; he suggests that people with
even partial knowledge of language and signs could interact with literate culture ( p. 74).
By examining the processes by which enslaved men, and primarily women, seized on judi-
cial and notarial means to sue owners, claim manumission, or call on a marriage promise,
Jouve Martn reminds us of the negotiation inherent in the written documentation.
Jouve Martn makes a contribution to both history and literary studies. He identi-
es his theoretical lens as including new literacy studies (analyzing reading and writing
within their context) as well as literary approaches to colonialism, suggesting a subaltern
perspective within written documentation. With these theoretical tools, the author is
able to explore how judicial writing contained a ctitious rst person ( p. 106) that erased
the mediation of the document as well as the presenter, while tting within the formulaic
prose of the court as the scribe translated the oral testimony into an acceptable narrative
form. Given these exciting choices, it is interesting that Jouve Martn also situated his
work as a complement to what he maintained to be a dominant historiographical focus
on the economic histories of plantations and their enslaved laborers. As a result, the
book reads as if Lima were the only colonial city in the Americas with a substantial black
population and certainly as if there was not a vibrant historiography on urban, black
communities if only meaning that the author had to cross a century or two. Jouve
Martns book already stretches across literary and historical studies, but with more
stretch into the vast work on urban slavery in Brazilian or Cuban history and, most
especially, the United States the exceptionalism of seventeenth- century Lima fades.
Nonetheless, the comparison only underscores Jouve Martns invitation to understand
Lima, in the seventeenth century, as a black city.
Undoubtedly, as Jouve Martn makes clear, Africans and their descendants were
not afforded the same political or juridical location in colonial Spanish America as were
indigenous people. Jouve Martn argues that without a political location, people of Afri-
can descent sunk their efforts into written texts as well as creating confraternities or
guilds for specic naciones of Atlantic African regions, such as Kongo or Guinea- Bissau.
He claims that when Africans and their descendants transcended their trans atlantic
nomenclatures to creole identities, enslaved and free men and women were able to
escape the boundaries of being slaves in the lettered city that bound them. Jouve Martn
seems to suggest that the rich diversity of Afro- Peruvians was their downfall, as did the
seventeenth- century viceroys. Here, the conation of the practices and the identities of
Book Reviews / Colonial Period 711
the African diaspora with the institutions of slavery requires disentanglement. But Jouve
Martn has provided many scholars with new tools and much inspiration to do so.
This clearly written book has proven signicant to scholars of colonial Peru, Afri-
can diaspora history in the Americas, and those interested in methodologies of reading
texts that work between historical and literary studies.
rachel sarah otoole, University of California, Irvine
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416783
Priest- Indian Conict in Upper Peru: The Generation of Rebellion, 1750 1780.
By nicholas a. robins. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007.
Chronology. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. x, 315 pp. Paper, $29.95. Cloth,
$59.95.
Religious history in colonial Latin America has attracted much attention over the past
decade and remains at the forefront of the current research agenda. Historians present
interest in religious experience has somewhat overshadowed the action of ecclesiasti-
cal institutions and clergy in the more mundane aspects of the churchs mission. This
is above all true of how its clergy operated at local levels well after the initial conquest
decades, when the initial encounter produced a riot of syncretistic misunderstandings
and outcomes. Studies such as those of Adriaan C. van Oss and William B. Taylor on
Guatemala and Mexico, respectively, have demonstrated the rewards of focusing on
parish clergy for a deeper understanding of how and why colonial societies functioned.
Nicholas Robinss new book provides a multifaceted treatment of the modus operandi
of rural clergy in its relations with the communities, and the communities range of
responses to the developing crisis in rural Upper Peru, which until now has been singu-
larly lacking in Andean historiography.
The book is carefully contextualized on three levels. The rst is the wider Bourbon
program of ecclesiastical reform and particularly how this was implemented and expe-
rienced at the local level. The second is a detailed immersion in the perennial frictions
and schisms among rural elites competing for indigenous resources, both xed and
liquid. The third, and potentially most problematic, is the teleological endpoint of the
1780 81 rebellion. Robins anatomizes these relations during the three decades prior
to the insurgency, interweaving his narrative and analysis with these wider framings,
while drawing on extensive archival work and engaging generously with a rich second-
ary literature. Bourbon reformism undermined many institutional and private interests,
targeting the clergy and undermining local moral economies. The author argues that
the increasingly assertive nature of civil authority was a new factor in colonial society,
a reminder that the Bourbon reform program was felt deeply at local levels. It was also at
this juncture that successive Bourbon administrations began to wind back the social and
economic remit of the church and its clergys sacred fuero.
In the Andean domains, ecclesiastical fees soured the clergys relations with indig-
enous communities. There is some evidence that the clergys nancial imposts and per-
712 HAHR / November
sonal service demands were a heavier burden upon indigenous communities than those
of royal ofcials. The case studies are instructive and many turn on disputes over the
diocesan protocol (arancel) that computed all possible permutations and combinations of
fees for sacraments and church services, and which was of almost baroque complexity.
These charges, the violence with which they were sometimes collected, clerical coercion
of indigenous labor, and even forced marriages, all combined to undermine both clerical,
and by extension royal, authority in rural Charcas. The rural clergys inveterate adver-
sary was the corregidor. In effect, both competed for indigenous surplus product, and this
perennial struggle intensied after 1750 when the latter were permitted increased levels
of repartos, the forced sale of merchandise to indigenous and poor rural congregations.
This rising curve of corregidors earnings was matched by increased priestly incomes
from the same pool of victims: rural communities were crushed in a nancial vice. The
communities had frequent recourse to the judicial system, often successfully, but there
was a certain hiatus between a favorable judgment and its implementation.
The backlash came in 1780 81 with rebel depredations against churches and cult
and vengeance against individual clergy. Robins makes the intriguing suggestion that
these attacks represented a rebel attempt at a cosmological conquest of the ruling God:
in effect, to conquer the Christian God was to conquer colonialism. The converging
pressures on indigenous communities and clergy alike were an important and sometimes
overlooked seedbed of the rebellion of 1780. The authors discussion of priest- community
relations is carefully controlled and avoids simplistic causal explanations. This insur-
gency was marked by extreme levels of violence against clergy by indigenous troops and
communities: in 1784 the presbyter (and Inca noble) Justo Sahuaraura reported that reb-
els had killed 70 priests, all but 6 in Charcas alone. Upper Peru is thus an unsurpassed
case study to examine the nature of the relations between curas and Indians and how such
relations could be imperiled, and even break down entirely.
The clergy were deeply involved in all the mundane aspects of colonial life, such
that to address the relations between priests and indigenous ocks is tantamount to
writing the history of rural society tout court. The authors portrayal of the clergy in
action is not dissimilar to that of Juan and Ulloa in their 1749 Noticias secretas, which
excoriated Andean clergy for alleged moral laxity and exploitative proclivities. Robins
lodges the caveat that some clergy attempted to protect their ocks, but that conict
was more likely to be recorded, such that the bias in the extant documentation tends
toward a negative view of clergy. Be that as it may, it is clear that church and clergy
were principal vectors of exploitation of the indigenous peasantry. Just as an understand-
ing of Mexican clergy in this era must begin with Taylors magisterial 1996 volume, so
too future research on the Andean clergy will start with Nicholas Robins ne- grained
study, which lls a major lacuna in the historiography of the colonial Andes and Spanish
America generally.
david cahill, University of New South Wales
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416792
Book Reviews / Colonial Period 713
Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms.
By adam warren. Pitt Latin American Series. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2010. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi, 290 pp. Paper, $26.95.
A new generation of scholars is examining the complex outcomes of the Bourbon reforms
in the Spanish colonies. Adam Warrens Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population
Growth and Bourbon Reform is a creative addition to this intriguing literature. Putting
doctors and medicine at the center of the story allows Warren to expose the multiple and
complicated interactions among numerous social and cultural groups in late Peruvian
politics and society. The book takes as its initial premise a study of the role of physicians
in constructing a vision (that ultimately failed in this period) of a modern Peru with a
healthy, growing population. Exploring this question and its implications from a number
of angles, the book also leads us to detailed discussions of a range of fascinating trends,
such as conicts among physicians and popular healers; late colonial, trans national
dynamics of policy making and rule; tensions between doctors and the church, with the
state as an intermediary; and a variety of popular beliefs and practices that intersected
with medical ideas.
An introduction that lays out the goals, historiography, and larger historical context
of late colonial Peru is followed by six chapters and a conclusion. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss
in detail the structural context of the proposed and enacted medical practices: rst, a his-
tory of medical and hospital infrastructure as embedded in larger institutional changes
in state and church policy; next, a look at the power struggle between doctors and other
healers, including surgeons and Afro- Peruvian healers. The remaining chapters take on
specic events or themes, all of which provide a window on the larger social and political
struggles in the late Bourbon era and through the rst decades of the postindependence
period. A chapter on diverging strategies for smallpox vaccination in the rst decade of
the nineteenth century reveals the ambitions of creole (local elite) doctors as well as the
limits of their power. Next, a chapter on leprosy demonstrates the hesitant progress made
by physicians who tried to strip the disease of its Biblical stigma and made it central to
the processes of medical modernization and colonial scientic knowledge production
( p. 156). Chapter 5 takes on the clash between state reform and common burial practices.
Warren uncovers the complex tensions between Bourbon medical ideas about health
and disease prevention and popular religious beliefs about piety, a good death, and the
afterlife. This chapter is enlivened by the details of popular funeral rites, including how
those practices were cut through by difference in race, class, and age of the diseased.
Chapter 6 reviews postindependence reforms in medical education, a subject of vital
importance to the new nation. Despite their lofty goals and valiant efforts in the previous
decades, doctors were unable to gain the political support to modernize, and to a certain
extent, secularize the nations main medical school. (Warren points out that medicine in
Peru, then and now, is highly centralized in the capital city of Lima.) This story of failure
rested on a combination of factors, including the continued strength of the church, and
the politicization of many prominent doctors, who themselves became enmeshed in poli-
714 HAHR / November
tics to the detriment of their medical careers. Ultimately, the creole doctors vision was
not strong enough to overcome the political, social, and cultural conicts of the era.
In a conclusion, Warren places the larger study in the context of the historiogra-
phies it intersects: the history of medicine, Peruvian history, and comparative colonial
history. Indeed, the book is a rich contribution to these literatures. He also argues here
that the study of medicine in late colonial Peru, until now largely overlooked, shows
us that the roots of medical modernization and innovation extend much deeper into
the colonial period ( p. 223). While the ambitious visions of medical reformers failed
in the face of larger forces, creole medical politics and discourse nevertheless carried
over into independence and inuenced early concepts of public health ( p. 229). Medicine
and Politics in Colonial Peru will be of interest to comparative colonialists as well as Latin
America specialists. The books clearly written narratives and engaging detail make it a
good choice for both undergraduate and graduate courses in colonial Latin America and
the history of medicine.
julia rodriguez, University of New Hampshire
doi 10.1215/00182168-1416801
National Period
Indigenous Citizens: Local Liberalism in Early National Oaxaca and Yucatn.
By karen d. caplan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Maps. Notes.
Index. viii, 289 pp. Cloth.
La obra que reseamos, Indigenous Citizens: Local Liberalism in Early National Oaxaca and
Yucatn de Karen D. Caplan, constituye una aportacin original a la historia del siglo
XIX mexicano. A lo largo de las siete partes del libro, la autora encara el estudio en dos
perspectivas: las evoluciones del liberalismo en los estados de Oaxaca y Yucatn, entre
1821 y 1847 y la posterior tensin que mantuvieron las realidades y liberalismos locales
con el liberalismo nacional. En el captulo introductorio y en las conclusiones, Caplan
analiza las interacciones en los dos planos citados de la realidad mexicana; en el segundo
estudia comparativamente el ambiguo impacto que conllev la revolucin liberal espaola
entre los indgenas de ambas entidades; nalmente en los captulos interiores alternativa-
mente descubre las lgicas internas que hicieron posible los liberalismos locales en ambas
entidades.
Esta original estrategia de anlisis permite comprender los lmites de la fragmen-
tacin poltica- territorial que sigui a la independencia mexicana, as como el largo y
contradictorio proceso de consolidacin de un liberalismo de corte nacional. Igualmente,
arroja luz sobre aspectos de la formacin del estado con una nica cultura poltica. Es
sta, sin lugar a dudas, una estrategia innovadora que permite escapar a interpretaciones
provincianas y miradas desde la cspide del sistema y de espaldas a un Mxico en que las
autonomas locales tuvieron una fuerza indiscutible que termin por declinar. Las opera-
Book Reviews / National Period 715
ciones implcitas en esta estrategia resuelven el peligro de desagregar una realidad que, a
pesar de ser multifactica en los planos, tambin tuvo una lgica integradora.
Indigenous Citizens se coloca, entonces, a contracorriente de perspectivas histo-
riogrcas que caracterizan el siglo XIX mexicano por sus fracasos o carencias. No niega
que la propuesta de cambio en la primera mitad del siglo fue insuciente para formar
una sociedad de ciudadanos liberales y conllevar transformaciones sustanciales en las
estructuras socioeconmicas y polticas del Antiguo Rgimen. Pero su autora rechaza
considerar la experiencia del liberalismo como epidrmica. Por el contrario, surgieron
varios liberalismos con fuerte arraigo local. A partir de 1812, los actores involucrados
en el estudio (indgenas y administradores locales de Oaxaca y Yucatn) construyeron
liberalismos nicos sobre la base de un lenguaje comn a todos. Ellos acordaron que el
nuevo estado deba estar limitado y que las obligaciones y derechos fundamentales deban
estar detallados en la constitucin.
La construccin local del liberalismo fue posible porque, despus de 1821, el prob-
lema histrico que enfrentaron los actores fue asegurar la gobernabilidad en el nivel de
las entidades federativas. En otros trminos, el liberalismo de la primera mitad del siglo
XIX no fue entendido como ideologa; fue ms bien un nuevo sistema de gobierno por
el que los ciudadanos ejercieron la libertad, desplegaron un movimiento proactivo de
cambio, crearon instituciones polticas hbridas y defendieron la conservacin de una
cultura poltica de patronaje. Indigenous Citizens muestra los procesos de negociacin que
se desarrollaron cotidianamente entre localidades indgenas y funcionarios estatales para
establecer la naturaleza peculiar de instituciones polticas innovadoras que eran ms con-
ictivas y que ms afectaban la vida comunitaria, a saber, la expansin de la ciudadana,
la propiedad privada y las contribuciones scales y militares.
