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Feature Review
Histria da Vida Privada no Brasil. Edited by fernando a. novais. Volume 2
edited by luiz felipe de alencastro. So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997.
Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. 523
pp. Cloth.
Histria da Vida Privada no Brasil. Edited by fernando a. novais. Volume 3
edited by nicolau sevcenko. So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998. 724 pp.
Histria da Vida Privada no Brasil. Edited by fernando a. novais. Volume 4
edited by lilia moritz schwarcz. So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998. 820 pp.
The inspiration for these volumes comes from France. The model is the highly success-
ful Histoire de la Vie Prive, edited by Phillipe Aries and Georges Duby. The French
scholars wanted to penetrate the crust of traditional politico-institutional history to illu-
minate the histories of individual lives. They hoped this approach would bring us closer
to the nitty-gritty of everyday life in the past.
Not surprisingly, these four volumes from Brazil reect the same problem as their
Gallic forebears: nding sources on the private realm. Obviously many secrets will
remain forever hidden from even the most assiduous of researchers. The farther back
the historian goes, the harder it becomes, because the closer to the present, the richer
the documentation. The historian of Brazil is necessarily left speculating, for example,
about the intimate existences of the runaway slaves who built colonial Brazils famed
quilombos in the seventeenth century.
Since the rst volume in this series (covering the colonial era) will be reviewed in a
future issue of this journal, I shall focus on the last three volumes, which cover the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries and total over 2,000 pages. Each volume has its own edi-
tor, operating under the general editorship of Fernando Novais, the distinguished
Paulista historian of the colonial era. References to the individual volumes will neces-
sarily be selective.
The challenge in writing this kind of history is bringing it down to the level of
individual actors. For this we need to reconstruct the time lines of single lives. The ideal
source would be the record linkage which matches individual lives as documented in
census lists, tax rolls and court records. In practice that approach is impractical, given
Hispanic American Historical Review 80:3
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HAHR 80.3_08 BookReview(569-648 8/4/00 3:30 PM Page 569
the effort needed to nd and link the records. That task has proved nearly impossible
even for researchers in U.S. history.
The Brazilian contributors to these volumes do not follow a uniform approach;
they make do with a pastiche of sources: travelers accounts, ofcial records, scraps from
the media, such as newspaper stories (or advertisements), popular ditties, and magazine
features. It should be added that the copious and well-chosen illustrations furnish a par-
allel historical chronicle that will repay careful study.
The other major problem facing historians of this topic is denitional. In his pref-
ace to the rst volume, Novais unfortunately has given us virtually no help in dening
what his authors mean by vida privada. He describes the team approach when the
authors intently discussed their texts, but nothing is said of the issues addressed.
Instead, the general editor offers a vague reference to the new history, whose charac-
ter is left to be deduced from its analog in French historiography. Novaiss imprecision
is duplicated by his contributors, who seldom clearly dene their subject.
Volume 2, covering the Empire, opens with a richly informative chapter on the
urban context of social life by volume editor Luiz Felipe de Alencastro. He includes
details on sanitation, popular medicine, immigration (especially Portuguese), varieties
of slavery, English riding horses, womens fashion, the rage for altering family names,
and the distribution of bawdy houses. What the author gives are ample clues for where
the private might be encountered.
Slavery is a large part of this story, since Brazil accelerated its slave imports early in
this erathe rst half of the nineteenth centuryat a time when the slave trade to the
rest of the Americas (except Cuba) had ceased. After 1850, when the slave trade ended,
manumission accelerated as the abolition movement gained inuence. Robert Sleness
chapter on the west of So Paulo shows clearly how this rapidly growing region was
highly dependent on fresh slave imports, given the low birth rate among the existing
slave population. This meant manumission was likely to free a large number of rela-
tively unassimilated Afro-Brazilians. Slenes also demonstrates, through skillfully docu-
mented cases, the frequent sexual exploitation of their female slaves by their masters.
The result is a gripping look at an all-important dimension of private life.
As Hebe Mattos de Castro notes in her chapter on slavery and the family, imperial
law simply dened slaves as property and dispensed with the scientic discourse
about racial differences. The author then taps the court records, especially of law suits
brought by slaves against their masters. At the same time, she chronicles the masters
maneuvering to keep freed slaves in a de facto servile relationship. Through it all, espe-
cially after 1850, the debate continued over dening the dimensions of citizenship to be
enjoyed by ex-slavesa debate with crucial implications for twentieth-century Brazil.
Meanwhile, the quest of every slave was to become recognized as free (livre) and not
freed (liberto), the latter term retaining an invidious overtone.
Evaldo Cabral de Mello opens his chapter on the end of the casa-grandes with a
cultural explanation for the sparse documentation of private life in Brazil. According to
this argument (earlier advanced by Gilberto Freyre), Catholics can unburden their
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secrets in the confessional, while Protestants have only their diaries as refuge. Nonethe-
less, Cabral de Mello nds enough written records of Pernambucan planters to illumi-
nate intimate details of some socially powerful Brazilians. The picture is of an authori-
tarian family structure, with the patriarch exercising arbitrary power over his women,
children, and slaves. Although restricted to the elite, these portraits are the most satisfy-
ing to be found in the entire four volumes. This is doubtlessly aided by the elegance of
Cabral de Mellos writing.
Luiz Felipe de Alencastro and Maria Luiza Renaux in their chapter focus on the
immigrants, who only reached Brazil in great numbers in the Empires nal years. Prin-
cipal coverage is given to the Germans settling the south. There is also attention to the
anti-Portuguese sentiments typical of the larger coastal cities. Finally, Joo Jos Reis
offers an intriguing account of the rituals surrounding death during the nineteenth cen-
tury. Because Brazilian society had not yet enthroned individualism, the entire commu-
nity was drawn into the grieving process. The more prestigious the deceased and/or his
family, the greater the funeral cortege. Once again one gets a sense of how closely inter-
twined were the private and the public in imperial Brazil.
Volume 3 might be expected to depict the greatest change in private lives. It covers
1890 to the mid-twentieth centurythe era when deepening technology and expand-
ing urbanization were eroding the basis of Brazils traditional agrarian society. The vol-
ume editor is Nicolau Sevcenko, a well-known social and cultural historian. His intro-
duction sets the scene well by describing the resistance to modernization evident in the
revolt of Canudos (189397), the Revolta da Vacina (1904) and the Guerra do Contes-
tado (191216), but curiously omits any mention of the racially charged Revolt of the
Chibata (1910).
Sevcenkos concluding chapter on Rio relies heavily on Machado de Assis and Joo
do Rio, two celebrated observers of Rio society. It was the succeeding generation that
then developed a fascination with gadgetry and machinesfrom the telephone to the
electric light to the automobile. Yet, that Brazil was also the era of Carmen Miranda,
the ofcialization of Samba, and the craze over Hollywoods latest lms. The account
is livened with popular lyrics and a series of excellent illustrations from contemporary
advertisements, cartoons, and photographs. But missing from this lively scene are the
rest (80 percent or more?) of the cariocas of the belle epoque. The favelas that began
appearing at the turn of the century, for example, nd no place here. And where are
those empregadas who did all the work? Were they never private?
One of the most intriguing contributions in volume 3 is Nelson Schapochniks
chapter based on post cards and family photo albums. Using these sources the author
creates a cartography of memoirs and desires, (p. 433). The postcards sent from
abroad reected Brazilians conception of the wider world. They had a special meaning
for creative genius Mario de Andrade, who never went farther abroad than Peru. The
246 post cards discovered among his literary estate had come from friends who served
as his eyes and ears when visiting the famous sites Mario would never encounter.
Schapochniks venture into family photo albums is equally rewarding. Most often
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pictured were weddings, communions, and school graduations. But even this author has
trouble averting his gaze from the elite. His tour of the interior decoration of belle
epoque houses and apartments, for example, never reaches the kitchens or the servants
quarters.
Elias Thome Saliba provides a welcome change of pace in his investigation of the
comic dimension of private life. Parody was the favorite form, appearing in songs,
radio sketches, and irreverent nicknames for famous downtown streets. The comic
relief was delivered by poets and sambistas, who mocked Brazils would-be national
identity. In a country whose future was daily debated, their humor provided a haven
where laughter was the solutionperhaps Brazils secret for maintaining hope and
banishing death (p. 365).