Pero Indigenous Citizens tambin muestra que a lo largo de 20 aos los casos estu-
diados arrojaron contrarios resultados de las experiencias de negociacin pactadas entre
gobernantes y poblacin indgena en los estados de Oaxaca y Yucatn. Ambas entidades
compartieron caractersticas demogrcas y polticas ( poblacin mayoritariamente ind-
gena, dispersa en pequeas localidades, enraizada autonoma local). A la vez, en ambas
los indgenas entendieron que su relacin con el gobierno poscolonial a nivel estatal
estaba basada en obligaciones mutuas (contribuciones y servicio militar) y en especcos
derechos para los indgenas (de autogobierno, de proteccin y exencin de parte de una
administracin con nociones de justicia y obligacin colonial). El destino de las divergen-
tes conguraciones liberales locales dependi de los comportamientos de la poblacin
no indgena. El caso yucateco muestra que cuando sta poblacin defendi objetivos
econmicos disruptivos, el pacto de gobernabilidad fue inviable.
Indigenous Citizens nalmente explica que los liberalismos locales de la primera
mitad del siglo XIX contribuyeron a la formacin del estado mexicano junto al sistema
constitucional. Aun cuando no estaban plenamente identicados con la nacin, tuvieron
en su horizonte la consolidacin del gobierno nacional y el progreso prometido por el
liberalismo. En la segunda mitad del siglo, esas empresas contaron con los indgenas
oaxaqueos que, a diferencia de lo que ocurri con los indgenas yucatecos, participaron
716 HAHR / November
en las las liberales bajo la lgica de apoyo mutuo. As, las jerarquas, la autonoma e
identidad de cada pueblo prolongaron su vida. El pacto termin cuando Daz control la
negociacin sobre recursos y distribucin de posiciones de poder en los estados y se at
al liberalismo econmico.
alicia tecuanhuey sandoval, Benemrita Universidad Autnoma de Puebla
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416810
Historia ambiental de Bogot y la Sabana, 1850 2005. Edited by
germn palacio castaeda. Leticia, Colombia: Universidad Nacional de
Colombia / Instituto Amaznico de Investigaciones IMANI, 2008. Illustrations.
Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliographies. 345 pp. Paper.
In the past few years, environmental history has gained visibility in Colombian academic
circles. Germn Palacio, editor of Historia ambiental de Bogot y la Sabana, 1850 2005,
is one of the researchers who have contributed most to the development of this eld.
The articles in this book are part of a research project that started in the 1990s when
Palacio and his team began looking at changes in landscapes and territories in Colom-
bia since 1850. Methodologically, the period of study was divided into three subperi-
ods: 1850 1920, reappropriation of nature; 1920 70, modernization of nature; and
1970 present; as a result of the emergence of the environmental discourse and its impacts
on natural resource management, Palacio calls this last subperiod the environmentaliza-
tion of nature. The authors in this volume use this periodization to undertake the study
of Bogot and its relation to the surrounding plain. The book includes a preface and
eight articles by different authors that look at different aspects of this relationship. Some
of the chapters deal with the development of the city, while others describe and analyze
environmental changes in the rural landscape of Bogots surrounding plain. Some of
the articles go even further and explore how Bogotas footprint has grown since the late
nineteenth century through agriculture and urbanization that established links among
the city, the surrounding plain, the slopes of the Eastern Cordillera and the tropical
lowlands of the Magdalena River.
The authors, whose backgrounds include economics, philosophy, biology, architec-
ture, history, and law, use a wide variety of approaches. This results in a volume with dif-
ferent writing and argumentative styles and differing points of view that provide a rich
and undisciplined understanding of the environmental history of the study area. All the
articles explicitly link different dimensions (social, economic, political, institutional, and
environmental) and spatial and temporal scales in a coherent analysis of environmental
change in the Bogot plain. This relational perspective provides a suitable framework
for interpreting and analyzing the society- nature relationship in the period of study and
also gives important information on the increasing imbalance between environmental
endowments and resource use. The rate of change has accelerated since 1850, result-
ing in environmental degradation as a result of poor management decisions that do not
Book Reviews / National Period 717
necessarily take into account the links among dimensions and scales. It is interesting to
mention that most chapters acknowledge the fact that, although Colombia gained inde-
pendence in 1819, little changed in the city and its surrounding area until well into the
second half of the nineteenth century. In other words, colonial management of resources
prevailed well into republican times. The articles also look at how the perception of ideal
cities and countrysides has changed since colonial times and how this is reected both in
urban and rural environments.
The essays provide an important contribution in the eld of environmental history
of the Bogot plain. While the diversity of approaches was highlighted as one of the
advantages of this compilation, it is also one of the disadvantages. Although all chap-
ters are suitable for a general public, some of them are not necessarily intended for an
academic audience and as a result, they lack the rigor required for an academic piece.
In these articles, facts are not adequately supported and, in many instances, the sources
may not be clear. This book is conceived with a Colombian public in mind. It is assumed
that the reader knows Bogot and its surrounding area well. Although there are maps of
the area in some articles, they are not used to contextualize the reader. The contribu-
tion of this book could go further if it included an introductory chapter with a brief but
adequate geographical and historical contextualization of the study area. Additionally,
there is no clear thread in the articles. Although grouped by geographical topic, there is
no indication of the reasons behind the ordering of the pieces. Each essay is conceived
as an independent piece; therefore some are repetitive in aspects such as a description of
the study area. The article about the natural setting of the Bogot plain is full of relevant
data but with very little analysis and elaboration. The reader without knowledge of the
area or basic knowledge on geology or biology may nd this piece very difcult to tackle
and quite useless. Finally, it would have been extremely useful to have a concluding piece
where the editor highlights the main points of the articles.
This book represents another step toward nurturing the eld of environmental his-
tory in Colombia consistent with current trends in the eld (such as interdisciplinarity).
Like any good research product, it leaves the reader with more questions than answers
and suggests many topics for researchers interested in Colombian environmental
history.
andrs guhl, Universidad de los Andes, Bogot
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416819
718 HAHR / November
Una historia ambiental del caf en Guatemala: La Costa Cuca entre 1830 y 1902.
By stefania gallini. Guatemala City: Asociacin para el Avance de las Ciencias
Sociales en Guatemala, 2009. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography.
xxix, 328 pp. Paper.
Latin American historians have devoted considerable attention to the study of the
regions coffee industries, although few of them have dwelt on coffees rich environ-
mental history. Stefania Gallinis new Historia ambiental del caf en Guatemala focuses
particularly on coffees environmental history. Like other classic coffee histories, such as
Stanley Steins Vassouras, Gallini has written a ne- grained analysis of one coffee region,
with an eye to larger trends in the coffee industry. Her study focuses in particular on the
Costa Cuca in southwestern Guatemala, which by the end of the nineteenth century was
one of the most dynamic coffee regions in the country. Gallini deftly situates her study
in the context of the best recent Anglo- American, European, and Latin American writ-
ing on environmental history.
Gallini has chosen an innovative way of writing this environmental history of cof-
fee. She devotes seven of the books eight body chapters to the decades leading up to the
coffee boom. This approach is deliberate, and makes the important historiographic point
that coffee farms in the Americas were almost never constructed upon empty, virgin
landscapes. Rather, the Costa Cuca and coffee zones like it were ecologically and cultur-
ally constructed over long periods of time. Gallini begins with a geographical overview
of the Bocacosta in Southwestern Guatemala, a region that connected the humid coasts
and the cooler highlands. The indigenous Mam people who inhabited the Bocacosta,
argues Gallini, practiced a form of vertical complementarity, cultivating complementary
crops in the highlands (tierras altas) and the lowlands (tierras bajas).
While there were signicant transformations in the regions landscapes during
the colonial period, Gallini argues that the most signicant ecological transformations
took place in the nineteenth century. The Bocacostas ecosystems were reconstructed
by a stream of modernizing inuences. Gallini devotes an entire chapter to one of these
inuences, the land surveyors (agrimensores). This is arguably one of the most innova-
tive chapters in the book. Gallini argues convincingly that surveyors helped determine
the expansion of territoriality, the capitalization of land as a factor of production, and
the construction of agro- export economies, all factors in the construction of the mod-
ern Guatemalan state ( p. 86). To simplify Gallinis much more complex and nuanced
argument, the maps that these surveyors produced constructed new ways of conceiving
and using territory. In the nineteenth century, measuring and mapping the land became
an essential step to claiming possession of it. These maps also helped consolidate the
concepts of private property and permanent cultivation, both of which marginalized
the indigenous ideas and practices of land tenure and land use that had prevailed in the
region until then and helped make the coffee boom and the construction of the Costa
Cuca possible.
Between 1850 and 1880 Ladinos from the highlands and their cattle began to move
Book Reviews / National Period 719
into the region. Like many other parts of Latin America, the region also experienced a
revolution in transportation and communication with the construction of highways, rail-
ways, the telegraph, and the postal service. These processes, coupled with the legal and
administrative processes described above, helped transform the Mam ejidos (farmlands
owned communally by indigenous communities) into state- owned baldos (uncultivated
common lands) that could then be sold to the highest bidder. Ultimately, highland and
lowland Mam communities became disarticulated. This process left the surviving ejidos
ecologically (as well as socially and politically) marginal; Gallini stresses that this process
led to a decline not only in the quantity of land held by Mam communities but also in its
ecological (and agricultural) quality.
The coffee boom of the 1870s and 1880s thus represented the culmination of a lon-
ger process. In the chapter devoted to the coffee boom (which accounts for about a quar-
ter of the book), Gallini explores the ecological and social transformations it wrought.
The conversion of ejidos and forests to coffee ncas did not lead to deforestation in the
technical sense. But Gallini argues convincingly that the coffee boom promoted a degra-
dation of the regions forests, in terms of their biological diversity, their ora and fauna,
and the soils and waters. By the end of the century, the degradation had reached a point
that even the state authorities had begun to express concern for the regions productive
capacity and had made tentative protectionist measures. Environmental forces brought
this coffee boom to an abrupt end in 1902, when a volcano and mudslide wiped out
many of the Costa Cucas coffee farms. This is also where Gallini brings her narrative
to a close.
Gallinis study offers an innovative approach to writing the environmental history
of tropical commodities by situating commodity booms in the context of broader, long-
term historical processes. She gives agro ecological processes their due without over-
stating their role, while weaving together environmental, social, economic, and politi-
cal history into a coherent narrative about the transformation of a community and its
landscapes.
stuart mccook, University of Guelph
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416828
The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho: Villa Clara and the Construction of Argentine Identity.
By judith noem freidenberg. Foreword by june nash. Jewish History, Life,
and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps.
Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. xx, 184 pp.
In 1910 Alberto Gerchunoffs The Jewish Gauchos, a book on Jewish life in agricultural
colonies, was published in celebration of the centennial of Argentinean independence.
The creative potential of the oxymoron Jewish gaucho coined by Gerchunoff has been
proven over and over again, and it has become a shortcut to talk about the experience of
Jews in Argentina, and all over Latin America. Its use in the title of The Invention of the Jew-
720 HAHR / November
ish Gaucho: Villa Clara and the Construction of Argentine Identity is misleading, since while
Judith Noem Freidenberg does treat the gure of the Jewish gaucho, her book does much
more than that. Freidenberg documents one hundred years of the life in Villa Clara, an
agricultural colony in the Argentinean province of Entre Ros, and is both observer and
participant in the celebration of the towns centennial. As the author shows, Villa Claras
Jewish majority has moved away from the village, and the town is now more diverse in
terms of ethnicity and class, but it does maintain its role as a producer of heritage.
The book originated as a personal project: Freidenberg traveled to Villa Clara with
her mother, who grew up in the village. She uses Villa Clara as a case study of the
impact of nineteenth- century European immigration on the construction of Argentine
national identity ( p. xv). Freidenberg advocates the use of the ethnographic method to
elicit plural versions of local history and thus contribute to the writing of a more inclu-
sive and diverse social history. She uses direct observation, literary sources, documents,
and multiple interviews. What emerges is a diverse microcosm of Argentina, inhabited
by indigenous peoples, European immigrants of different regions, and criollos. Freiden-
bergs attention to native populations, often overlooked in studies on immigrant com-
munities, is especially pertinent.
Freidenberg studies the Jewish establishments alongside several other European
colonies hailing from Italy, Spain, Switzerland, France, and Belgium. She also accounts
for other displaced communities such as the Germans of the Volga, the German Rus-
sians, and the Lebanese Syrians. She therefore complicates the relationships between
nation, language, culture, and country of origin. While it is estimated that about half
the immigrants from Italy and Spain went back to their countries of origin, Jews had
nowhere to return to, since they had signed away the possibility of return when they left
the Russian Empire. The poignancy of this situation underlies the commitment of Jew-
ish immigrants to make the Argentinean experience work. For them, however, migration
to the big cities, with their economic and educational opportunities, was a new frontier,
and second generation colonos often chose internal migration.
Freidenberg traces the creation of European colonies in the provinces of Entre
Ros, starting off with the question who was here rst? The response to this might
seem obvious but as her research shows is contested among the different communities
and different social agents. Her emphasis is on memory and the creation of community,
and she describes the different layers of memory that lie within the region where the
Jewish colony that would become Villa Clara and other European colonies were estab-
lished. Freidenbergs study moves from country to province; from province to region,
and then closes in on the town of Villa Clara and its neighborhoods in order to show us
how the national echoes in the local, and how the local signies in the national. The last
chapter that deals with the 1990s has the main objective of analyzing changes in Villa
Clara but also problematizing the writing of history. When I began eldwork in 2002,
Freidenberg says, I invited residents to discuss how best to write the history of Villa
Clara. I asked them to visualize Villa Clara and describe it to an imaginary outsider
( p. 125). The experience indeed yields exciting results, from quasi- lyrical accounts of
Book Reviews / National Period 721
interclass and interethnic bliss to embattled descriptions of struggles for space, material
goods, and recognition.