In volume 4 the authors again face the temptation to avoid the private side of the
story and slip into a description of institutions in general. Such is the case with Angela
de Castro Gomes, who summarizes her well-known description of the corporatist struc-
ture imposed by the Estado Novo. But for the individual worker the most important
element in that system was not the union (sindicato) but the labor court system (where
grievances were taken with the help of a labor lawyer, not the union). It merits no dis-
cussion here. The same criticism applies to the chapter by Joo Manuel Cardoso de
Melo and Fernando Novais, whose analysis of socioeconomic history relies primarily on
macro data to describe migration, industrialization and housing. The reader is left ask-
ing how the ordinary Brazilian got a job when forced to compete with omnipresent
reserve army of the unemployed. Were the best paying industrial jobs ( Volkswagen,
Whirlpool, for example) only available through kinship ties or patronage networks?
How often did pure merit the mantra of capitalist ideologycarry the day? In other
words, how did the labor market look from the workers standpoint?
The chapter by Alba Zaluar on violence is a recital of crime as seen by the middle
and upper classes. The author provides ample statistics on the explosion of urban
crime since 1970, but fails to tell what crime has meant in personal terms. There is no
mention, for example, of the frequent drama of families forced to negotiate with shad-
owy kidnappers, who frequently work hand in glove with the police. Alba also seems
uncritical of the way in which the image of the crime threat is sold to the public, as in
TV sensationalist pseudo documentaries such as the program Aqui Agora. Finally, the
author omits any mention of the brutalizing violence often practiced by the penal sys-
tem and the police.
In her chapter on race relations, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz offers an informative syn-
thesis of recent research. She relies on macro data to construct a useful racial prole of
modern Brazilian society. Meanwhile her chapter offers little on the nature of race rela-
tions na intimidade, as the volumes title promises. Surely by now there are enough rst-
person narratives and case studies to give us the personal avor of, in the authors
words, Brazils particular type of racism, a silent and faceless racism which hides
behind a suppressed guarantee of universality and legal equality which leaves for the
private realm the practice of discrimination. (p. 182).
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Esther Hamburgers look at the astoundingly rapid penetration of television into
post-1960 Brazilian society gives includes an excellent analysis of how the telenovelas
exercise their magic on a cross-class audience. The author argues convincingly that
reception of the telenovelas has become a community phenomenon, including multiple
forms of viewer (especially female) feedback, thereby constantly creating the essentials
of an imagined national community (p. 441). The telenovela has even reached the sta-
tus of a unique national art form, surprisingly successful in the export market. But ques-
tions remain. For example, how has TV viewing changed family lifetraditionally the
core of private existence in Brazil?
Despite the foregoing criticisms, the reader must feel gratitude to these editors
and their authors. Even if their exploration of private lives is necessarily incomplete, we
now have a valuable vade mecum for all who wish to know more about the grand sweep
of Brazilian social history.
thomas e. skidmore, Brown University
General
From Aztec to High Tech: Architecture and Landscape across the MexicoUnited States
Border. By lawrence a. herzog. Creating the North American Landscape.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Photographs. Maps. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. xiv, 241 pp. Cloth, $39.95.
This book, the most recent addition to the John Hopkins University Presss distin-
guished Creating the North American Landscape series, is a product of the authors
longstanding interest in urbanism and architecture along the MexicanU.S. border-
lands, and the CaliforniaMexico region in particular. The premise of the book is that a
new type of landscape is developing along the MexicanU.S. border: A Mex-Am
transfrontier metropolis that ignores political boundaries and that is propelled by a
combination of transnational and global forces. The author describes the urban and
architectural traditions that emanate from each side of the border, but his main focus is
on the potential blending of these landscape traditions at their points of cultural con-
tact along the border itself. While the author envisions the development of an authen-
tic border landscape that reects both traditions, the powerful inuence of the U.S. in
Mexico and the preference for nostalgic versions of Hispano-Mediterranean architec-
ture in the U.S. Southwest, makes assimilation problematic. Fearing that the adaptation
of commodied landscapes from the United States are leading to a sense of place-
lessness in Mexican border citiesthe development of an Anywhere Mexico/USA
he also expresses the hope that U.S. cities might be made more livable by absorbing
landscape traditions from south of the border.
The book contains seven chapters, and begins with a description of the character-
istic features of the transcultural city that result from the collision of the regions two
predominant landscape traditions: Mexican memory and North American high-
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tech. Because the author situates the Mexican borderlands in a wedge between two
powerful, opposing forces, the next three chapters describe the evolution of regional
landscape elements in Central Mexico, northern Mexico, and the Southwest U.S.
Moreover, a large-scale view showing how these landscape traditions play out on the
border landscape itself is provided by case studies of Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego,
California. In the ensuing chapter, the focus is on the processes of economic and cul-
tural integration, with an emphasis on the negative impact of globalization and mod-
ernism on the tourist landscapes and public spaces of Tijuana. Because they are respon-
sible for much of the formal architecture in the region, the author also includes an
entire chapter of interviews with architects from Tijuana and San Diego. The nal
chapter consists of a summary and conclusion in which it is observed that, Mexican
landscapes are increasingly being eclipsed by global consumerism (p. 207), while the
landscapes of the urban Southwestern United States have not resolved their connection
to the Mexican past (p. 212).
From Aztec to High Tech is a very well-written book that provides a clear and con-
cise argument for the existence of a new transborder landscape. Yet, although the
author writes of a gradual blending of the two landscape traditions, it remains ques-
tionable whether-or-not a truly integrated borderlands landscape is possible when the
economic and cultural inuences of one is far greater than the other. Furthermore,
while the author provides broad overviews of the historical and contemporary evolution
of urbanism and architecture in Mexico and the MexicanU.S. borderlands that make it
accessible to the general reader, those already familiar with the urban landscapes of the
region may grow impatient with these summaries of secondary material. Finally, the
chapter of interviews would have been more informative if it had also included inter-
views with the developers responsible for many of the popular landscapes in the region.
Otherwise, the interviews would have worked better blended into the body of the book.
Despite these observations, due to its accessible writing style and broad review of the
literature, this book would be an asset to any Mexican or MexicoU.S. regional or
urban geography course.
william f. manger, Arizona State University
The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America. Edited by doris sommer.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Photographs. Illustrations. Index. vi, 310 pp.
Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $17.95.
Doris Sommer, who gave new vitality to the study of nineteenth-century Latin American
novels, has here collected 20 short essays exemplifying both a broad range of contempo-
rary criticism and a refreshing emphasis on the particulars of time and place. Sommers
introduction even proposes that this emphasis might be termed a new costumbrismo on
the part of literary critics. Hence the title of the volume, which may otherwise be mislead-
ing, because none of the essays deal with regionalist literature in the familiar sense. The
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books blurb suggests that a new critical investment in temporal and geographical
specicity is a response to the pressures of current theoretical trends towards models of
cultural globalization. That may be. On the other hand, a renewed attention to particu-
larities of time and place (history) might be merely an overdue retreat from excessive
abstraction (theory), which is pretty arid and colorless stuff, after all.
Whatever explains the historical bent of these essays, historians of Latin America
will nd much of interest in this collection. Probably the most valuable for historians
are the essays that use textual analysis to help us understand the way that people felt and
acted in the past. For example, my favorite among them reads Machado de Assis to
explore the historical meaning of cruelty in nineteenth-century Brazil. Pieces on Ital-
ian opera in early-nineteenth-century Mexico and on melodrama in late-nineteenth-
century Argentina point in a similar direction, as do two that parse the discourse of
recent rightwing dictatorships in Chile and Argentina and another that examines the
novels read by middle-class Mexican women at the end of the twentieth century.
Many essays deal with colonialism and post-colonialism. El Inca Garcilaso de la
Vega appears here (contrary to the conventional interpretations) writing in terms only
Andeans could understand. An essay on the Philippine independence movement
explains how, faced with local diversity of languages, that movement embraced the
Spanish language as a weapon of anti-colonialism. A number of essays come in interest-
ing pairs. Two examine the paradoxes whereby the rhetoric of modernity was both the
bedrock of [postcolonial] Spanish American cultural discourse and the potential source
of its most radical disempowerment (p. 96). Two focus respectively on Simon Rodrguez
(the tutor with whom Simn Bolvar rambled in Europe and a true cultural radical) and
on Jos Joaqun Fernndez de Lizardi, the rst Latin American novelist who, though far
more conservative than Rodrguez, at least denounced slavery. Two deal with Jos
Marti, who needs no introduction, and two with various aspects of Puerto Rican histor-
ical identity.
Overall, the collection bears Sommers personal stamp: her own interest in history
and in clear prose, as well as the inuence of her pathbreaking work on the regions
foundational ctions. (One of the contributors presents a novel of star-crossed lovers,
on the model that Sommer has identied in so many national romances of nineteenth-
century Latin Americathis one about Texas, written in the 1930s but not published
until recently.) Whether or not the idea of a new costumbrismo transcends the role of
unifying introductory motif (it doesnt, in my view), The Places of History provides a valu-
able look at what Latin Americanist critics are up to these days. Signicantly, the book
is slotted for a marketing category called Latin American Studies, rather than literary
criticism, a eld that has lost any claim on a general readership during the last couple of
decades. This graceful collection evidently seeks to recapture some of that readership. I
think it will succeed, as well as twenty essays by postmodernist literary critics ever
could, in speaking to a larger audience.
john charles chasteen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Book Reviews / General 575
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I religiosi a corte: teologia, politica e diplomazia in antico regime. Edited by avio rurale.
Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1998. Notes. Index. 353 pp. Paper.
The result of a 1995 conference in Fiesole, I religiosi a corte presents new investigations
and large summaries of the religious clergys involvement in court politics, broadly con-
strued, between 1500 and 1750. It contains four articles in Spanish and ve in Italian,
including a sizeable introduction. Its authors describe the fortunes of individual reli-
gious clerics or whole religious orders in state-building milieus; or they report the ways
in which the state-builders themselves valued monastic personnel.
Carlos Jos Hernando Snchez surveys the interactions between the sixteenth-
century Spanish viceroy of Naples, Pedro de Toledo, and that citys various religious
orders, and he concludes that the viceroys attention to friars and monks was part of a larger
political project. Jos Martnez Milln outlines the ambiguous fortunes of the Society of
Jesus in Spain between 1578 and 1594, and he nds that the Society was at once his-
panized and bound decisively to Rome. Carlos Javier de Carlos Morales contemplates the
court politics of Diego de Chves, a Dominican friar who managed the conscience of
Philip II. Bernardo J. Garca Garca studies the opinions and occasional polemic of the
confessor of Philip III, Lus Aliaga, who emerges as a highly complex ecclesiastic.
On the Italian side, Gianvittorio Signorotto charts the semiotics of virtue that
the Capuchins, in particular, represented to the Milanese, which is why the latter occa-
sionally used the former as ambassadors to the Spanish court. Marcello Fantoni
addresses the intense interest that Medici Grand-Duke Cosimo III demonstrated
toward the religious orders of Florence: that particular ruler t monastic sojourns into
his travel plans, moved his furniture into monastic cells, and encouraged his entourage
to perform penitential exercises, to the point that an osmosis occurred between court
and monastery. Giovanni Pizzorusso scans the entanglements among territorial govern-
ments, royal policies, and French missionaries in the Antilles in the seventeenth century
and recovers an intersection of religious and ethnic frontiers, where spiritual motives
were both important and practical. Finally, Matteo Sanlippo scrutinizes the intricacies
of the Jesuits actions in French North America between 1604 and 1763, and recounts
their attempts to handle local authorities, circumvent the centralizing impulses of the
papacy, and bridge divisions within their own religious order.
As a body, the authors highlight paradoxes as they delineate connections among
ecclesiastical and secular gures between 1550 and 1750. Indeed, the editor of the vol-
ume, Flavio Rurale, encourages ambiguity by explicitly rejecting neat expectations
such as distinguishing between church and state, or identifying particular religious
orders with papal interests that too often govern approaches to the subject. Instead,
he urges researchers to unearth the compromises between ecclesiastical and secular
spheres, and insists upon the importance of religious motivations. The contributors
obviously have agreed with his excellent mandates and have attempted to act upon
them.
Yet nearly all these pieces contain signicant weaknesses: they offer either too
much specicity and historical narrative, and dissolve into lists (Hernando Snchez,
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Martnez Milln, Pizzorusso, and Sanlippo); or they infer overly-large ends from a rel-
atively small incident (Signorotto), or they ultimately fail to make their evidence mean-
ingful (Garca Garca). Specialists will nd the overviews tedious, while non-specialists
will be overwhelmed by details. The volume also does not function as a sophisticated
introduction for readers with multiple languages: despite a wealth of learned references,
the contributors generally neglect to address historiography, and occasionally employ
outmoded paradigms, such as Carlos Moraless diagram of intransigenti and spirituali in
the court of Philip II. Only Fantonis work on Cosimo III is fully successful in terms of
a lucid argument, arresting evidence, and documented conclusions; signicantly, it is
also the shortest article in the volume. In sum, these scholars frequently uncover
provocative angles to secular and ecclesiastical relationships in the early modern period,
but they would have beneted from more editorial help in relaying their stories.
lu ann homza, College of William and Mary
Sir Francis Drake: The Queens Pirate. By harry kelsey. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998. Illustrations. Maps. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xviii, 566 pp.
Cloth, $35.00.
This substantial volume is ample testimony to the fact that the deeds and personality of
Francis Drake have persistently been the subject of debate and controversy. It is likely
that they will continue to prolong such responses rather than provide denitive answers
to fundamental doubts. The picture that emerges accepts the qualities that have consti-
tuted the stuff of national legend for centuriesdogged tenacity, reckless fearlessness,
bravery, and the gift of being a natural sailor. However, Harry Kelseys purpose is to
shatter that familiar image on the basis of what is claimed to be new evidence, in order
to uncover the aws of character, command, strategy, and beliefs.
Hence, Drake detested the command of large eets and failed in exercising this
role, was equally averse to the boredom of strategic planning, engaged in raids on land
that were dreadful failures, hated consulting his ofcers, was intolerant of criticism, suf-
fered the fatal aw (p. 393) of being paranoically beset by fears of plots, and liked vio-
lence. Consequently, he was tyrannical in imposing his authority and showed contempt
for ordinary seamen. In contrast, he cultivated the rich and the powerful for the pur-
pose of personal prestige and gain, including his queen and those who fell into his hands
as ransomable prisoners. Herein lies the fundamental thesis underlying the entire book:
an overpowering greed to line his own pockets constituted the central driving force of
his behavior as a pirate, a lifestyle he had learnt in the company of the Hawkins family
of Plymouth when he was still a youth. His hand was not stayed by any deeply held reli-
gious commitment, even though on occasion he regarded himself as nearly an agent of
God (p. 171), nor is there any evidence of warmth or depth in family or other personal
relationships.
In truth, it is neither original nor, therefore, really necessary to take a sledgeham-
mer now to shatter the reputation of Drake in this way, nor has it been so for some
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time. Only a popular rather than a well-informed representation would deny the traits
implicit in some of the above evaluations. Moreover, the xation with the attribution of
piracy, ascribing the designation to Drake almost in the same way that Spaniards
applied the word pirata to any interloper in the New World (and it is there principally
that Kelsey judges his actions to be such), ignores his special signicance. For as an
instrument in the execution of maritime enterprise nanced by men of inuence and
power, to which the queen contributed and which she supported for many years, and by
identifying the targets of a national endeavour against Spain in the New World, Drake
stood apart from the dozens of other compatriots who plundered the Spanish empire.
Furthermore, as Harry Kelsey admits, his raids on Cdiz and Sagres were stunning
(p. 304), and in the case of the rst a demonstration that daring, surprise and last-
minute decisions could successfully replace tactical planning.
Yet, this is a signicant and enjoyable study of Drake that cannot be ignored. It can
be thoroughly absorbing in its detail of his family background, and offers a fresh per-
spective on some of the traditional areas of debate, especially the claimed discovery of
Cape Horn, the California landfall, progress along the North American coast, and the
conict with Doughty interpreted in the context of the revaluation of Drakes character.
But, above all, it does provoke further investigation and debate over Drake the man.
Moreover, this book is meticulously researched, has an extensive bibliography, and is
clearly illustrated.
peter t. bradley, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Background
The Social Life of Numbers: A Quechua Ontology of Numbers and Philosophy of Arithmetic.