Freidenbergs The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho: Villa Clara and the Construction of
Argentine Identity is an important contribution to the social history of rural communities
in Latin America. It will be illuminating for scholars of Latin American immigration and
for those interested in multiethnic communities. The maps, graphs, and photographs
that illustrate the book and its literary references and oral history interviews open it up
as well to a more general reading public.
mnica szurmuk, Instituto Mora, Mexico
doi 10.1215/00182168-1416837
Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880 1955.
By sandra mcgee deutsch. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Photographs. Maps. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvi, 377 pp. Paper, $23.95.
Cloth, $84.95.
In 1932, blonde, 18- year- old Ana Rovner became Miss Once, named for a Buenos Aires
neighborhood with a considerable Jewish population. She then became Miss Capi-
tal, hoping to become Miss Argentina and enter the Miss Universe contest. Although
Rovner did not refer to her Jewishness, her background was never a secret. A couple of
years later, President Agustn P. Justo attended a solo performance by Berta Singerman
at the Teatro Coln, the temple of elite porteo culture. Singerman, who had begun her
career in Yiddish theater, acquired national and international fame for her recitations.
At the peak of her career, she performed for 70,000 people in Crdoba. These anecdotes
illustrate the visibility of Jewish- Argentine women in both popular and high cultures
in 1930s Argentina, precisely at a time of growing nationalism and xenophobia in both
Europe and Latin America.
In the masculine public space of Argentina during the rst half of the twentieth
century, more than a few Jewish women participated in Socialist, Anarchist, Commu-
nist, or union activities, or worked toward the establishment of a Jewish home in Pales-
tine. Beyond comprising the largest Jewish womens group, the Organizacin Sionista
Femenina Argentina (OSFA) also became the largest Jewish group in this country.
In this pioneering book on Argentine Jewish women, Sandra McGee Deutsch ana-
lyzes a wide variety of sites, both in the Argentine countryside as well as in the cities,
where Jewish women interacted with Jews of different origins and non- Jews alike. Very
little has been written about the history of immigrant women of any ethnic background
and their descendants in Latin America, therefore this remarkable volume should be
of interest to anybody interested in the immigrant societies of this continent and their
hybrid identities. By putting women at the center of the stage, the focus is not on insti-
tutions and discourses but on the daily lives of many individuals with a variety of back-
grounds and trajectories.
722 HAHR / November
Studies of Jewish women in Latin America have too often focused on prostitutes or
novelists. Indeed, Argentine Jewish prostitution is probably the aspect of Jewish womens
lives that has attracted most attention on the part of scholars, writers, and lmmakers.
Deutsch does not ignore the disproportionate number of Jewish prostitutes in Buenos
Aires until the early 1930s, but she is much more interested in exploring the ways in
which Jewish women crossed many borders and how they negotiated the boundaries
between private and professional lives and between the respectable and disreputable.
The eight chapters in this volume deal with the fundamental roles played by Jewish
women in all aspects of rural and urban societies, in both the domestic and the public
spheres. Women transmitted linguistic, culinary, musical, and other kinds of heritage to
their children and thus created a kind of ethnic enclave in their homes. At the same time,
the gradual adoption of local customs, food, and manners transformed these homes into
Argentine ones. In the streets, schools, and workplaces, Jewish women contributed to the
formation of argentinidad. As to racial relations, Deutsch concludes that, although not
always successful, [a] spectrum of Jewish women, ranging from colonists to prostitutes,
claimed whiteness by setting themselves apart from criollos ( p. 244).
At any rate, as students and teachers, in the liberal professions or political activi-
ties, through human rights groups or Zionist organizations, Jewish Argentine women
fought against exclusion within the Jewish community and without, and demanded to be
an integral part of Argentine society. Deutsch correctly points out that even as Jewish
women aided their communities and the nascent state of Israel, they highlighted their
Argentine identities and expanded the sense of who belonged to the nation ( p. 235).
Attention is given in the book to both working- and middle- class women, Ashke-
nazi and Sephardic alike. Too many studies have tended to overemphasize the supposed
separation between Jews of Ashkenazi and Sephardic origins, as if there was hardly any
contact between them in their daily lives. By contrast, Deutsch points to several contact
zones between members of the two groups, such as their participation in Zionist and
philanthropic associations.
Unlike many studies on the Jewish experience in Argentina, anti- Semitism is
not a main axis of discussion here. Deutsch is right to point out that, except at certain
moments, Jewish women in Argentina experienced relatively little anti- Semitism until
the 1930s, although their status and race were ambiguous ( p. 10).
Based on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, written documents and
oral history, this book is highly recommended to anyone interested in Latin American
ethnic studies or in the history of women in this region. It will be particularly helpful to
students and scholars of Jewish Latin America.
raanan rein, Tel Aviv University
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416846
Book Reviews / National Period 723
Historia de la clase media argentina: Apogeo y decadencia de una ilusin, 1919 2003.
By ezequiel adamovsky. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2009. Photographs. Illustrations.
Notes. Bibliography. Index. 538 pp. Paper.
Argentine historian Ezequiel Adamovsky has produced the rst comprehensive history
of the Argentine middle class. As the books title indicates, he focuses mainly on the sub-
jective aspects of class identity. He is interested in the evolution of the myth of Argentina
as a country dened by its middle class and set apart from its Latin American neighbors.
In a carefully constructed analysis, Adamovsky successfully traces the arc of this idea
from its beginnings in the 1910s through its apogee in the early 1960s to its crisis in the
nancial debacle of 2001.
Along the way, Adamovsky challenges several of the deepest myths of Argentine
culture and politics. One is the idea that a distinctive middle class had formed by the early
twentieth century and found its political expression in the new Radical Party (Unin
Cvica Radical). Drawing meticulously on trade and professional publications from the
rst third of the century, Adamovsky instead stresses the fragmented and precarious
status of those who made up the middle ranks of the economy. Professional associations
formed in these years to represent the interests of teachers, shopkeepers, small farmers,
white- collar employees, and educated professionals. Yet, in contrast to David Parkers
ndings for Peru, Adamovsky demonstrates that these associations never declared them-
selves representatives of a new middle class. Individuals with a university education
tended to come from the ranks of the landed oligarchy while those at the lower levels,
including even bank employees, tended to self- identify as workers.
Adamovsky shows that the idea of a common middle- class identity was rst pro-
moted by liberal elites, the Catholic Church, and authoritarian movements like the
Argentine Patriotic League as a political strategy to isolate the left and undermine the
solidarity of working people. Appeals to the middle class emerged especially in the wake
of the mass protests and political violence of 1919. Inuenced by political debates in
Europe, conservative writers and Catholic leaders began to imagine a new kind of social
order that transcended the old binary division between the decent people and the dis-
orderly plebe. In this new order, a middle sector dened by its respectability would stand
as a bulwark against revolution. As the author demonstrates, the Radicals themselves
only gradually adopted a similar discourse in the 1920s, though they still claimed to
represent both the middle class and workers. In any case, Adamovsky argues convinc-
ingly that the idea of the middle class remained just that an abstract concept invoked in
political debates but not representative of a broader sense of lived experience.
Adamovsky is particularly deft at using his primary sources to trace the contingent
nature of class and political identities. For instance, he stresses the initially ambivalent
relationship between Juan Pern and the plebeian masses that would ultimately make up
his base of support. Adamovsky recalls that in 1944 Pern rst tried to build his political
career through an appeal to the middle classes. He staged public assemblies to discuss
the problems of the middle class and enjoyed the support of most professional associa-
724 HAHR / November
tions, whose members stood to benet from his economic policies. Drawing parallels
with 1919, Adamovsky further demonstrates that the rst anti- Peronist rally, staged in
September 1945, was orchestrated not by the middle class but by the countrys biggest
landowning and business interests, backed by the Catholic Church and the US ambas-
sador Spruille Braden. He suggests that this public offensive by those groups associated
with the old oligarchy ultimately backred and galvanized support for Pern among
the poor.
This book is thoroughly researched and written for a broad audience. Adamovsky
draws on an impressive breadth of sources, including newspapers and magazines, trade
and professional publications, travel accounts, literature, theater, etiquette guides, and
visual materials such as photographs, propaganda posters, and cartoons. He is explicit in
his interpretations and honest about the relative limitations of his sources, especially in
those chapters that rely largely on literature and theater to tease out a sense of middle-
class identity. The illustrations are well chosen and visually complement the argument.
The language is crystal clear, and the books organization is methodical, even didactic.
Opening and closing summaries frame each section of the argument, and an extensive
epilogue recaps the entire story.
One trade- off of Adamovskys comprehensive approach is that the book gets off
to a fairly slow start. Though the title promises a broad enough sweep through most of
the twentieth century, the narrative actually begins decades earlier in Sarmientos time.
Going over some well- trodden ground, Adamovsky reconstructs the elitism that under-
pinned liberal policies of the latter nineteenth century, especially disdain for the rural
poor and those of non- European ancestry. This material is well integrated into the rest
of the book and makes the work broadly accessible, but the authors choice means that his
more original ndings do not begin to appear until about chapter 5.
Several questions remain to be taken up by other scholars. For instance, Adamovsky
makes an admirable effort to integrate race into his analysis of Argentine class iden-
tity, stressing the way middle- class ideals of education and cleanliness contained implicit
associations with whiteness. Yet he has almost nothing to say about gender ideology,
which is key to understanding norms of respectability. More comparative work could be
done as well. Though Adamovsky draws some brief comparisons with Peru, France, and
Britain, he has little to say about the United States, another immigrant country with a
powerful national myth of middle- class identity. This is particularly surprising given his
own stress on the signicant role played by American political and economic interests in
shaping the anti- Peronist culture of the 1950s and early 1960s, which held up Argentinas
middle class as synonymous with the nation.
Still, Adamovsky has produced a uniquely thorough and even- handed exploration
of the Argentine middle class that avoids the usual stereotypes. He uses history to dem-
onstrate that in spite of its deeply rooted patterns of class and race prejudice, Argentine
culture contains within it more progressive possibilities. In the books closing pages, he
draws attention to those moments, especially 1919 and 2001, in which broad social and
protest movements briey transcended old class divisions and constructed more inclusive
Book Reviews / National Period 725
alliances. This book will be the benchmark study for years to come and would surely nd
an even broader audience should it become available in an English translation.
karen robert, St. Thomas University
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416855
The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid- Twentieth- Century
Argentina. Edited by matthew b. karush and oscar chamosa. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. viii, 309 pp.
Paper, $23.95. Cloth, $89.95.
Peronism, as scholars of Argentinas most profound political movement readily acknowl-
edge, is one of the most thoroughly examined topics in Latin American history. Scholars
have been fascinated not only by the enduring legacy of Juan and Evita Pern in Argen-
tina, but also the manner in which Peronism seems to embody some deeper character of
all of Latin America. Peronism signies more than changes in the rules of the game in
the economic and political sense, but also in the way we talk about the game and under-
stand the players in a word, culture. While the study of cultural history has gained
respectability over the years, the cultural history of political movements, especially
Peronism, has been relatively neglected. The new collection edited by Matthew Karush
and Oscar Chamosa takes an important step toward closing that scholarly gap, bringing
together a diverse array of topics in an intellectually unied work.
In the introductory essay, the editors place the collection rmly within the his-
toriography of Peronism, highlighting the work of Daniel James, Marcela Gen, and
Mariano Ben Plotkin (who wrote the conclusion) as particularly important for their own
approach. The editors and contributors take seriously the need to move away from the
traditional focus on structuralism, the national government, and Juan and Evita them-
selves in order to explore how the target audience for Peronism received, responded to,
and shaped the overarching message of that movement. This effort, reected in Karushs
contribution to the volume, requires a greater recognition of Peronism as a national
movement, not just one focused on Buenos Aires, and serves to highlight the extent
to which Peronism inserted itself into almost every aspect of daily life. Through care-
ful research and imaginative analysis, the authors succeed in expanding the scope and
sophistication of our understanding of Peronism and its legacy.
Given the expansive nature of the new cultural approach, the compilation format
is particularly appropriate for this subject, and the individual essays provide distinct,
yet mutually supportive, views of the uses of culture in Peronism. Natalia Milanesio
leads off with a discussion of the term cabecita negra used to describe someone of
Native American heritage, the use of which served to distinguish Peronists from anti-
Peronists in much the same way as the word descamisado. For Perns opponents, these
terms served not only to denigrate, but also to dene the masses that rallied around
him throughout his presidency. Milanesio shows how the use of this language reected
726 HAHR / November
the fears of anti- Peronists and how, in later years, scholars made assumptions about
Perns supporters based on these prejudices. Peronists, however, embraced these terms
of upper- class disdain as a way to signify their authentic national character. However,
as Milanesio and subsequent authors in the book demonstrate, that does not mean that
Peronists, whether of the leadership or the rank and le, were immune from racial or
class anxiety. Diana Lentons piece on the 1946 Maln de la Paz is a tting follow- up to
Milanesio, as Lenton describes the controversy surrounding a march to Buenos Aires
undertaken by Kolla Indians in an effort to win back land taken from them by previous
governments. This incident reected both the willingness of Argentines to embrace the
social justice rhetoric of Peronism and the discomfort Peronist ofcials felt with those
who did not follow the proper channels in requesting such justice. In the end, many of
the marchers were forcibly removed from the city, though the government did eventually
fulll their requests in 1949.
The tension between ofcial rhetoric and popular action continues throughout
the following essays. In their efforts to dene national culture, Peronists throughout
the nation turned to the past while simultaneously seeking to mark their present expe-
rience as a break with the past. Oscar Chamosa skillfully expresses this contradiction
in his investigation of the folklore movement. This movement had roots dating back
to the 1870s and received ofcial support from the governments that immediately pre-
ceded Pern, yet Peronists embraced folklore as authentically national culture. While
Chamosa highlights this ofcial co- optation, he also makes plain that culture can only
be partially promoted or contained by ofcial means. Ultimately, no government can
make a cultural product genuinely popular, yet every political movement seeks to be
connected to the populace through such products in order to establish their own authen-
ticity and legitimacy.