By gary urton. With the collaboration of primitivo nina llanos. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1997. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Appendixes. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. xvi, 267 pp. Cloth, $35.00. Paper, $17.95.
awpaq (rst): This is an extraordinary book. It is easily readable even for the non-
mathematically inclined and non-Andeanists. It deals with issues of why one counts,
what is counted, and how arithmetic operations are used in social life. Drawings, dia-
grams, and tables allow for the easy perusal of the material, and the profusion of exam-
ples facilitate understanding. The material comes from wonderful ethnographic eld-
work in southern Bolivia, conducted with exquisite linguistic skills by anthropologist
Gary Urton paired up with Primitivo Nina Llanos, a professor of Quechua at the Uni-
versity of Sucre.
Iskayaken (second): It is also a deeply philosophical work, delving into the under-
lying logic and principles involved in Quechua ways with numbers. It argues that
Andean civilization scores high on numeracy, but low on literacy (lacking a writing sys-
tem). Discussing ordinal numbers, Urton introduces the prototypical model of an ordi-
nal sequence, derived from the social relations of a mother and her offspring, mother
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being rst, and the children succeeding, one by one, in a hierarchical relationship of
seniority up to and usually including ve. Ordinal numbers in the Quechua world
should form pairs, and therefore odd numbers are complicated: they are bad omens in
prognostication, and they socially stand alone as incomplete. Pairs, however, are con-
junctions of two opposite but complementary things intimately bound together as
something that can be one. Thus, for example, yanantin is a husband-wife team, a unit
that expresses part-to-whole relations rather than shared attributes that put things in a
class. A member of a pair that is torn asunder is said to be single, alone, incomplete, and
odd. Pairing elements are therefore fundamental elements of ordination, and an aspect
of the dual organization that is so fundamental to the Andes.
Kimsaaken (third): Urton shows that enumerating, that is, ranking and ordering
are more important in Andean social life than counting. Thus, rst and last, junior and
senior, progenitor and offspring place individuals in an ordered world, and give mean-
ing to cardinal numbers, which, by themselves are not considered to have an indepen-
dent existence. There are also things one should not count, notably animals in a herd,
because numbers tend to separate things, to isolate one unit from another. And this is
not a good thing to do when applied to a reproductive group such as a herd. Animals are
enumerated by checking off the individual names of each from a mental list. Enumera-
tion is dependent on the social categories in which things are put into. In the decimal
system of the Quechua, a unit of ten is made up of a set of two ves, the rst ve (odd)
united or paired with its even unit of ve (six to ten). Enumeration is therefore also
always concerned with a sense of completeness, balance and symmetry that is an ideal to
be achieved.
Tawaaquen (fourth): Arithmetic operations of summation, subtraction, multiplica-
tion and division serve social principles of rectication, a term Urton introduces and
discusses at length. When circumstances produce imbalances, incomplete sets or dishar-
mony, action must be taken to restore balance, and the arithmetic procedures of sub-
tracting from one set, adding them to the other, re-dividing units, and so on, are aimed
at rectifying the imbalance. They are, apart from the mental operations that manipu-
late the numbers, a set of social and political processes that require authority to carry
out. For example, in Inca times, excess men from one decimal unit ( pachaca) would be
re-afliated with a unit that was decient. The change had to be recorded in someones
list. And this is what the khipu, the knotted strings, used in Inca administration, do so
well. Based on the pioneering work of Marcia and Robert Asher, Urtons analysis explic-
itly points to the underlying social principles of khipu-keeping: the enumeration of
ranked items in paired categories that can be changed as required by untying and rety-
ing knots on a string, such that there is a column of items in an ordered sequence, with
the earliest ones being tied furthest away from the place where it joins the main chord.
All the members recorded in a khipu are placed in it, each one in its place and category.
That one can arrive at a total summation is incidental to its real purpose.
Qhipaaquen ( last): Rectication is modeled as yapa, a word that comes from the
world of trading. Yapa is the little gift added on to a quantity already agreed upon in
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bartering or sale, meant to even out any potential imbalance in the exchange. This is the
only term from the world of trade that Urton discuses. Regrettably, the social life of
numbers in the market place is given insufcient treatment. He does so explicitly,
because, when he discusses European logic of numbers introduced by the Spanish,
Urton sees the two worlds as separate and non-interfering. Which is not quite the case,
as when he gives an example of expert weavers (skilled in the art of counting) who are
seemingly unable to count money. In the world of exchange things transferred from one
person to another need to be measured. This adds a whole domain to counting,
accounting, enumerating and arithmetic operations not adequately discussed in this
book. Although contemporary Quechua use Spanish units for weight, volume, surface
area and coinage, the way these units are used, often respond to an Andean logic that
should have been brought under consideration in this book. A fanega, for example, is a
bushel of maize but it is also the amount of land that can be seeded with a fanega of seed
which is indeterminate depending on slope, soil, and seeding density. This is, as I see it,
an application of the art of rectication; for example, barter, where units to be exchanged
are often paired. Economic valuation is also an aspect of ordination, as when a clay pot
to be bartered is considered equivalent in value to its volume in ne grains, but two vol-
umes for lumpy items such as potatoes. Urton follows too closely the teachings of our
respective mentors, R. T. Zuidema and John V. Murra, who tended to de-emphasize the
role of markets and exchange of goods in the Andes, in prehispanic, colonial, and con-
temporary contexts. It would have been interesting to have Urtons excellent talents also
applied to the social life of numbers in this sphere, a rectication, I hope he, myself, and
other students of the Andes will soon bring about.
enrique j. mayer, Yale University
Colonial Period
The Word Made Image: Religion, Art, and Architecture in Spain and Spanish America,
15001600. By jonathan brown et al. Foreword by anne hawley.
Fenway Court, vol. 28. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998.
Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. 126 pp. Paper, $24.95.
The six interdisciplinary essays in this slender volume offer a multifaceted view of
Catholic art and architecture in sixteenth-century Spain and its colonies. In his intro-
duction, Jonathan Brown frames the anthology, an outgrowth of a 1996 conference held
at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, within the culture of the Counter Reforma-
tion as it reafrmed the efcacy of images and acted as a catalyst for an outpouring of
religious art. While underscoring the predominance and orthodoxy of sacred themes in
Spain, Brown notes the challenge to that orthodoxy in both the remaking and reading
of images when transplanted to the Americas. He also reminds us that image making
can be fully understood only at the nexus of competing religious, economic, and politi-
cal interests.
580 HAHR / August
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At the outset we are cautioned to heed the peculiarly refracted history of Spain.
Only in recent decades have revisionist studies begun to reposition Spanish art and his-
tory as more innovative and internationally informed than was previously allowed.
Richard L. Kagan critically reassesses the lasting imprint of the nineteenth-century
scholar William Prescott and his views of early modern Spain as isolationist and deca-
dent. Kagan unveils Prescotts paradigm, a pervasive bias that evaluated Spains twin
evils of Absolutism and Catholicism against the superior, progressive ideals of the
United States.
The tradition of devotional images to touch the mind, heart, and spirit of the
believing viewer was rmly embedded in Spain before Trent made it ofcial policy.
Lynette Bosch convincingly demonstrates how liturgical and mystical texts were given
visual form and in concert were intended to promote spiritual enlightenment. Bosch
also traces the stylistic changes that occurred in the sixteenth century from an austere
aesthetic of pain to a more sensuous aesthetic of beauty, attributing this shift, some-
what exclusively, to Italianate inuences and a new praxis of spiritual exercises advo-
cated by the Roman church.
On a grander scale, all the arts could be scripted to commemorate a familys her-
itage. Richard G. Mann examines the Chapel of St. Joseph in Toledo to unravel the
prolonged negotiations by the Martn Ramrez heirs in order to insure that their name
would occupy a prominent place in Toledan history and their souls a perpetual place in
glory. The iconographic program of El Grecos innovative paintings (159799) visually
and conceptually cross reference both the chapels (St. Joseph) and patrons (St. Martin)
namesakes, glorifying the familys good works and elevating their mercantile roots.
Catherine Wilkinson Zerner documents Philip IIs obsession with creating a splendid
royal chapel and mausoleum in the Basilica of the Escorial. Using the human body as an
integrative metaphor, Zerner analyzes how bodies, symbolic (the Host) and living, in
fragments (relics) and intact, seen and unseen, functioned as an ensemble to create an
appropriately magnicent repository for the Hapsburg dynasty.
The immense Spanish enterprise abroad was abetted by images that transcended
language barriers and acted as didactic tools to implant European values. However,
both Clara Bargellini and Sabine MacCormack are attentive to the ability of collabora-
tive cultural projects to tell an alternative story and reveal the complex, often contradic-
tory, issues surrounding early colonial interchange. Bargellinis historiographical essay
pursues the growing appreciation of the native contribution in sixteenth-century
monasteries in Mexico. While all the monastic arts were creative adaptations of their
Renaissance and Christian models, Bargellini advocates closer attention to the broader
cultural and spatial alignments forged with indigenous communities. MacCormacks
scrutiny of the church murals in Andahuaylillas, Peru, reveals that while compliant with
theological and liturgical requirements, their resonance with Andean cosmologies
served to reinforce rather than extirpate ancient belief systems.
It is hoped that this welcome contribution will encourage other publications, per-
haps with tighter thematic links (such as images as words) that would sharpen under-
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standing of the nature and extent of Transatlantic cultural exchange. The disappoint-
ingly small black and white illustrations do not do justice to the uniformly high level of
the texts, however, the provocative offerings in this volume are highly recommended to
any student of Hispanic and colonial American topics.
jeanette favrot peterson, University of California, Santa Barbara
De bezinning op het verleden in Latijns Amerika. By b.h. slichter van bath.
N.p., [1998]. Tables. Notes. 762 pp. Cloth.
Leven met het Verleden. By b. h. slichter van bath. N.p., [1998]. Notes. 96 pp. Cloth.
B.H. Slichter van Bath is one of the most well-known Dutch historians outside the
Netherlands. At the age of 88, the Nestor of the Low Countries historians has put out
two more books to add to his impressive oeuvre. Both books reect his career as a life-
long historian. Leven met het Verleden (Living with the Past) is a short professional auto-
biography, an interview that ran out of hand (p. 9); De Bezinning op het Verleden van
Latijns Amerika (Reection on Latin Americas Past) analyzes and quanties the works
of Slichter van Baths Latin American colleagues during the colonial era.
Slichter van Bath is most known for his Agrarian History of Western Europe. How-
ever, in Leven met het Verleden one gets to understand how pluralistic Slichter van Baths
career has been. He started off as a Medievalist at the University of Groningen, where
he turned to the history of the Dutch countryside. In the 1950s Slichter van Bath
combined his professorship in Groningen with one at the Agricultural University in
Wageningen. This gave him the opportunity to focus more intensively on agrarian his-
tory. Finally, in the 1960s, he shifted once again to Latin American history, holding
positions at universities in Amsterdam and Leiden. As a Latin Americanist, Slichter van
Bath published three books in Dutch and several articles in English, about demography,
economy and Spanish-Native American relations in Mexico and Peru.
Leven met het Verleden remains a fascinating portrait of the connes of Dutch aca-
demia, the cross-fertilization of different branches within history, and the fruits of aca-
demic cooperation in Dutch, European and transatlantic contexts. The author links his
shift toand the Dutch interest inLatin America during the 1950s with the Nether-
lands loss of Indonesia and a subsequent decline in attention to Asia (p. 41). He also
claries how he used his expertise in the quantitative aspects of agrarian history in his
approach to Latin America. After reading Leven met het Verleden, Slichter van Baths per-
spective in De Bezinning op het Verleden van Latijns Amerika will not come as a surprise.
The most interesting part of the book is the authors premises. The historical pro-
fession reached a novel stage in 1493, when Europeans encountered a New World. This
land without history needed other conceptions, another way of looking at the past. Of
course there were links to Spanish, Native American and Christian history: the new ter-
ritories were part of Spanish and Portuguese motherland, while the continuity of
Native American past, and the Native Americans presence had to be explained in Bibli-
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cal terms. However, a New World created a new historiography, rst as a narrative of
the novelty, and after about 1600 as a description of a new society.
In order to evidence these trends, Slichter van Bath used a database of 2,642 publi-
cations and 244 tables. The author liberally manipulates his tables to discuss the back-
ground of the authors, the themes of their accounts, the sophistication of their work,
the degree of their professionalization, and their audience. Slichter van Bath answers
many questions in detail. His large databases allows him to distinguish trends over var-
ious regions and periods, and one may expect answers to questions like: Which authors
had the most knowledge of Native American languages (pp. 22628). Slichter van Bath
gives us many interesting details that arise from the tables. Its strength is also its weak-
ness: the author remains too close to his database. Therefore, the book lacks a leitmotiv
and a more encompassing conclusion.
As Slichter van Bath admits in the introduction, the book is an account of a
research project, for which many materials have been collected, but . . . its boundaries
remained vague (p. 7). This should not be taken as an admission to failure, but as a gift.
With the encyclopedic character of the book, Slichter van Bath offers us a novel work
and a considerable amount of data. It will be up to future Latin Americanists to use his
research data and give their interpretation of this fascinating topic.
ernst pijning, Minot State University
Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish
America. By ann twinam. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Maps.
Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xiii, 447 pp. Cloth, $60.
For those of us who have been following Ann Twinams work on honor, this book has
been eagerly awaited and does not disappoint. Indeed, it goes well beyond issues of
honor to explore in detail family dynamics among the colonial elite and Bourbon social
policy, all in a clear and engaging style.
In addition to a thorough introduction and conclusion, the book is organized into
two substantial parts. In the rst, Twinam takes the original approach of exploring the
experiences of illegitimates and their families at each stage of the life cycle. In addition
to providing unusually detailed glimpses into the private lives of the colonial elite, she
uses her evidence to contribute to analyses of honor, patriarchy, and the shifting divi-
sions between public and private. In previously published articles, she demonstrated
how elite women could maintain public reputations of honor by keeping pregnancies
secret and not raising their own children. Here she extends that notion of multiple
identities, which were not necessarily aligned, to the children who had a natal status
(as legitimate, natural, spurious, or bastard), a baptismal status (which included the
additional categories of expsito and unknown parentage), a private familial status, and a
public social status. Twinam also provides one of the few explorations available on colo-
nial fathers, asserting that extramarital affairs had no affect on their honor but might
weigh on their consciences.
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The next part of the book moves from elite families to Spanish bureaucrats in an
insightful examination of how the laws of legitimation were applied over the course of
the eighteenth century. In this section, Twinam presents signicant ndings on differ-
ences among geographical regions and change over time. From the vantage point of the
colonies, attempts to preserve traditional hierarchies provoked an increase in petitions
for legitimation from those who found themselves facing tightened exclusions from
public ofces, with the greatest prejudice occurring in the larger Caribbean region and
the least in the Andes and Central America. Ultimately, the bureaucrats on the Council
of Indies supported the goals of the colonial elite by granting legitimation primarily to
those who had already passed as honorable and were socially well-connected. Along the
way, nevertheless, Twinam perceptively traces an attempt at social engineering by mid-
level Bourbon ofcials. In the rst half of the eighteenth century, they approved the
petitions of the few who applied and paid the necessary fees, regardless of their situa-
tions. By the middle of the century, however, ofcials began requesting more thorough
documentation of petitioners actual natal and baptismal status and increasingly turned
down the applications by the children of priests and adulterous parents on moral
grounds. Their incipient attempts to discourage promiscuity by suggesting that parents
automatically legitimate their own children through marriage were vetoed by higher
authorities. Nevertheless, these bureaucrats in turn blunted the radical potential of a
1794 decree granting honor to all expsitos by failing to issue such applicants conrma-
tions of their legitimation.
Twinams analysis is backed up by impressive archival research. The bulk of her
evidence comes from the 244 petitions (more than half of them complete) for legiti-
mation ( gracias al sacar) which she painstakingly unearthed from uncatalogued sec-
tions of the Archive of the Indies. In addition, she tracked down additional informa-
tion on the applicants from wills, professional dossiers, and lawsuits in local archives
throughout Spanish America. These cases provide her rich material on the delibera-
tions of bureaucrats and the attitudes of the colonial elite, but readers should keep in
mind that her ndings apply only to a small if inuential segment of the population.