The remaining chapters discuss the various means by which Peronism tried to fos-
ter such legitimacy through a diverse array of artistic and cultural expressions. Anahi
Ballent examines the Eva Pern Foundations use of architecture; Mirta Lobato, Mara
Damilakou, and Lizel Tornay discuss the personication of Peronist values in the form
of beauty pageants; Eduardo Elena investigates the effort to convey Peronism through
literature and fashion; and Csar Seveso neatly brings the endeavor to a close by discuss-
ing the emotional impact of the effort to either purge or preserve Peronism after the
Liberating Revolution of 1955. Each piece stands as an excellent addition to the scholar-
ship of this era; together, they provide any reader with a revealing insight into the actions
the Peronists took to make sure that they would have a lasting legacy in every facet of
Argentine life.
gregory hammond, Austin Peay State University of Clarksville, TN
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416864
Book Reviews / National Period 727
Mucha tela que cortar: La saga de una fbrica textil y la pugna de las familias Caballero
y Lpez por su control. By pierre raymond. Bogot: Editorial Planeta, 2008.
Photographs. Map. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xix, 380 pp. Paper.
The historiography of this book is as excellent as could be, within the limitations of a
developing economy like Colombia. In contrast, it is somewhat meandering in its treat-
ment of the topic, and the reader can easily get lost in the comings and goings of the
volume. Within these extremes, it provides important lessons within the eld of political
economy.
Mucha tela que cortar illustrates Colombian history in the twentieth century, empha-
sizing economic and political events, and leaves us with lessons applicable not only to that
country. The story begins just before the First World War, at the height of the interna-
tional economy based on expanding trade, capital, and labor movements across regions,
and a world currency system based on a exible gold standard. Politically the world lived
in the midst of a colonial system in which the Western nations dominated, formally or
informally, what were called the poor nations. A few years earlier Colombia had had a
civil war, which was partially responsible for its loss of the province of Panama.
The story begins in the province of Santander in the central highlands of Colom-
bia, when the Caballero family, led by Liberal general Lucas Caballero, had a dream of
industrial development in a forlorn provincial setting called San Jos de Suaita. They
were latifundistas in the region with extensive land holdings, and their mostly rudimen-
tary industrial undertakings were based on the manufacture of non- centrifugal sugar
and its by- products, leading to a distillery and a chocolate factory. Surely the fact that
Caballeros party was in power at the time and that he had occupied important govern-
ment positions led him to dream of an expansion of industrial activities in his possessions
and to involve foreign capital in them.
Thus begins a saga that extended from 1912 to 1995 and illustrated important para-
digms in the literature of economic development. The rst was established by one of a
few American economists who spent part of their professional lives in Colombia. Pro-
fessor Albert Hirschman ended his career at Columbia University, where he wrote his
famous Strategy of Economic Development (Yale University Press, 1958). He pointed out
that attempting to develop an economy or region based on the balancing of many differ-
ent economic activities is doomed to failure. This was the major mistake of the Caballero
family, whose attempts to develop cotton and textiles based on that plant were combined
with sugar cane and its derivative products cacao and chocolates, wheat and our, and
cattle with some of its by- products. If they would have pursued an unbalanced growth
approach, concentrating their efforts on cotton fabrics alone, they would have stood a
better chance of success.
The second lesson consists of illustrating how important social overhead capi-
tal is for development of directly productive activities. Unless infrastructure precedes
industrial efforts in an unbalanced way, agro- industry will be doomed to failure. The
Caballero brothers enterprises had to transport inputs and outputs through a rigmarole
728 HAHR / November
of means that alternated among rivers (frequently canoes), lakes, railroads, pack mules,
and country roads. Implicit in such varied transportation methods were lengthy delays,
demurrage costs, embarkation and disembarkation charges, with the corresponding
breakage, sinking, and other losses. Sufce it to say that the arrival of machinery and
equipment, mostly imported from New York, was delayed for one year in arriving to the
production site. Although not as extreme, the serving of regional markets was also quite
burdensome.
The third important lesson of this volume reinforces the imperviousness of having
politics determine economic success in what has been characterized as rent seeking. The
obstacles in making political power a determinant of economic success become abun-
dantly clear when the Caballero family splits and the even more powerful Lpez family
becomes intertwined by marriage with the Caballeros, provoking an economic impasse
for the agro- industrial project (which was even called a dream by family descendants).
What began in 1912 meandered through failures up to 1965 and involved former Colom-
bian president Alfonso Lpez Michelsen and the mainstream media in that country.
It is worthwhile to navigate this winding but extremely well- documented book to
illuminate these three important lessons, as well as the struggles between the Antwerp,
Paris, and New York foreign investors and the local politicians turned entrepreneurs.
jorge salazar- carrillo, Florida International University
doi 10.1215/00182168-1416873
Peripheral Visions: Politics, Society, and the Challenges of Modernity in Yucatan.
Edited by edward d. terry, ben w. fallaw, gilbert m. joseph, and
edward h. moseley. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. Maps. Notes.
Index. viii, 275 pp. Cloth.
The result of a 1993 conference on Yucatecan history and culture, this edited volume
brings together a well- known group of yucateclogos to offer new interpretations about
older regional topics. That it took 17 years to go from conference to book is unfortunate,
although Gilbert Josephs epilogue (Some Final Thoughts on Regional History and
the Encounter with Modernity at Mexicos Periphery) is new and weaves in some, but
not all, of the more recent works on Yucatecan history and how they would apply to the
themes presented here. In fact, scholars of Yucatn should nd Josephs essay to be one
of the more useful in the book, especially from a historiographical perspective. All in all,
the volume offers an update to older, but still pertinent, collections as those of Edward
Moseley and Edward Terry, Yucatn: A Word Apart (1980); Gilbert Joseph, Rediscover-
ing the Past at Mexicos Periphery (1986); and Jeffery Brannon and Gilbert Joseph, Land,
Labor, and Capital in Modern Yucatn (1991). Like those works, this one is published by
the University of Alabama Press, adding to its reputation as the English- language leader
in Yucatecan studies. This new book should be used in tandem with these older studies,
especially to view Yucatecan history as both distinctively regional (and in some ways
Book Reviews / National Period 729
peripheral), but also integrated into the larger Mexican whole. In contrast, most of the
contributors in Peripheral Visions seek to answer newer questions about the effects of
modernization on Yucatecan life and culture, especially as Joseph explains it, the nexus
of religious culture and politics and how that affords a deeper understanding of Yuca-
tans modernizing process and its limits.
After an introductory essay by Helen Delpar and Ben W. Fallaw that nicely sets
up the major themes, the editors divide the book into two parts. The rst includes
seven essays on Society and Politics, and part 2 includes four on Religion. Like
any edited volume, some of the contributions seem more useful than others, but they
all work together to discuss modernity and its effects on aspects of Yucatecan society.
Delpar describes how that was reected (nay, advertised) abroad in chapter 2, regard-
ing Yucatecan boosters attempts to market both the states archeological and natural
resources. Some struggles with modernity were more successful than others, for example
the progress in labor (as attested to in Paul K. Eisss excellent chapter 3 on labor politics
in Yucatn from 1915 to 1918), but less so for the long- range success of womens reforms
or land reforms. Stephanie J. Smith, in chapter 4, wants readers to see that progress
was made for womens rights but fails to show how any revolutionary reforms crossed
class lines or how they benetted Maya Indian women or campesinas in rural Yucatn.
Likewise, Fallaw in chapter 5 illustrates how many of the well- intentioned reforms advo-
cated by President Lzaro Crdenas did not enjoy long- lasting success. Included here is
discussion of the rapid decline in the henequen industry, but Fallaw neglects some newer
insights on the signicant impact of changes in harvesting technology that ended the
demand for Yucatecan ber analysis that could have illustrated how expanded mod-
ernization abroad led to decreased modernization in Yucatn. On the other hand, some
modernization attempts came from without, such as the Lebanese immigrant merchants
whom Eric N. Baklanoff discusses in chapter 6, although more proof of the signicance
of this small population would be welcome. Stylistically, it is unfortunate that the edi-
tors allowed Baklanoff to use parenthetical notation instead of footnotes as used in every
other chapter.
Arguably the most important contribution to part 1 is chapter 7 on the decline of
Yucatns henequen industry by historical sociologist Othn Baos. Employing both
sound research and convincing analysis, Baos minces no words to show how more recent
economic trends associated with NAFTA and privatization enacted with the revision of
Article 17 of the Mexican constitution during the Carlos Salinas sexenio (1988 94) dealt
signicant blows to Yucatns nal attempts in the henequen industry. Writes Baos, the
actions were taken without considering the prevalent social and historical conditions
that would have easily predicted that the ejidatarios were unprepared for individual man-
agement of private property ( p. 146). This chapter is a welcome addition to ll in the
historiographical lacunae in post- 1970s Yucatecan history and political economy.
Part 2 on religion adds important dimensions to regional cultural history. But while
Lynda Morrisons chapter 7 is too narrowly focused on the life of one particular priest,
Terry Rugeleys chapter 8 provides rich analysis over a broad sweep of time about the
730 HAHR / November
important role religion played in rural rebellions. This sections nal two essays deal
with the resurgence of the church during the Porriato (Hernn Menndez Rodrguez
with Ben W. Fallaw) and church- state relations in Yucatn during and after the Mexican
Revolution (Fallaw).
Combined, these various essays in Peripheral Visions provide important new insights
into the cultural understanding of modern Yucatn. It is not a collection that could be
used in too many survey history courses on Mexico or Latin America, but it is one that
all students of Yucatecan history should own and read.
sterling evans, University of Oklahoma
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416882
Se llamaba Elena Arizmendi. By gabriela cano. Mexico City: Tusquets Editores,
2010. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 259 pp. Paper.
Adriana is one of the most famous characters of Mexican literature. She rst appears in
Jos Vasconceloss Ulises criollo and later in La tormenta (volumes 1 and 2 of his four- part
biography). A stunning woman, intelligent and sensual, a modern compaera for Mexicos
premier revolutionary intellectual, Adriana is almost the perfect lover that is, until
she leaves him. Then, this glorious Eve is transformed into a devourer of men, the
femme fatale of Mexican literature. Now, thanks to the exhaustive historical research,
deft analysis, and uid prose of Gabriela Cano, we have a biography of the real Adriana
with excellent photographs. As the title establishes, her name was Elena Arizmendi, and
she was a woman to be reckoned with.
Arizmendi was born in 1884 into a comfortable family, granddaughter of Liberal
general Ignacio Meja. She spent her early years at her grandfathers Ayotla sugar mill
in Oaxaca and was later sent to Mexico City for a suitable education. She went on to
study nursing in San Antonio, Texas, where she was befriended by Francisco and Sara
Madero. Arizmendi founded the Cruz Blanca Mexicana Neutral (Mexican White Cross,
equivalent of the Red Cross) while Madero was president. When problems arose in that
organization, the Maderos sent her to get legal advice from the young Maderista lawyer,
Jos Vasconcelos; thus began one of the most famous love affairs in Mexican history.
A passion for literature and music along with an intense erotic relationship united
this modern couple. Snubbed and slighted by the gente decente for carrying on an illicit
love affair with a married man, Elena condently deed her middle- class upbringing.
She traveled with Vasconcelos to the United States when he was forced into exile during
the revolution. As she developed intellectually, she tired of being la otra and broke off the
relationship in 1916. Infuriated, Vasconcelos published a short story in 1920, The Tor-
ment, in which he proclaimed: The serpent that has been coiled around my heart for
some years, nally, has slithered off, leaving me only venom (endnote, p. 209). Domini-
can writer Pedro Henrquez Urea later observed: Vasconcelos pursues her with hor-
Book Reviews / National Period 731
rendous threats and accusations to people from whom she is seeking employment. He
seems to have lost his mind, crazed by her ight [. . .] Poor woman!( p. 121).
But Elena Arizmendi was anything but a poor woman or a femme fatale; she was a
resourceful and independent woman who was determined to chart her own course. She
married and separated from an American businessman, Robert Duersch, and moved to
New York City in the 1920s to be on her own. She made a living by teaching music and
writing articles for newspapers and journals. She focused her major energies on pro-
moting the Liga de Mujeres Ibricas e Hispanoamericanas, also known as the Liga de
Mujeres de la Raza, and edited Feminismo Internacional, the rst international journal
dedicated to Hispanic feminism.
As Cano underlines, within modernist conventions, woman is only a theme and
receptacle of masculine desire ( p. 23); for Vasconcelos, Adriana was the best booty of
the Revolution. Facing these stereotypes, Arizmendi struggled to represent her own life
and opinions on womens capacities. She published a short biographical novel in New
York City in 1927, Vida incompleta: Ligeros apuntes sobre mujeres en la vida real, in order to
explain her vision of male- female relationships and feminism. It is unclear if this work
was responding directly to Vasconceloss 1920 short story or to gossip, since Ulises criollo
was not published until 1935 (by 1938 it had gone into 22 printings). Nevertheless, it was
Elena Arizmendi Mejas attempt to set the record straight and to gain recognition as a
mujer moderna. Given its limited diffusion, this novel failed to challenge the powerful
literary gure of the femme fatale. Ironically, her later years paralleled those of Vascon-
celos: although a pioneer of Hispanic feminism, Arizmendi, too, became Conservative,
anti- Semitic, and a Falangista fellow traveler.
Previously, Gabriela Canos skill in unraveling contradictory representations of
female revolutionaries (who unfortunately leave no personal papers to make the histo-
rians task less arduous) provided readers with her provocative study of Amelio Robles,
the transgendered Zapatista colonel (in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in
Modern Mexico, edited by Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughn, and Gabriela Cano, Duke
University Press, 2006). Now, Arizmendis biography, accessible to academic as well as
popular readers of Spanish, facilitates not only a better comprehension of changing gen-
der norms and the limitations of middle- class feminism in revolutionary Mexico but also
the ongoing struggle of women to represent their own lives.
francie chassen- lpez, University of Kentucky
doi 10.1215/00182168-1416891
732 HAHR / November
A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia,
1880 1952. By laura gotkowitz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 398 pp. Paper, $24.95.
Laura Gotkowitzs book is a timely intervention in ongoing discussions among histori-
ans, ethnohistorians, political scientists, and anthropologists over the meaning and uses
of the law for the consolidation of the modern nation- state, and for what we might now
refer to as the evolution of multicultural or plurinational states in Latin America and in
the Andes. She also lls in what has been a neglected chapter in recent Bolivian history,
that is, the period between the turn of the nineteenth century up to the events of the
1952 Revolution.
Gotkowitz adds signicant depth to conventional understandings of the 1952 Revo-
lution as a rubicon of Bolivian history by connecting it to myriad ongoing campaigns
undertaken by rural indigenous advocates throughout the 1910s 1940s. In so doing she
brings into focus the relationship between grassroots indigenous efforts and the military
populism of this period, while linking the often mythologized events of 1952, typically
discussed as a largely urban movement among workers and the middle class, to a less well
known but persistent silent revolution in the countryside over rights to land.
Gotkowitz generates her rich narrative of indigenous advocacy, representation, and
organizing during the period by tracing out the construction of relationships between
indigenous and other political actors: rural- urban networks, workers unions, municipal
ofcials, and national political leaders and parties. Her attention to these highly coordi-
nated networks animates her accounts of the 1938 constitutional referendum, 1945s rst
national indigenous congress, and the 1947 uprisings in rural Cochabamba, all precedents
to what has arguably been Latin Americas most neglected revolution. Gotkowitz uses
archival records to build the case for the consistency of indigenous claims about collective
rights, autonomy, and land throughout the twentieth century right up to the present, and
for the extent to which these claims played a signicant role in Bolivias national politi-
cal history during this period. Setting the narrative against the background of national
politics, Gotkowitz shows indigenous leaders as engaged in an ongoing argument among
themselves and with state authorities about what it meant to be indigenous. This was
an argument conducted by contesting the signicance of presidential decrees, petitions,
land surveys and titles, boundary disputes, competing denitions of private property and
of fallow lands, efforts to extract protections and guarantees, written labor agreements,
arguments over taxation, the juridical status of communities, political circulars, and a
host of other legal, political, and bureaucratic interventions.
Gotkowitz explores the vernacularization, in the hands of grassroots indigenous
leaders, of relationships between liberalism, rights discourses, and concerns for justice
in early twentieth- century Bolivia. Indigenous voices appropriated legal precedents and
idioms as tools to claim alternative visions of Bolivias liberal state, citizenship, collective
rights, property, self- government, and ownership. We see the extent to which indigenous
political practice was shaped by, and actively shaped, the process of the law. This book
Book Reviews / National Period 733
shows how indigenous leaders, as sometimes subversive and self- appointed agents of the
law, appropriated and challenged Bolivias liberal project, as part of an ongoing contest
in Bolivia about who can legitimately speak for Indians.
The most important contribution of Gotkowitzs book is her convincing and well-
researched demonstration of the importance of the regular politically creative uses of
national law made by indigenous leaders during this period in repeated interventions
with multiple levels of state ofcialdom. Despite often prevailing assumptions to the
contrary, representatives of indigenous interests both demonstrated legal literacy and
challenged an elite monopoly over legal interpretation. Promoting their own account of
the law, these leaders actively built relationships with nonindigenous local and national
political leaders and regularly intervened to promote their own concerns, primarily in
order to articulate collective indigenous claims to land.
Gotkowitzs work is in fruitful conversation with scholars dedicated to identifying
indigenous voices and political projects or concerned with the forms taken by indigenous
engagements with the state, and with a rich corpus of research on the politics of land and
land reform. More narrowly, even as it helps to ll in a relatively neglected chapter in the
history of indigenous struggle in Bolivia, the book adds to our appreciation of the limits
of national identity projects and opens a timely historical window upon the grievances
that continue to be sources of Bolivias current transformational moment of Evo Morales
and the MAS.
robert albro, American University
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416900
Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989 2006.
By steve j. stern. Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Photographs. Maps. Table. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. xxxiv, 548 pp. Paper, $27.95.
Reckoning with Pinochet is the third book in Steve J. Sterns trilogy, which historicizes
the memory question in Chile from 1973 to 2006. This volume details an unnished
struggle between opposing memory camps to dene politicocultural legitimacy in the
years after 1990. The story features contested versions of recent history: the military
coup of 1973 as a salvational mission of the armed forces against the possibility of civil
war, and communist domination versus the coup as rupture with a previous democratic
tradition, followed by a brutal dictatorship that massively violated human rights. Stern
concludes that the struggle by human rights activists and other community groups,
reinforced by the transnational human rights movement, gradually overcame, or at
least partially overcame, Chiles tradition of elite pacts and periodic political amnesties
to instill a new awareness of human rights violations and to press for accountability in
criminal prosecutions.
Reckoning with Pinochet is framed with the concepts introduced by Stern in the rst
734 HAHR / November
volume of the trilogy (and reprinted in this book, pp. xxi xxxiv). It is a multifaceted
history of the struggles by various groups in Chile since 1973 to impose their version of
history, their version of truth, and their version (institutional, legal, economic, and cul-
tural) of a post- dictatorship Chile. It is a history of the rolling impasse that gradually
changed the center of gravity of Chilean politics and political culture. Stern documents
the unwavering determination of human rights and victims organizations, in Chile and
globally, to establish truth (accurate knowledge regarding the human rights violations),
to provide for symbolic and material reparations for victims, and to seek criminal justice
( prosecution) despite the 1978 amnesty decree, criminal statutes of limitations, and a
conspiracy of silence that impeded truth and justice for many years. He also documents
the persistent commitment of a shrinking group loyal to the salvationist version of Chil-
ean history that glories the armed forces and their civilian allies defeat of international
communisms effort to impose Marxist tyranny on the country from 1970 to 1973.
Sterns history of the struggle to dene and control public and ofcial memory in
Chile relies on archival research, periodical sources, oral history, audio and visual (music,
radio and television stations, alternative lms and tapes), Internet sources, and a close
reading of a vast literature on Chile from the 1960s to 2006. His notes, and notes on
sources, will be of great use to all Chileanists and to other historians, especially cultural
historians. A unique feature of the book is Sterns interjection of an afterword for each
main chapter, in which he offers philosophical, moral, and sometimes methodological
reection on themes ranging from the relation of the Chilean case to other instances
of radical evil (such as the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide) to how the changing
exhibits in the Santiago National History Museum and new memorials in the Plaza de la
Constitucin reected a new memory aesthetic and a gradually changing civic geog-
raphy as Chileans battled over how to frame and process demands for (and resistance to)
truth, justice, and impunity, in the name of reconciliation.
In places Stern uses personal stories and rst- person accounts to illustrate the fric-
tional synergies among community groups and elites that gradually, but not inevita-
bly or without setbacks, pushed toward erosion (but never elimination) of the military
regimes version of the past. Discussion of best- selling ction and nonction during the
three presidencies (1990 2006), of popular works of theater, of changing forms of mass
media coverage, and street protests enrich the political narrative. In other sections, the
book reaches into anthropological and psychological terrain, for example the cases of two
women tortured brutally and transformed into collaborators of the military regime, who
entered Primo Levis gray zone, where once clear categories of victim and perpetra-
tor bleed into one another ( p. 78). In still other sections, the book is self- consciously
personal; thus Stern tells the reader that the dilemma of how to communicate to others
experiences beyond normal powers to document, analyze, and represent is a paradox
that troubles and humbles the author of this book ( p. 105).
Sterns trilogy, Reckoning with Pinochet especially, is not an easy read. The creative
metaphorical conceptual frame requires mastery by the reader to make full sense of the
narrative. The narrative includes stories of brutality and cruelty that are gut- wrenching.
Book Reviews / National Period 735
The rolling impasse of Chilean memory politics after 1990 has hundreds of big and
little memory knots from the Rettig Commission report, the assassination of Jaime
Guzmn, the periodic saber rattling of Pinochet and the army, Pinochets detention and
arrest in London (1998 2000), the Mesa de Dilogo, and the subsequent wave of pros-
ecutions of military and police personnel many of which Stern addresses in depth.
But for all the challenges it poses, Reckoning with Pinochet is an essential work on post-
dictatorship Chile and on the implications of the Chilean case for the global struggle for
human rights. Although Stern ends his story in 2006, the battle over memory in Chile
continues, as Stern recognized it would, precisely because a history of memory struggles
is always unnished ( p. xxxiii).
brian loveman, San Diego State University
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416909
Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala. By diane m. nelson. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2009. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxxvii,
403 pp. Paper, $25.95. Cloth, $94.95.
Diane Nelsons previous book, Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Gua-
temala, was a masterpiece: an evocative and frighteningly insightful discussion of the
multiplicity and uidity of identity in Guatemala. In that book, her propensity to explore
the difculty of xing a meaning to words was an essential aspect of her exploration of
the slipperiness of identity in Guatemala as the country struggled away from war.
Given the brilliance of the rst book, any subsequent work would almost certainly
disappoint in comparison. Reckoning treads similar ground. This book, too, explores
complexity and duplicity in contemporary Guatemala since the peace accords signed in
1996. This work also employs Nelsons keen eye, empathetic ear, wonderful informants,
and deep knowledge of contemporary Guatemala to offer us images of a society that is
never quite what it seems. In this book as well, language and its tricks are never far from
the surface. Horror movies and sci- literature also make appearances here, as they did
in Finger in the Wound. Often all of this contributes to startling insights; sometimes it is
annoying.
Nelson explores the slipperiness or lack of solidity in postwar Guatemala by
focusing on duplicity: the contrived, assumed, split, and fractured identities which are
a necessary part of survival and discourse in contemporary Guatemala. Along the way,
she also makes it clear that these levels of duplicity are not uniquely Guatemalan but are
part of all identities in contemporary society. Her keen eye for the multiple and often
contradictory meanings in words and her deep engagement with theory all help in the
exploration.
She begins the book with a description of the Baile de la Culebra (Dance of the
Snake) in Joyabaj, in which Kich participants take on the identity of a ladino labor con-
tractor and various characters in his life in order to rebel against the oppression he sym-
736 HAHR / November
bolizes. From there the book explores in ever deepening and complex ways the compli-
cated and convoluted nature of meaning and identity. The book is constructed through
nine chapters and seven shorter intertexts. The intertexts are where Nelson plays most
with words and their meaning. Occasionally these are interesting; I found them often to
be frustrating. Like her research assistant, I didnt buy at all . . . the horror lm stuff
that nds its way into the story throughout the book.
However, when she takes a break from playing tricks with words and talking about
slasher lms, Nelson provides us with the most insightful and evocative explorations of
contemporary Guatemala available. Her discussion of David Stoll and Rigoberta Menchu
and the way she links this to ladino perceptions that indigenous people are always hid-
ing something, some other identity, is well done, as is her appropriate dismissal of Stolls
expos in a footnote. The exploration of our conictual relationship with the multiple
identities of the state and the states imposition and adoption of bio- power through a
discussion of the malaria campaign in Guatemala in the 1950s and 1960s is excellent.
The discussion of the multiple sides to the state, explored in chapter 6, is also excel-
lent. This is a natural t for Nelsons approach; with the constant talk of hidden pow-
ers, conspiracy theories, and the continual shifting of positions that accompany politics
in contemporary Guatemala. She captures in insightful ways the dilemmas of modern
citizenship by exploring the state viewed as both too weak and too strong, the United
Nations Mission in Guatemala that both helped provide space for the development of
civil society and curtailed its growth, and those who see working with the state as the
only way to strengthen civil society while recognizing that such work involves legitimiz-
ing the state and its control over citizens. Her exploration of the militarys deep involve-
ment in both the apparatus of the state and capital in Guatemala is brief but well done.
When she recounts with respect and sympathy peoples attempts in Joyabaj to deal
with life, recovery, and identity and links these personal stories to the complexity of
postwar Guatemala in particular and to life in a neoliberal world in general, as she does
in chapter 5, this work is superb. Her discussion of the labor contractor who is also a
dedicated organizer for the peasant association, CONIC, captures wonderfully the com-
plexity of postwar Guatemala.
While occasionally frustrating, this is both an interesting reection on the dilem-
mas of contemporary society and our place in it and an essential exploration of the end-
less complications of Guatemala.
jim handy, University of Saskatchewan
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416918
Book Reviews / International and Comparative 737
International and Comparative
Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth- Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and Their
Overseas Networks. By xabier lamikiz. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY:
Boydell Press, 2010. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 211 pp.
Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth- Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and Their
Overseas Networks is divided into different topics whose common thread is trust. In the
introduction Xabier Lamikiz reviews different works that deal with commercial activi-
ties connected with trust and reveals his approach to the subject. The rst two chapters
analyze the Bilbao merchants; the third and fourth colonial trade and traders between
Cdiz and Peru, and chapters 5, 6, and 7 the relation between merchants, condentiality,
trust, distrust, and networks. The main and highly unusual source of this work is the
private and condential mail from Peru that was carried in the frigate La Perla seized by
the British in 1779 when travelling from El Callao to Cdiz.
It is traditionally maintained that around 1,700 Bilbao merchants had pushed aside
foreign rivals in Bilbao commerce. The author argues that there are other reasons for
this. These include the special scal system of Vizcaya, the update of commercial ordi-
nances in 1737, the use of foreign merchants as correspondents in Northern Europe
when they returned to their countries, the establishment in London of some merchants
from Bilbao, and the use of captains of Basque ships as overseas agents. He sustains that
the presence of merchants from Bilbao in foreign countries was intimately connected to
issues of trust. The traditional interpretation stresses the importance of the modica-
tion of the institutional framework, but it is not related to the 1737 Ordinances, which
were very much inspired by the French Ordonnance pour le commerce (1673) and the
Ordonnance pour la marine (1681) (see works by Manuel Torres Lpez and Carlos
Petit). They are associated with the modication of the town ordinances (1679, 1684 85,
and 1699). These modications obstructed the commercial activities of foreigners. And
there is also an economic reason. The Bilbao merchants succeeded in controlling the
credit offered to iron makers and to the migrating sheep breeders. Before the ocks
returned in spring to the northern mountains and before they were sheared the breed-
ers had to pay for winter herbage. Without money, they had to sell the wool in advance
to a merchant at a reduced price. A similar system was used to control iron production
(Rafael Uriarte Ayo, Estructura, desarrollo y crisis de la siderurgia vizcaina, 1700 1840,
Bilbao, 1988, pp. 168 81). At the beginning of the eighteenth century (1727 28) the
native Bilbao merchants controlled 58 percent of the wool exported via this port (Luis
Mara Bilbao, Exportacin y comercializacin de lanas de Castilla durante el siglo
XVII, 1610 1720, in El pasado histrico de Castilla y Len, vol. 2, Edad moderna, Burgos,
1983, table 4, p. 242).