Twinams book is too long to use with most undergraduates, but given the breadth of
its themes and cogent arguments it deserves a wide readership among scholars and
graduate students.
sarah c. chambers, University of Minnesota
Relaciones de poder y comercio colonial. Edited by enriqueta vila vilar and
allan j. kuethe. Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1999.
Tables. Appendixes. Index. xv, 304 pp.
The nine essays contained in this book were originally presented as conference papers at
the 1997 International Congress of Americanists in Quito, Ecuador. Heterogeneous in
thematic and geographical focus, the work is useful, but not all that cohesive. The book
is divided into two parts. Three chapters in part 1 examine the immensely important role
584 HAHR / August
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played by the Spanish Consulado of Seville and later Cdiz. Six chapters of part 2 exam-
ine a wide variety of largely unrelated issues dealing with colonial commerce.
Enriqueta Vila Vilar, co-editor of the book, begins with an examination of the
Consulados growing political inuence during the seventeenth century, arguing that its
power stemmed from the critical role it played as the Crowns primary nancier. A sym-
biotic relationship between the Crown and the Consulado developed in which the
Crown came to depend on loans from the Consulado and the Consulado learned to
extract favorable concessions in return. Most of this chapter focuses on the evolution of
the Consulados administrative responsibilities and its growing centrality in Spains
political economy. The following two chapters are by Allan J. Kuethe, the books other
editor. In trying to explain why the Bourbons reform of the Consulado monopoly was
delayed until 1778, Kuethe embraces an argument very similar to that of his co-editor.
As Kuethe shows, enlightened reformers were convinced of the need for freer trade
long before 1778, but the Crowns nancial dependence on the Consulado made it
difcult to challenge the Consulados commercial privileges. Instead, the empires com-
mercial structure was held hostage to the Crowns scal exigencies. When nally the
commercial system was reformed, however, it rapidly fell victim to the wars of the
French Revolution and Napoleon. Kuethes second chapter explores the relocation of
the Consulado from Seville to Cdiz. While he recognizes that the move largely
stemmed from practical concerns, namely the geographical advantages of the Atlantic
port of Cdiz over the inland city of Seville, Kuethe also sees the relocation as a
reection of the growing weakness of the Sevillano merchants, a process which he
claims began with the War of the Spanish Succession, 170013. The Sevillanos main-
tained dominance in the new Consulado, but the role of the Gaditanos (Cdiz mer-
chants) grew markedly. To some degree, this interesting argument seems to challenge
the hegemonic view of the Consulado discussed in prior chapters by Vila Vilar and
Kuethe himself.
The essays that comprise part 2 are less cohesive as a whole but still interesting
individually. The rst piece, by Carlos Alvarez Nogal, investigates the commercial deal-
ings of Bernardo de Valds, a prominent seventeenth-century merchant of Seville, spe-
cializing in the import of gold and silver. The author shows how this merchants wealth
and liquidity both permitted him to become one of the Crowns principal nanciers and
earned him the special concessions which he used to expand his business. A chapter by
Antonio Gutirrez Escudero summarizes aspects of the production of tobacco and its
export from Santo Domingo during primarily the eighteenth century. An article by
Javier Ortiz de la Tabla y Ducasse examines the important but little-studied era of neu-
tral commerce during which the Crown permitted ships ying the ags of neutral coun-
tries to conduct business in American ports. The author shows how these concessions
to neutrals, adopted during the worst of the commercial interruptions related to the late
colonial wars, aggravated entrenched interests in America and Spain who resented what
they perceived to be encroachments on their privileges. John R. Fisher returns to issues
that he has dealt with extensively elsewhere, notably the impacts on colonial commerce
Book Reviews / Colonial Period 585
HAHR 80.3_08 BookReview(569-648 8/4/00 3:30 PM Page 585
of comercio libre after 1778 and two decades of war after 1793. As Fisher correctly
notes, this tumultuous era is critical to both our understanding of the Bourbon reforms
and, ultimately, to the independence of the Spanish American colonies. The next arti-
cle, by Carmen Parrn Salas, examines the nature of the Bourbon Reforms in Peru and
the reaction to them by the Limeo elite. While many historians see these late colonial
reforms as having weakened these powerful Peruvians, the author points instead to the
limits of reform and the consolidation of power by the commercial elite of Lima. The
last piece, by Alfredo Moreno Cebrin, explores the differing impact that the 1751
legalization of the repartimiento de mercancas exerted on Mexico and Peru respectively.
He concludes that its inuence was much more disruptive in Peru than Mexico.
As with many edited collections, this one suffers somewhat from lack of cohesive-
ness. Nevertheless, many of the pieces do touch on the role of corruption in colonial
commerce, specically the crucial role that political power played in advancing private
commercial interests. The Spanish Crown dispensed commercial favors in exchange for
nancing. The Bourbon Reforms attempted, in part, to untangle this dense web of
entrenched interests, but ultimately enjoyed limited success.
This collection of essays is well worth reading. They demonstrate well the pro-
foundly important interrelationship between colonial commerce and politics. In addi-
tion, they are a poignant reminder to historians of colonial Spanish America to pay
close attention to the internal politics of the Peninsula.
jeremy baskes, Ohio Wesleyan University
The Mapping of the Entradas into the Greater Southwest. Edited by dennis reinhartz
and gerald d. saxon. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Photographs.
Plates. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 227 pp. Cloth, $37.50.
When Pnlo de Narvez decided upon an interior exploration during his ill-fated
expedition to Florida in 1528, another member of the crew, Alvar Nez Cabeza de
Vaca, expressed serious doubts. They were in a land they knew nothing about, he
argued, with no idea as to where exactly they were. The irony is that such conditions
constituted the expeditions raison detre: exploration is all about making the unknown
known and xing ones position. This is, in part, what distinguishes exploration from
mere travel. It also explains why mapping is such a fundamental component of explo-
ration. An exploration not described carefully, with its course chronicled and itinerary
mapped, would be considered a failure by most monarchs and merchants who tended to
sponsor such ventures. The act of exploring truly reached fruition, much like discov-
ery, only when described and xed in space: that is, when textually constituted and
codied.
The textual constitution, through mapping, of parts of the so-called New World
forms the basis for this collection of six essays originally presented at a 1992 conference
at the University of Texas at Arlington. The primary emphasis is on the cartographic
images and information that resulted from the series of entradas made by de Narvez
586 HAHR / August
HAHR 80.3_08 BookReview(569-648 8/4/00 3:30 PM Page 586
and Cabeza de Vaca (152737); Fray Marcos de Niza and Francisco Vzquez de Coro-
nado (1539 42); and Hernando de Soto and Luis de Moscoso (1539 43) into the
Greater Southwest, a curiously ahistorical appellation for a collection aimed, in part,
at historicizing the conceptual formation of a geographic area. It is also something of a
misnomer: extensive discussions of expeditions to, and maps of, Florida and the entire
northern portion of the Gulf Coast, as well as an essay on Nahua cartography, result in
the Greater Southwest assuming an almost imperial nebulousness, encompassing
everything south and west of Washington, D.C.
The collection opens with two introductory essays that provide overviews of carto-
graphic culture in Europe and Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century. David Woodward
discusses the intellectual milieu of Renaissance Europe, arguing that while spatial epis-
temology and representation experienced signicant transformations in the sixteenth
century, in practice navigators and explorers continued to rely upon traditional methods
to gure out where they were and where they were going. Consequently, maps of the
periods explorers tend to be unreliable documents for attempting to reconstruct voy-
ages and explorations and need to be supplemented with other types of evidence. David
Buisseret shifts the locus of emphasis to Mesoamerica and indigenous mapping in his
analysis of the fusion of cartographic styles in sixteenth century maps produced in New
Spain, such as the relaciones geogrcas. Buisseret observes that although indigenous
styles persisted for some time, European representational style and spatial epistemology
ultimately became hegemonic.