Credit control, rather than trust, seems to explain the partial success of traders
from Bilbao. It is also worth noting that, at least during the rst three- quarters of the
century, the Bourbon monarchy had excellent relations with its Basque subjects. In 1728
738 HAHR / November
the king authorized the creation of the Caracas Company, a chartered company with a
commercial monopoly in Venezuela that was established in San Sebastin (Roland Den-
nis Hussey). During the Spanish Succession War (1701 14) the Basques and Navarrese
were clear supporters of the Bourbons.
The colonial trade between Cdiz and Peru seems much more complex. As hap-
pened in Bilbao, the legal framework as well as the communications improved, as can be
seen in the mail transported by La Perla, or in the register ships; therefore the Spanish
merchants were better informed. In contrast, the expulsion of many foreign merchants
from the Spanish colonies deprived foreign commercial houses from trading in Cdiz
thanks to agents and trustworthy correspondents. These positive changes for the Span-
ish merchants also increased competition. As occurred in Bilbao, the proportion of for-
eign traders in Cdiz reduced throughout the century, and the Spanish partly ceased to
be mere intermediaries and began to trade on their own account.
The book nishes with an analysis of trust and distrust. The author is aware that
law played an important role but that it was insufcient. Trust was not enough to gen-
erate commercial success ( p. 181). Laws, with more or less effectiveness, protected trad-
ers against dishonesty, crimes, and illegalities, but not against risks, economic trends,
and political situations. Generally merchants did not reimburse debts because they were
incapable of doing so, not because they were dishonest. Trust could involve honesty,
integrity, technical skills, competence, and good or reliable information but also, and
probably more importantly, the possibility of retaliating against those that breached the
contract, which the author ignores. Merchants could take reasonable risks if they knew
their correspondents, where they lived, their relatives, and their properties. In some
cases family, friends, and neighbors offered this information. Merchants used these peo-
ple as agents because of their capacity to exert pressure. The author provides signicant
examples, but does not make the most of them. The British merchants preferred to have
a debtor in Cdiz than a debtor in the Spanish colonies because the assets of the former
could be seized ( pp. 131 33). Juan de Eguino, who got into heavy debt with a French
company, travelled to Peru where he had an important business, but he left his family in
Cdiz ( pp. 154 55) perhaps as a sort of hostage. Ignacio Torres was aware that if he took
his family to America he might not obtain more credit in Spain ( p. 130). The family acted
as a kind of warranty that he was going to fulll his obligations.
The author could have supported and nuanced his argument with two important
works on American trade and on information available to merchants trading with Span-
ish colonies: the fourth and fth volumes of Huguette and Pierre Chaunu, Sville et
lAtlantique, 1504 1650 (Paris, 1956), and especially Michel Morineaus book Incroyables
gazettes et fabuleux mtaux: Les retours des trsors amricains daprs les gazettes hollandaises
(XVI XVIII sicles) (Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences
de lHomme, 1985).
emiliano fernndez de pinedo, University of the Basque Country
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416927
Book Reviews / International and Comparative 739
Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. By jane g. landers. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010. Photographs. Maps. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography.
Index. x, 340 pp. Cloth, $29.95.
Over the last 20 years, Atlantic historiography has come to dominate the study of slavery
in the colonial Americas. The central goal of the Atlantic paradigm is to push against
national and imperial boundaries to demonstrate that most histories of the African
diaspora need to be situated in multiple historical sources and contexts. While most
scholars tend to endorse the approach, most only pay lip service and remain restricted to
the primary sources particular to national and imperial archives. Jane Landerss Atlantic
Creoles in the Age of Revolutions is a welcome exception and deserves to be read widely.
Through diligent and skillful mining of national, regional, and local archives in the
United States, Spain, and Cuba, Landers provides an engaging model of how to recover
and insert individuals into the overlapping histories of the Atlantic world during the Age
of Revolutions.
As the title of the book indicates clearly, Landers builds upon and extends Ira Ber-
lins denition of Atlantic Creoles from Many Thousands Gone (1998). Berlin focused
on Africans who deftly navigated the worlds of early Anglo- American slavery as they
straddled a cultural matrix of African origins and American enslavement. In contrast
to Berlin, and with much- needed renement, however, Landers is not simply interested
in charting how slave culture moved in a sequential process from African to an African
American creole culture. Rather, she examines Africans in depth and detail who were
polyglots and polycultural and adept in dealing with imperial rivalries in the greater
Caribbean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Following indi-
viduals who became ensnared in the American, Haitian, and French revolutions, border
disputes and maroon wars in Florida, and conspiracies and rebellions in nineteenth-
century Cuba, this book artfully forces scholars of all these topics to reassess how events
often considered specic to a single locality were shaped by wider Atlantic currents.
Moreover, by focusing on individuals who moved through the Caribbean during the Age
of Revolutions, Landers paints for the reader a fresh and far more revealing portrait of
how everyday individuals of the most humble backgrounds as slaves and free people of
color could become instrumental in shaping imperial conicts.
Whereas Landerss earlier book Black Society in Spanish Florida provided a detailed
social history analysis of slave and free people of color in Saint Augustine as a product of
economic, political, and cultural forces from the Atlantic world, this latest book employs
a cultural history approach to provide biographies of individuals of African descent who
were shaped by and (just as crucially) shaped the social, political, and cultural forces of
the Atlantic world. In order to achieve this task, Landers examines a fascinating cast of
characters that she describes as the Forrest Gump of their days, present at almost all
of their major turning points during the Age of Revolution ( p. 15).
For example, Landers analyzes the fascinating story of Prince Whitten, who spent
the rst 15 years of his long life in Upper Guinea, the next 10 in South Carolina, another
740 HAHR / November
35 in Spanish Florida, and the nal years in Cuba. Whittens Atlantic itinerancy was rst
the product of enslavement, but then he took matters into his own hands by joining the
Loyalists during the American Revolution and moving to Florida, and then nally exile
and a new life in Cuba once Florida became a US territory. Moving in an opposite geo-
graphic direction but propelled by the similar geopolitical forces was George Biassou, an
early leader of the Haitian Revolution. Once the slave revolt broke out in 1791, Biassou
aligned himself and his troops with the Spanish in exchange for his freedom, received
recognition for his military exploits, and became a salaried and pensioned ofcer. As
Toussaint Louverture directed the political tide of the Haitian Revolution toward an
alignment with the French Revolution, Biassou remained loyal to the Spanish Empire
and took up residence in Spanish Florida. Landers demonstrates how Florida throughout
the period of her study functioned as an imperial borderland, with Spanish, British, and
American forces vying for control of the peninsula. Individuals who could negotiate
and navigate these worlds emerged as leaders, such as William Bowles, who headed the
Muskogee State and created a trading network that extended to the Caribbean.
These biographic portraits are fascinating in their own right and also serve to
illustrate Landerss overarching argument about the strength, relevance, and ultimate
decline of royalism as a political option for slaves and free people of color during the Age
of Revolution. Spain had a policy that extended back for centuries of incorporating the
population of African descent into colonial societies through militia service and Catholi-
cism. During moments of imperial crisis the Spanish Crown would provide opportuni-
ties, often born out of military expediency, for people of African descent to earn their
freedom by demonstrating their loyalty to the Spanish Empire. However, as the Age of
Revolution came to a close, with America asserting its dominion over the Florida Pen-
insula and the rise of Cuba as a plantation colony of sugar, tobacco, and coffee exports,
racial regimes based upon slavery no longer allowed the same degree of social mobility
that royalism had previously allowed. Chapters that examine conspiracies and rebellion
in Havana and Matanzas, Cuba, demonstrate both the vitality and increasing limitations
of royalism as an ideology to campaign for better treatment of slaves and free people of
color. Whether in the new republic of the United States, ever rigidly polarized by race
and slavery, or the booming economy of Spains ever- faithful isle of Cuba in the nine-
teenth century, slaves and free people of color were increasingly treated like domestic
enemies despite years of loyal service.
This elegantly written study testies to the rewards of exhaustive research into the
lives and experiences of individuals who moved through the worlds of slavery and revolu-
tion in the Greater Caribbean. It will be mandatory reading for scholars and students of
Atlantic history, Caribbean history, American history, Latin American cultural history,
and, more broadly, scholars of the African diaspora.
matt d. childs, University of South Carolina
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416936
Book Reviews / International and Comparative 741
The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. By lisa yun.
Asian American History and Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,
2008. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. xxiii, 312 pp.
In a short, provocative essay published in 1988, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak posed a
powerful question: can the subaltern speak? Spivak rejected the notion that those outside
of societys loci of structural power are rendered marginal to the point of silence and
invisibility. Subaltern experiences, she argued, were not only audible and visible but were
knowable and heterogeneous. Lisa Yun aptly takes up this transformative call in The
Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. Her lengthy research
produces a fascinating, elegantly written, and careful analysis of thousands of deposi-
tions and petitions collected during an 1874 Chinese government fact- nding mission
to Cuba (at the height of the anticolonial Ten Years War) to investigate the work and
life conditions of Chinese coolies and intervene on their behalf. The Cuba Commission
Report contains 2,841 coolie accounts of abuse, torture, and murder by contract holders
and their agents against Chinese immigrants, many of whom came forth at great peril
to make known to home ofcials a level of exploitation and inhumanity in Cubas inden-
ture system that approached the surreal. Yuns critical reading of these texts focuses
close attention on the testimonies and interjects cul experiences in what have been the
conventional tools and paths for apprehending the subaltern in colonial Cuba: the slave
and ex- slave narrative as well as the premodern and modern structures of the emerging
Cuban nation. Yun is especially concerned with complicating historic iterations of hier-
archy, racialization, and violence. As analyzed by Yun, coolie experiences both recover
subaltern lives and disrupt the linearity and homogeneity deployed in defense of imperial
technologies.
Yuns erudite discussion of the freely entered, signed labor contract indicts the liber-
alist philosophical moorings of freedom, volition, and individual rights, which apologists
insisted gave coolie laborers greater socioeconomic status compared to slaves. This is an
important rethinking by Yun of nationalist histories Manichean architectures. Indeed,
one of the books greatest scholarly contributions is that it challenges a monolithic his-
toriographical portrayal of the Cuban body politic. Scholars have generally relied on a
black/white binary that at once erases the Asian presence and obscures a more nuanced
understanding of Cuban historical processes. Certainly, as Yun argues, such a binary
produces static racial victims and victors as well as a self- evident transition from premod-
ern to modern Cuban economy, society, and subjectivity. The coolies were often forced
to extend their terms of indenture, jailed within prison/industrial labor complexes, and
denied freedom papers and other commodied writs. All sorts of rights as seemingly
mundane as the right to beg, occupy public space, walk in public, travel, work at entre-
preneurial and professional occupations, and be released from contractual obligations
upon fulllment depended on the coolies purchase of writs that in turn created a thriv-
ing economy of paper and further subjugated and exploited immigrant Chinese. Their
742 HAHR / November
lives serve as testimonial challenges, argues Yun, to the normativity inherent to liberal
philosophy.
The nal chapter peels back the layers of a 1927 book by Antonio Chuffat Latour,
an Afro- Chinese Cuban who cast coolie and slave contributions to Cuban society in a
single framework. Chuffats liminal identity, which both evaded and embraced blackness
and Chineseness, informed his struggle to accommodate diasporic Chinese within the
Cuban national pantheon. He spoke of Chinese patriotism in Cuban anticolonial insur-
gencies and raged about historic and contemporary abuse against el chino and el negro. In
this sense, Chuffat joined other notable Afro- Chinese artist- intellectuals, such as the
poet Regino Pedroso and painter Wifredo Lam, equally concerned with prying apart
monolithic bodies politic by using the analytic tools of diaspora, class, ethnicity, race,
and culture.
One unsatisfying element of this otherwise rich work is Yuns estimation that slave
narratives and coolie testimonies are transpirational texts ( p. 56); that is, much of their
power is that they bring to public light what transpired in a violent colonial regime. As
political interventions, however, the texts seem much more critical for coolies than for
slaves. While the six- decade- long indenture system was damaged by coolie testimony,
Cuban and American slave systems generally drew signicant authority and strength
from widespread awareness of their brutality, abolitionist efforts notwithstanding. Fur-
ther, despite the books title, slave voices are conspicuously inaudible in it. Yuns primary
project to apprehend coolie experiences would be further advanced by better recovery
of divergences and convergences among similarly positioned peoples. Still, despite this
notable unevenness in subject treatment, this interdisciplinary work of history and liter-
ary criticism is a highly readable, critical scholarly innovation for studies of race, labor
regimes and violence, immigration, and Asian diaspora experience in Cuba and the
Americas.
melina pappademos, University of Connecticut, Storrs
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416945
Allemandes au Chili. By pauline bilot. Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de
Rennes, 2010. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. x,
209 pp. Paper, 16.
Anyone who knows the eld of the history of Germans in Chile will immediately asso-
ciate the title of this book with Jean- Pierre Blancpains classic study Allemands au Chili
(1974). But reading twice they would note the difference that the single letter e makes.
And, indeed, it makes all the difference, because some 36 years after Blancpains compre-
hensive work, Pauline Bilot asks new questions on a topic that deserves attention. Here
women are the focus, and after having read this beautifully illustrated book, originally a
masters thesis, this reviewer is sure that its title is deserved.
Based on a broad variety of sources, the book is organized according to topics start-
Book Reviews / International and Comparative 743
ing with a historiographical overview. This is a very important synthesis for it shows
the kind of work that has been done and the many lacunae that still exist if we approach
Germans in Chile from a gender perspective. Indeed, Bilot is right when she states that
at the time when Blancpain wrote, gender studies were simply not yet in focus. This has
changed lately, for migration studies have developed into a major eld of concern for
gender scholars. In addition, Bilot demonstrates how work on German- Chileans has
long suffered from ideological inhibitions. Either authors defended their subjects from
the reproach of nationalist and national socialist sentiment, or they castigated them for it.
This problem has recently gained new relevance due to the debates around the infamous
Colonia Dignidad. The basic problem of evaluating the German- Chilean record has
tainted both German and Chilean works on the topic. Perhaps for this reason, there is a
strong French connection in writing the history of the German community in Chile.
Bilots review of historiographical trends is most interesting when she writes about
migration and gender. Indeed, these elds have long been separated too much. While
US scholarship has certainly long since embarked on a course of combining the issues,
European scholarship has been slow to adapt. Indeed, it is in the eld of Latin Ameri-
can studies where this fruitful and interdisciplinary discussion has made most prog-
ress lately. Thus, in 2003 Alexandra Lbcke published a very interesting study about
German- Chilean womens discourse in the nineteenth century (Welch ein Unterschied
aber zwischen Europa und hier . . . [Frankfurt am Main: IKO, 2003]). Like Lbcke, who
concentrated on letter writing, Bilot also uses the writing of women as a basic source. In
addition, she has used documents of the Archivo Held in Santiago de Chile and of the
Archivo van de Maele in Valdivia.
It is numbers where Bilots original contribution to the eld of study rst
becomes relevant. In studying the well- known statistics of German emigration she
is able to demonstrate new dimensions as to the gender structure. The gender factor
is important not only to the sum total of emigration but also to geographical origins
and religious denominations, as Bilot aptly shows. Most interesting is her study of
single women: the choice between autonomy and marriage was a major issue here and
it becomes clear how ingeniously women lived up to the challenge of a foreign coun-
try. In chapter 3, Bilot presents a strong social history of female lives in the German
communities of Chile. It is important to note that she does not start with the arrival at
the foreign shore but takes into account the voyage. Here again, a major eld of study
that has come into historians focus lately that is, travel writing could learn a lot
by including a gender perspective.
More of this kind of work is necessary to gain a broader and more inclusive vision
of the past. While the mere fact that German- Chileans had a stronger impact than their
low numbers would imply is not in itself a new result, the signicance of female voices
within the process of ethnic genesis, in this case that of Deutschtum, becomes very clear
from this study. It is interesting to read Bilots version of the female discourse on nation
and gender, although this is more of an addition to what Lbcke has shown before.
Again, it needed a French scholar to tell the whole story of Germans in Chile. Any-
744 HAHR / November
one interested in the topic will be glad to have this book, which for the future will cer-
tainly remain as much a classic as Blancpains has been for such a long time.
stefan rinke, Freie Universitt Berlin
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416954
This Land Was Mexican Once: Histories of Resistance from Northern California.
By linda heidenreich. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Photographs.
Tables. Figure. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 255 pp. Paper, $19.95. Cloth, $50.00.
This Land Was Mexican Once is a well- thought- out and carefully organized book that
provides historical background on Northern California. It explores important questions
that seek to shine light on the ways that social systems were established throughout the
region and normalized through the use of history. Author Linda Heidenreich attempts
to destabilize white supremacist narratives by using a wealth of primary sources to pre-
sent an account of the Napa Valley as it was experienced by nonwhites since the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century. She makes use of Prasenjit Duaras notion of bifurcated
history, which is to write a history that recovers counter memories while demonstrat-
ing ways in which the past was transmitted to the present ( p. 4), and utilizes testimonios,
including those dictated to Enrique Cerruti by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Salvador
Vallejo, and Rosalia Vallejo de Leese; census records; and birth and death certicates to
map out dispersed histories coexisting in time. She then turns to the dominant narra-
tive that was used to cover and subordinate many of those histories to map out how such
histories became dominant.
This Land Was Mexican Once is organized into chapters interspersed with sec-
tions comprised of primary source materials critical to understanding the sociopoliti-
cal climate of the time. It begins by mapping precolonial histories, specically those of
Wappo- speaking peoples and other California Indian groups, and concludes by examin-
ing immigration and life among racialized minorities in post- 1848 Napa. Heidenreich
describes the impact that the missionaries, the Spanish, the Mexicans, and nally the
Americans had on the Wappo- and Patwin- speaking peoples. This book has a particular
focus on Spanish colonial and Mexican periods to demonstrate the complex and class-
stratied societies of the time. It also presents history as it was experienced by Chi-
nese and African Americans in the area to further illustrate racial tensions within the
complex class- based power dynamics that developed within the regions now known as
Sonoma, Napa, and Solano Counties. In particular, chapter 6 examines immigration
and life among racialized minorities in post- 1848 Napa and shows how African Ameri-
can, Chinese immigrant, and Chicana/o communities were pushed to segregated areas
of Napa. Today in this same region, US citizens and residents of color and their white
allies continue to do battle on an uneven playing eld ( p. 165). Although the author
asked very important questions and sought to analyze how things got to be so messed
up at both the local and national level ( p. 1), her analysis of African Americans was
Book Reviews / International and Comparative 745
under developed. The African American presence in Napas neighboring city Vallejo is
extremely prominent. Thus, further analysis of this community is warranted if a holistic
account of Napas history is to be presented.
In sum, This Land Was Mexican Once is an important book that demonstrates the role
of history in constructing dominant discourses of the nation. Heidenreich has written
a history that reects the coexisting and conicting histories that underlay this nations
historical background. Historians, students, and anyone else interested in colonial and
contemporary Latin America will nd this volume useful and rewarding.
carmen martnez- caldern, University of California, Berkeley
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416963
Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples. Edited by david maybury- lewis,
theodore macdonald, and biorn maybury- lewis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 2009. Maps.
Table. Notes. Index. vii, 258 pp. Paper, $29.95.
War was waged on indigenous peoples across the Americas in the late nineteenth century
by creole elites who saw them as obstacles to the dream of modernity upon which their
republics had been founded. One of the earliest of these wars occurred in Chile starting
in 1869, when the government adopted a policy of forcefully assimilating the lands and
indigenous peoples of southern Chile. In Argentina, General Julio Roca led the Con-
quest of the Desert (1879 84) against the Mapuche Indians; in Canada, federation in
1867 prompted a shift from the previous policy of respecting indigenous lands to a far
more aggressive policy of colonization. In the United States, a history of force was nally
trumped by reason with the Dawes Act of 1887, dividing Indian lands into small parcels
and enabling white settlement of all lands west of the Mississippi. This volume of essays
asks whether these events, which David Maybury- Lewis has referred to in earlier work
as a Second Conquest, have a common explanation, testing in particular the explana-
tory power of Manifest Destiny as a rationalization for expansion. The collection arose
from a conference conceived and organized by the distinguished anthropologist of Brazil
David Maybury- Lewis, whose son helped to complete the volume after his fathers death
in 2007. The focus of the work is not the events themselves but the ways in which their
perpetrators sought to legitimize them, and the perceptions of self and other that shaped
how they did so.
The book is especially valuable for its comparative perspective, which embraces
Canada and Brazil as well as the United States and Spanish America. So much attention
has been paid to the role of Manifest Destiny as the legitimation for US expansionism
that it has been too often forgotten that most of the former colonies of the Americas
began republican life with their own powerful sense of being assigned a privileged role
in history as champions of modern utopianism. The editors are to be applauded for their
comparative ambition, although it is only partly realized. The only explicit comparisons
746 HAHR / November
drawn in the essays themselves are between the United States and Canada, and only
three out of the seven chapters are devoted to Latin American countries, namely Argen-
tina, Chile, and Brazil. It is always easy to point to omissions in a comparative volume,
but the absence of Mexico, where the Porriato waged a military campaign against the
Yaqui Indians, is striking. All the essays are stimulating in themselves and the whole
certainly is greater than the sum of its parts, but it is left to readers to do most of the
comparative work for themselves, which has both advantages and disadvantages. Given
the pioneering nature of the project, a light editorial touch was probably the right deci-
sion. The book is invaluable not least for bringing to an English- speaking audience some
of the best Argentine and Chilean work on the still relatively little- known atrocities
against the indigenous peoples of those countries. It is a truly interdisciplinary volume,
bringing together historians, anthropologists, comparative literature scholars, and polit-
ical scientists, although there is no discussion of the methodological tensions involved in
the different approaches adopted.
The editors conclude that Manifest Destiny itself was unique to the United
States although its distinctiveness derives mainly, argues contributor Anders Stephan-
son, from its extraordinary historical effectiveness but that comparable self- justifying
narratives were developed elsewhere in the Americas. The most explicitly comparative
point highlights the ideological subtext of the claim that there are two distinct types of
nationalisms: one ethnic, xenophobic, and intolerant of difference; the other civic, inclu-
sive, and benign. The narrative of civic nationalism, which emphasizes political legiti-
macy, rights, and citizenship open to all, can in itself promote or reinforce the erasure
of the histories and experiences of the excluded and the marginalized. The nationalisms
that emerged in the Americas during the late nineteenth century were characterized, the
editors suggest, less by the symbols of pre- Columbian societies that were widely appro-
priated into the iconography of creole nations, as Rebecca Earle has shown for Spanish
America in The Return of the Native (2007), than by the frequency with which indigenous
peoples were imagined out of the new landscape ( p. 16).
Perhaps less convincing, or at least it would be worth further research, is the claim,
noted en passant, that such narratives emerged largely independent of one another
( p. 15). Chile and Argentina were constant reference points for each other in most aspects
of nation building; it seems unlikely that they were not so in this respect, although it may
be hard to trace because of the taboo nature of the topic, which also makes it hard to
identify the counternarratives. Overall, this is a highly stimulating collection, accessibly
written, that should be read by anyone interested in the history of indigenous peoples
and nationalism in the Americas.
nicola miller, University College London
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416972
Book Reviews / International and Comparative 747
No Higher Law: American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776.
By brian loveman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Photographs. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 539 pp. Cloth, $35.00.
Brian Loveman, perhaps best known for his work on Latin American militaries use of
legalistic arguments to support the overthrow of democratic governments, provides a
thorough examination of US foreign policy in the Americas from the founding of the
United States to the present. No Higher Law argues that in spite of drastic changes in the
international system and US domestic environment, there has been a surprising level
of continuity in some of the core beliefs, institutions, policies, and practices ( p. 2).
Furthermore, mirroring a similar claim by Greg Grandin in Empires Workshop, Love-
man claims that Latin America served as a testing ground for policies that the United
States would later try to implement elsewhere. Lovemans approach focuses on intermes-
tic (both international and domestic) politics, analyzing the ways in which international
and domestic politics, heavily shaped by the United States unique religious and cultural
milieu, were intertwined and heavily dependent on one another.
Three central pillars to US foreign policy have been unilateralism, US exceptional-
ism, and a No Transfer Policy. Loveman correctly notes that, contrary to many claims
to the contrary, the United States has never embraced isolationism, instead advocating
unilateralism as a means of avoiding, at least until after WWII, the entanglements of
balance- of- power politics. Furthermore, unilateral intervention normally resulted from
politicians need to out- patriot their political opponents through manly action. The
evidence that Loveman brings to bear is damning. He lists, for example, 37 instances
in which the United States used military force to intervene abroad between 1798 and
1844, long before it was an imperial power: 58 from 1894 to 1921, when it was becom-
ing an imperial power, and another 17 instances between 1946 and 1958, when it had
become a superpower. The belief of foreign policy makers (and perhaps most US citi-
zens) in US exceptionalism allowed the United States to claim that when it was engaging
in military intervention abroad, which was quite often, it was doing so not to advance its
own agenda, but rather to benevolently promote liberty, democracy, and freedom. The
examination of the impact of US exceptionalism by historians is nothing new, but the
duration of Lovemans study allows him to trace the ways in which the reasons claimed
for US exceptionalism have changed (and stayed the same) over time. Early in the his-
tory of the republic, exceptionalism was based on Providence, Americas special religious
place in the world, John Winthrops City upon a Hill. Later, exceptionalism was based
on supposed racial and cultural superiority. A testament to the power of the myth of US
exceptionalism is the fact that both Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush used the
same argument in favor of democracy, free trade, and free enterprise to promote their
ghts against international terrorism. Ironically, for a country that purports to promote
freedom and democracy, much US foreign policy has been crafted and undertaken in
secret. I was surprised to learn that as much as 12 percent of the national budget under
George Washington was set aside for secret operations. Congresss 1811 No Transfer
748 HAHR / November
Policy established that any transfer of territory in the Western Hemisphere from one
European power to another would be viewed as a threat to US national security inter-
ests and therefore would not be tolerated ( p. 27). Not only did it serve as a basis for the
much more famous 1823 Monroe Doctrine but it also served as the basis for the Carter
Doctrines defense of the Persian Gulf.
Although Loveman does not highlight the growing power of the executive branch
as one of the central foci of his book, he does an excellent job of demonstrating the ways
in which presidents quickly realized that by establishing facts- on- the- ground through
foreign intervention, the legislative and judicial branches could do little but go along
with the executive branch. Not only that, both the legislative and judicial branches actu-
ally abetted the consolidation of power by the executive branch, creating what he calls
the rise of the imperial presidency. The approval of the No Transfer Policy by Congress
is one example of this collusion, but a better example was the Supreme Courts decision
that while only Congress had the power to declare war, the president as commander
in chief could make war without a declaration. And while some scholars have argued
that the Supreme Court has prevented presidents from overstepping their bounds, Love-
man provides numerous instances in which presidents acted outside the bounds of the
Constitution without retribution from the courts. In addition, presidents have not only
used their increased powers to intervene abroad; they have also used them for domestic
repression when the public (or some members of the public) do not approve of US foreign
intervention.