Harry Kelsey provides the rst treatment of Spanish entrada cartography in his
discussion of cartographic images produced by expeditions to Florida, the northern
gulf, and what would become the northern reaches of New Spain. His essay is comple-
mented by Robert S. Weddles examination of coastal cartography and the initial explo-
ration and mapping of the gulf coast. Both essays trace the genealogy of various maps
made of the regions and of the kinds of information that appeared on them and provide
the reader with a cartographic chronology of the pace at which land was explored and
the shape of the land determined. Dennis Reinhartz traces the legacy of entrada infor-
mation and misinformation found on European printed maps from 16001802 and the
impact of entrada data on later exploration, revealing that maps were one of the most
popular mediums for European audiences and helped structure their conceptualization
of the New World and the Greater Southwest. The collection ends with a pictorial
essay by Katherine R. Goodwin on the cartographic exhibit which accompanied the
symposium as well as a lengthy cartobibliography.
The collection is severely limited in a number of ways. The essays tend to be more
descriptive than analytic; thematically, there is an overemphasis on map genealogy and
the circulation of geographic information; and the essays are devoid of any broader the-
oretical or historiographical engagement. Historians who have found the recent turn
towards a more critical and post-structural reading of maps exciting will be disap-
pointed, as will historians interested in questions of power, ideology, and the cultural
and political uses and ramications of cartographic practices and products. However,
Book Reviews / Colonial Period 587
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the volume should prove a welcome addition to the spate of recent works on colonial
cartography: the clear and engaging essays, extensive array of color and black-and-white
prints, lengthy cartobibliography, and close attention to the intellectual lineage of many
maps undoubtedly will be of interest and value to specialists in the history of cartogra-
phy and of the early colonial period.
raymond b. craib, Yale University
Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South,
17181819. By thomas n. ingersoll. Photograph. Illustrations. Maps. Tables.
Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxvi, 490 pp. Cloth, $60.00. Paper $25.00.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999.
Thomas Ingersoll presents a clearly-written account of New Orleans in its rst century.
This is no easy task. Building on the work of Peter Wood and Alan Kulikoff, Ingersoll
sets out to overturn conventional scholarship that paints colonial New Orleans as a
place of Mammona city of illicit sex and vice. Instead, the author contends that
New Orleans was marked by a remarkable degree of continuity over time, and that
Manongreed and avaricecharacterized the citys growth under the French, Span-
ish, and United States regimes (p. xvii). Further, New Orleans existed in a unique con-
text of urban setting and plantation life (p. xv) and was indisputably North American
in character, not Caribbean (p. xix) Finally, the basic character of society was the same
in New Orleans as in Woods South Carolina, Kulikoffs Prince Georges County, or
anywhere else where the labor of black slaves was the mainstay of the economy (p. xviii).
The author makes these points with partial success.
Ingersoll splits his book into three parts, covering French, Spanish, and U.S. owner-
ship of New Orleans, and does an excellent job of synthesizing scholarship on the
growth of the planter class, the advent of the sugar industry, and the place of planters,
slaves, and free blacks under each successive political master. He admirably negotiates
primary and secondary sources in Spanish, French, and Englisha task that few histo-
rians are willing or able to undertake. Ingersoll uses these sources to insightfully com-
pare the three regimes.
This work contains two related weaknesses. First, Ingersoll downplays the differ-
ences between the three governments in New Orleans. By placing New Orleans within
the North American context, and outside the Caribbean and Latin American frame-
work, the author is sometimes forced to make connections that simply do not exist. He
contends, for instance, that Charleston and Savannah were the two closest neighboring
towns (p. xvii). Aside from Pensacola and Mobile, Havana was a closer journey, raising
questions about economic and cultural inuences regardless of who owned the town.
Ingersoll argues quite well that New Orleans society was not European in character
(pp. 1018), and compares the city to the French Caribbean and Latin America in sep-
arate chapters. However, the French comparison with Saint Domingue and Martinique
mostly shows that New Orleans was unlike the nearby island slave societies, while the
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Spanish comparison is taken up with an argument against the Tannenbaum thesis. Since
Ingersoll discounts Tannenbaum anyway, it is less clear how New Orleans was not Latin
American in nature.
Second, his contention that in each successive regime laws or religion had little or
no effect on either the planter class or the condition of black slaves or free blacks is
problematic (p. xviii). While arguing against coartacin and the Siete Partidas as the
linchpin of Spanish slave relations, Ingersoll nonetheless notes that in the years of
Spanish rule, 1,496 slaves purchased their freedoman opportunity that simply did not
exist under the French and U.S. systems of law. As Charles Cutter has demonstrated,
legal culture was the way that Spanish subjects related to each other and to society. For
the New Orleans community, then, it was not simply the action of self-purchase that
affected master-slave relations, but the possibility of such a purchase. This is a major
difference from the French and U.S. regimes, and one that this book underestimates.
Nonetheless, Mammon and Manon is a work that all historians and students of early
Louisiana should read. It combines a fascinating account of the citys early history with
a controversial argument that should keep historians debating about colonial New
Orleans for years to come.
andrew mcmichael, Vanderbilt University
The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and Discovery in the Southeast.
Edited by patricia galloway. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Index. xvi, 457 pp. Cloth, $60.00.
Floridas Indians from Ancient Times to the Present. By jerald t. milanich. Native Peo-
ples, Cultures, and Places of the Southeastern United States. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 1998. Plates. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps.
Bibliography. xi, 194 pp. Paper, $19.95.
Postmodernist historiography nally is bearing fruit for parts of the Southeast. Her-
nando de Soto is being revisited but, this time, his epic entrada and its subsequent nar-
ratives are being viewed as they came to be: couched rmly in their own social and lit-
erary matrices. This new work, edited by Patricia Galloway, was conceived as a
historiographical prolegomenon to the study of the expedition and especially of the
people whose lives it touched (p. x). The former objective has been achieved admirably;
the latter depends on interpretation. Taken together, the analyses offered here by nine-
teen scholars and writers should constitute the preface to any serious consideration of
the Soto narratives as historical documents; I agree with the editors conclusion that
these narratives tell us as much or more about their authors and the contexts in which
they were written as they do about actual expedition events (p. xiii). Neither history
nor historians, however, are products of a perfect world.
The fact that such an examination has not occurred thus far is as much a projection
of a Western mental landscape, mirroring the unquestioned Good Thing that is the
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perfected democratic ideal as were the four narratives recounting the entrada them-
selves (p. 411). ( The Caete fragment is only mentioned, not discussed.) The essays
examine various or all of the narratives along with the entrada itself, loosely from per-
spectives of literary criticism; the concept, logistics, and some legal aspects of the expe-
dition; treatment of the Native Americans (the shortest and least realized section); and
Euro-American historiography and the subjectivity of commemorative history.
The essays vary in length and depth of treatment but most add materially to our
understanding of a variety of topics of value to Latin Americanists and, at least indi-
rectly, to Native Americanists. Lee Dowlings excellent critique of the Inca Garcilasos
literary sources, for example, treats the authors Classical style, his ability to formulate
plot, and his search for the most effective form for the transmission of his urgent mes-
sage of racial moral equality (p. 105). Sotos nance structure is concisely outlined by
Ignacio Avellaneda, whose ne understanding of Spanish nance systems was lost to us
with his untimely death. Technical aspects of the expedition, some of which have been
the subjects of confusion or controversy in the past are examined, from the state of car-
tography and navigation (Robert S. Weddle) to estimates of a league in Mexico and
Florida (Ross Hassig).
The core expression of the editors rationale appears in her opening to part 3, in
which she considers the strengths and weaknesses of the disciplines that have been
applied to the Soto narratives and suggests a new and collaborative paradigm for inter-
pretation, within the context of the Annales model. Centrality in this process is given to
written accounts rehabilitated through textual criticism (pp. 29192). Oral traditions
held by the descendents of the Native peoples themselves still have almost no place in
this paradigm. Ethnographers have, thus far, collected only myth and legend and all
other discourse still awaits extremely sensitive analytical techniques (that also remain
to be developed) (p. 29091), Jos Rabasas nod to the degraded view of Amerindian
cultures and the continuing culture of conquest that is being perpetrated today
against indigenous communities notwithstanding (p. 402).
The next volume in this series (and there must be a next volume if we are to put
ourselves forward as framers of a representative common past) could examine the myr-
iad ways in which the Soto accounts have fed our national Conquest myths and under-
written our cultural rationalizations. Ralph Vigil touches on this topic when he cites our
national idealization of Soto as a shining knight (p. 336), and the editor herself points
out the gulf between public, or celebratory, and academic interpretations of history, that
has widened over the last century (p. 411). Galloway and her confreres have taken us by
the collective hand and led us to the threshold of a new understanding of the Spanish
and Euro-American imaging of the Southeast. Now, it is up to others boldly to go forth.