Some may take issue with the way in which Loveman applies current concepts to
the past, such as his calling Indian Removal a form of ethnic cleansing. Nonetheless,
Loveman is honest about his own intellectual struggles over the applicability of these
concepts. He argues that he took on this project to better understand [the past] on its
own terms and to reframe our understanding of the present ( p. 1). Through his thor-
ough undermining of the myths of US isolationism and exceptionalism, he has accom-
plished this and more.
andrae marak, California University of Pennsylvania
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416981
Book Reviews / International and Comparative 749
Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters.
Edited by dina berger and andrew grant wood. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010. Photographs. Map. Notes. Index. 393 pp. Paper, $24.95.
Mexico is indelibly imprinted in the collective imagination of the United States as a
romantic playground and land of the exotic otherness. Neither the intensity of trans-
national migration of Mexican workers living in the United States and Mexico, nor the
now millions upon millions of American tourists who have traveled, toured, and played
in Mexicos Spanish colonial cities, indigenous markets, pre- Columbian sites, and long
tropical beaches have dulled these attitudes. How this came to be is a fascinating story
that Dina Berger and Andrew Grant Wood begin to answer in their edited volume Holi-
day in Mexico: Critical Reections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters.
Berger and Woods volume counteracts the overwhelming tendency of tourism
scholars to focus their research on contemporary, synchronic case studies. Certainly
there are exceptions, but most research fails to address tourism from a historical perspec-
tive. Over the course of the well- written and interesting chapters, the authors remind us
that not all was as new as the rst tourism scholars in the 1970s implied. These chapters
are bracketed by an introduction and conclusion in which the editors contextualize the
contributors theoretical perspectives and their specic historical cases.
One of the strengths of these essays is that neither the editors nor the chapter
authors try to present a unied vision of tourism history and development in Mexico.
What they do is present a panorama of Mexican tourism, not an exhaustive study of all
kinds of tourism, but a diverse collection of specic tourism histories that tell as much
about international politics between the United States and Mexico as about tourism in
Mexico. Collectively, the authors illustrate the particular kinds of tourists and the shift-
ing representations of Mexico that are cultivated by the Mexican state as well as regional
and local community civic leaders and private entrepreneurs. As Bergers chapter illus-
trates nicely, American tourists and Mexican hosts t into the US Good Neighbor
Policy of the 1930s, in which tourism played a strong role in fostering positive relations
between the two countries. Other essays, notably chapters by Eric M. Schantz (about
vice), Jeffrey M. Pilcher (about touristic consumption), and Barbara Kastelein (about eco-
logical and social decline), show some of the darker sides of tourism in Mexico.
Indeed, tourism development and its history is both positive and negative as tour-
ists themselves engage in contradictory behaviors, the US and Mexican governments
inject their political agendas in the mix, and businesspersons small and large try to gain
an advantage and make a prot. Andrea Boardman shows how US soldiers in the US-
Mexican War acted like tourists, setting the stage for the tourism growth that followed
their return home. While Boardman shows proto- tourist soldiers, other authors show
how tourism became democratized, at least for US tourists, following World War II.
Essays by Christina Bueno on the reconstruction of Teotihuacn, by Wood about
improving health conditions in Veracruz, and by Alex Saragoza about resort development
on the Pacic coast describe the monumental acts and nances of the state to develop
750 HAHR / November
and promote tourism. Other authors show how tourism politics play out among local
businesspersons, the state, and foreigners: Andrew Sackett on the politics of tourism
development in Acapulco, Lisa Pinley Covert on transforming San Miguel de Allende
into a cultural center, and Mary K. Coffey on the resignication of folk art. Collectively
these authors illustrate how massive state capital investment was related to private invest-
ment and fostered tense public- private unions.
In various essays, notably Woods chapter on Carnival in Veracruz and, especially,
M. Bianet Castellanoss chapter about Maya service workers, the authors take a contem-
porary tourism site or associated tourism activity and then describe the politics that led
up to the contemporary situation. Relying primarily on oral histories, Bianet Castellanos
reconstructs labor regimes and tourism in Yucatn from the perspective of workers who
try to comprehend tourism work, which does not come under ritual control like corn
farming. Castellano shows the development of mutual dependency and economic sup-
port that exists between a Maya community and Cancn tourism resorts.
Berger argues signicantly that the tourism gaze is not one way and imperial, and
that tourism politics, development, and practices are dialectical. By considering tourism
development as representative of power relations between states, between tourists and
hosts, and among politicians and businesspersons the authors here deepen our knowl-
edge of the history of tourism in Mexico.
walter e. little, University at Albany, SUNY
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416990
Satans Playground: Mobsters and Movie Stars at Americas Greatest Gaming Resort.
By paul j. vanderwood. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Photographs.
Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 392 pp. Paper, $24.95. Cloth, $89.95.
Reading Satans Playground, Paul Vanderwoods latest history of the San Diego Tijuana
borderlands, I was struck by its unexpected resonances with Mike Daviss City of Quartz:
Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990), one of the foundational texts of post-
modern geography. City of Quartz offered up provocative readings of the great early
twentieth- century southern California mythmakers boosters, noirs, mercenaries,
exiles, etc. and the often toxic legacy they left behind. For Davis, the Los Angeles
produced by these mythmakers has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia
for advanced capitalism ( p. 18). While Vanderwood shows little interest in excavat-
ing the future in San Diego Tijuana, he shares Daviss fascination with the glamour,
hype, sleaze, and violence that have marked southern California culture since the great
westward migrations of the 1920s brought a combustible mix of dreamers, scammers,
entrepreneurs, and (what Davis calls) Midwestern Babbittry to the Pacic coast. The
brilliance of City of Quartz lies in its broad historical sweep and acerbic social critique,
while Satans Playground treats us to layer upon layer of thick description and a playful
(at times nostalgic) style that situates the people and events it chronicles securely in the
Book Reviews / International and Comparative 751
not- so- distant past. The authorial intent in these two remarkable books couldnt be more
different, and yet both ring true on the troublesome subject of California dreaming.
In his previous borderlands histories, The Power of God against the Guns of Govern-
ment (Stanford University Press, 1998) and Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint
(Duke University Press, 2004), Vanderwood revealed a gift for storytelling that set him
apart from more conventional social historians who would disguise their art (or lack
of it) behind the neutral prose, data sets, and rigid chronologies of social science. That
gift is very much in evidence in Satans Playground. Like any good gangster tale, the
story begins with a heist, shoot- out, and getaway; it follows the police, press, and private
detectives as they close in on the culprits; and it ends with the robbers dead or behind
bars. Along the way, Vanderwood supplies us with an extraordinarily rich history of the
wheelers and dealers that shaped the San Diego Tijuana nexus in the boom and bust
years between the world wars. He surrounds his principal protagonists the self- made
Border Barons ( James Crofton, Baron Long, Wirt Bowman), Baja California governors
Esteban Cant and Abelardo Rodrguez, and the world- renowned Agua Caliente resort
in Tijuana with a dizzying cast of minor characters including Hollywood celebrities,
world- class sports gures (human and equine), transplanted Chicago gangsters, petty
criminals, bootleggers, unsavory politicians, hardworking (if occasionally corrupt)
policemen, sensation- seeking newspaper men, self- righteous moral reformers, and the
hordes of tourists who ocked to southern California beaches and Tijuana casinos in
search of drink and diversion.
Most historians despair of achieving the proper density for thick description of
the sort envisioned by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, which seeks to explain the politi-
cal, economic, and social context behind gestures as eeting as a wink at a cockght. But
this book comes awfully close. And if Vanderwood sometimes sacrices his narrative to
an irresistible tangent, the overall effect more than compensates for any temporary loss
of continuity. The poorly digested minutia of local history can make tedious reading for
outsiders, but in the hands of this master storyteller seemingly random historical details
are stitched together with a carefully crafted tone a sly cross between the archness
of The Sting and sarcasm of classic noir that reveals unexpected connections among the
most disparate of anecdotes, connections that a more conventional method would never
have uncovered. So while the book dispenses with the formal thesis and argumentative
style so beloved of the disciplinarians of history, and draws no contemporary lessons
from its subject matter la City of Quartz, Vanderwoods adroit use of literary ambience
and the generic conventions of the crime story provides more than enough coherence,
at least for this reader.
Satans Playground is remarkable in another important way as well. Doing history on
two sides of an international boundary is no simple thing, especially in the face of per-
sistent major economic, social, and cultural asymmetries. As a consequence, US- Mexico
borderlands histories tend to favor one side or the other, most often (but not always) the
United States. In contrast, Vanderwood crosses and re- crosses the border with apparent
ease, despite the obvious logistical and archival challenges. This enviable facility allows
752 HAHR / November
him to track the Border Barons as they work both sides of the line (San Diego/Tijuana,
Sacramento/Mexicali, Washington/Mexico City) to their considerable prot, to expose
the subtle (and not so subtle) transnational machinations of powerful politicians like Baja
governor (later president) Abelardo Rodrguez, and tease out the often contradictory his-
tories of a complex international phenomenon like the Agua Caliente resort. The result
is borderlands history as its transnational best.
This short review can only hint at the wealth of historical detail and literary craft
that make Satans Playground such a great read. It will no doubt be a mainstay of under-
graduate and graduate classes on California, Western, and borderlands history for years
to come. And like Linda Gordons The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1999) another great borderlands history structured around a crime it
should be a big hit with history lovers everywhere.
robert m. bufngton, University of Colorado at Boulder
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1416999
Hotel Trpico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950 1980.
By jerry dvila. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Photographs. Tables.
Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi, 312 pp. Paper.
Jerry Dvila, author of Diploma of Whiteness (2003), has produced another exciting mono-
graph on Brazilian racial thought during the twentieth century. Hotel Trpico begins with
the election of President Getlio Vargas for his third term (1951 54) and examines Bra-
zils diplomatic initiatives in Africa during the time Brazil shifted to the military govern-
ment (1964) and enjoyed her economic miracle (1969 74). The book title comes from
a hotel in Luanda where Brazilian diplomat Ovdio de Mello and his wife Ivony de Mello
stayed near the end of civil wars in Angola, when many Portuguese colonists were eeing
the country. The hotel was the site of the most incongruous acts of Brazilian foreign
policy ( p. 1) as Brazil became the rst country to recognize Angolan independence
under the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in November 1975.
Hotel Trpico is based not only on the authors extensive archival research in Brazil and
Portugal but also on his interviews with former Brazilian diplomats and intellectuals
who traveled to Africa during the 1960s and 1970s. His informants are predominantly
elite white men who identied themselves as Africans and/or blacks and embraced Afro-
Brazilian culture only in the context of Africa, while conveniently overlooking their own
racism and the exclusion of black Brazilians in the national politics.
Dvila organizes the book into nine chapters. The rst chapter situates Brazil in the
luso- tropical world, with Gilberto Freyre traveling to Angola in 1951 as a guest of Por-
tuguese colonial ofcials. Brazilian national identity was inseparable from Portuguese
ethnicity. Chapter 2 focuses on the hardships of Raymond Sousa Santos, the rst ambas-
sador to Ghana, whom President Jnio Quadros appointed in 1961 for his independent
foreign policy. Chapter 3 examines the experiences of Brazilian diplomats in Nigeria for
Book Reviews / International and Comparative 753
1963 83 as the lovers of the African race, in relation to Afro- Brazilian immigrants and
their descendants (known as Brazilians) in Lagos. Chapter 4 examines the interna-
tional context as the war broke out in Angola in 1961, involving the United States with
Cold War concerns and racial politics. Under enormous pressure from Portugal and the
powerful Luso- Brazilian community, Quadros was forced to compromise his policy, and
his successor Joo Goulart also could not sustain a cohesive foreign policy regarding
Portuguese decolonization. Chapter 5 starts with the visit of President Lopold Senghor
of Senegal in 1964, six months after Brazils military coup, in order to challenge Brazils
support of Portuguese colonialism. A strong advocate of negritude, Senghor attempted
to mobilize black Brazilians and stimulate black activism. In the meanwhile, Brazils alli-
ance with Portugal became more and more costly for the military government. Mrio
Gibson Barboza is the topic of chapter 6 for his efforts to change Brazils Africa policy
as a new foreign minister at the time of the oil crisis. Chapter 7 examines the challenges
Ernesto Geisel and his government had to face in Africa after the Portuguese Revolu-
tion took place in April 1974. With the great inux of migrants from Socialist Portugal
and Portuguese Africa, Brazil was slow in recognizing independent Guinea- Bissau and
Mozambique. The reader is reunited with Mello arriving in Luanda in 1975 in chapter
8, which examines Angolas independence, achieved with the help of Cuban troops, and
postindependent Angola- Brazil relations. Chapter 9 focuses on Brazil- Nigeria relations
in the late 1970s through the visit of two prominent Afro- Brazilians with different mes-
sages on Brazil: Abdias do Nascimento and Pel.
Hotel Trpico is a very informative monograph on Brazilian diplomacy whose
strength lies in the fascinating narratives and episodes the author draws from elite Bra-
zilians reections, demonstrating the die- hard rhetoric of racial democracy in their poli-
tics of identity. The book even includes two former militants narratives of exile in Cuba,
Chile, Portugal, and Angola during the 1970s. It also traces the connection between
Brazils Africa policy and the black movement in Brazil, and describes the inner dilemma
of Sousa Santos based on his memoir. Even so, Dvila does not include any real voices of
important Afro- Brazilian activists. Nascimento and others such as Thereza Santos and
Kabengele Munanga were not interviewed. Lastly, the rst four chapters might benet
from a better organization of arguments, since the text moves backward and forward in
time and some parts may appear repetitive to the reader.
Jerry Dvila is to be celebrated for his meticulous research and nuanced histori-
cal interpretations. The book is very well written and free of unnecessary jargon. Hotel
Trpico contributes to the growing body of research on twentieth- century Brazil. The
book will be read not only by scholars and students of modern Brazil but also by many
others who are interested in race and nation in modern Latin America. It should be
widely adopted for undergraduate and graduate courses in modern Brazil and Latin
America as well as global and Atlantic history.
mieko nishida, Hartwick College
doi 10.1215/00182168- 1417008