Despite a common thread of the Soto narratives, The Hernando de Soto Expedition
and Floridas Indians are dichotomous works. Jerald Milanich, an archaeologist who has
worked almost exclusively in north- and south-central Florida, has here produced a
body of information accessible to the general public, reprising much of the informa-
tion in his earlier publications, while adding an element of personal nostalgia. This
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work is partly a journey of good memory for the author, who seeks to lead the reader
across the land, describing his own awe at seeing for the rst time, for example, the
shell middens created by the ancestors of the people known after contact as the Calusa.
Their size and complexity were staggering he says, and their number remarkable
(p. 129). Milanich, who has entered into many controversies throughout the years over
the lack of evidence supporting corn agriculture among such complex coastal societies,
reiterates here the clear evidence for the development of social complexity matrixed in
aquaculture, rather than agriculture. His information is neither clearly understood nor
appreciated, however, as other southeastern archaeologists continue to interpret
Maskk history determinedly within the matrix of sedentary (corn) agriculture, which
requires them to denigrate or elide the coastal societies and focus, rather, on the classic
core societies of the Piedmont and interior Southeast.
The illustrations are useful; some have not been published since M.S. Gillilands
recapitulation of the Key Marco artifacts, in 1975. Further, the author has made much
archaeological and direct historical information accessible to a lay audience. Unfortu-
nately, however, when he moves beyond archaeology and into historical interpretation,
his narrative takes the traditional disarticulation of Floridas rst peoples to new lengths.
Todays Seminole people, descendents of the survivors of this process, are once again
deprived of their historical equity in the land by being portrayed as relative newcomers
to a Florida where prior rights are covertly assigned to Euro-American civilizers. Partly
in the apparent interest of simplifying the story for popular consumption, the authors
larger narrative has become simplistic. Spaniards came; Indians died; Spaniards bribed
the nave Indians, who succumbed: Who could resist? (p. 165). Spaniards left; the
English came and went; the U.S. was born. Doubt over the precise impact of disease
upon the Native peoples has been introduced into the story. This certainly has validity,
as recent researches have sought to quantify the realities of an impact that traditionally
has been imaged, universally, as devastating to the Native peoples of the Americas and
has provided the conceptual basis for the myth of disappearance. The authors pat asser-
tions do not carry such reassessments to any obvious conclusions, however. In his inter-
pretation, the results of the meeting of the Native American and the European cultures
were still tragic and one can only conclude that the indigenous residents of [geo-
political] Florida never had a chance (p. 154). If the effects of pathogens were not
enough, Milanichs Spaniards still are the conquering conquistadors who well under-
stood the political systems of the Indians (p. 165). They were powerful allies who
used their gifts to reinforce chiey authority, despite the myriad documented instances
to the contrary (p. 165).
In this often-reiterated narrative, todays citizens of the Seminole and Miccosukee
Tribes continue to be disenfranchised; their equity in the land erased through the twin
classic agencies of disease and warfare. As if this were not enough, however, a new myth
arises to usurp even the primacy and legitimacy of the survivors. In closing the book
with an overview of Floridas Native people today, the citizens of the two federally rec-
ognized tribesthe triumphant survivors of the half-millennium-long process of cul-
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tural interpositionare submerged, indiscriminately, into a litany of self-identifying
groups across the state and among the thousands of individuals whose assertions of
Native American legitimacy go unchallenged each decade by the U.S. Bureau of Cen-
sus, in contradiction of federal law. When all is said and done, sad to say, the voice of
the Euro-American is still the voice of pronouncement; the voice of the Spaniard is
raised; but the voice of the Indian is still a small voice crying in the wilderness. This is
out of all proportion to reality.
pat wickman, Seminole Tribe of Florida
Black Society in Spanish Florida. By jane landers. Foreword by peter h. wood.
Blacks in the New World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Photographs.
Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Index. xiv, 390 pp. Cloth, $50.00.
Paper, $19.95.
Frank Tannebaum, in the seminal study, Slave and Citizen, argued that there was a
marked difference between Spanish and Portuguese slave systems and those of the
British and Anglo Americans in terms of the treatment of slaves and free blacks. Tan-
nebaums thesislaw and religion in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies had a
benecial effect on slavery and, more importantly, eased the transition from slavery to
freedomhas been tested many times, with disappointing results. Applied to rapidly
expanding plantation areas of the New World, Tannebaums thesis has proved unten-
able. Jane Landers argues that if tested in the right laboratory, the basic tenets of that
thesis have validity. Her laboratory is Spanish Florida, or more specically St. Augus-
tine and its hinterland.
Landers demonstrates that individuals of African descent in Spanish Florida
enjoyed a higher social status and more legal rights than did their counterparts in con-
temporary Anglo America. Free blacks and slaves worked the economic, political and
social systems available to them in Spanish Florida. Economically prized by the Spanish
in the absence of Native American laborers, politicized by imperial wars, Indian wars
and wars of independence and empowered by Spanish law and custom, Africans and
African-Americans gained access to freedom, citizenship and property rights. Nowhere
were the opportunities available to the enslaved and newly freed more evident than in
the maroon community of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. Landers recounts the
origins of Mose, founded in 1738 just north of St. Augustine, and provides a valuable
analysis of the implications of this Spanish sanctuary. She writes, Moses inhabitants
were able to parlay their initiative, determination, and military and labor skills into free
status, autonomy at least equivalent to that of Spains Indian allies, and a town of their
own (p. 60).
Landers effectively places Florida in an international context and slaves and free
blacks in the social, political, and economic systems of the age. Too often, historians of
colonial United States and those of colonial Latin American treat Spanish Florida as an
anomaly. The author demonstrates the linkages between Spanish Florida and the
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British colonies to the north and between Florida, the Spanish Empire and the world.
She also shows that African, Indian, and Spanish worlds overlapped one another, with
the three races mixing and meshing on the very complex, multiethnic and multicultural
frontier of Spanish Florida.
In researching this study, Landers delved into national, municipal, and parochial
archives in Florida, Spain, Cuba, and Mexico. Exhaustive research in diverse archives
allows the author to do more than conrm that the basic tenets of Tannebaums thesis
are valid for Spanish Florida. It affords her the opportunity to reconstruct a segment of
African-American societyone of great cultural and linguistic complexitythat pre-
dated the antebellum South.
Landers book is an invaluable addition to a small but growing literature on black
society in the Spanish and French colonies of North America. Like works by Gwen-
dolyn Midlo Hall and late Kimberly Hanger, Landers study fosters a new understand-
ing of the lower South during the colonial period. Although Spanish Florida is cir-
cumscribed to include only the region around St. Augustine, this does not diminish the
value of a very well-written and exhaustively researched work. Historians specializing in
colonial Latin America or the colonial United States would do well to read this book.
Historians of the Spanish borderlands, the antebellum South, or the Atlantic slave trade
should not miss it.
john james clune jr., University of West Florida
African Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean. Edited by jay b. haviser. Princeton: Markus
Wiener Publishers; Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999. Illustrations. Maps. Tables.
Figures. Bibliography. xiii, 364 pp. Cloth, $69.95. Paper, $28.95.
In the preface to this volume, Editor Jay Haviser notes that It is an ironic fact that the
greatest focus of Caribbean archaeological research until the late twentieth century was
toward Amerindian and European colonial studies. Yet clearly, the most dominant cul-
tural inuence in the Caribbean is African and African-descent (p. 1). This statement
is also true for other areas of the Americas and for this reason African-American archae-
ology has become an important specialization within the sub-discipline of historical
archaeology. Much of the early archaeology of slavery was concerned with the search
for Africanisms or marker artifacts that belied the ethnic origins of the enslaved pop-
ulation. However, more recently archaeologists have abandoned the search for
denitive index artifacts in favor of creolization theory or the total archaeological pat-
tern associated with the African immigrants and their descendants. Creolization and
how it was and is envisioned is the central concept of this book. The need for such a
volume is readily apparent to anyone attempting comparative research on the African
Diaspora or teaching a course in Caribbean archaeology.
This collection of papers grew out of a recent (1997) symposium on West Africa
and the Americas. After a cogent introduction, Haviser organizes the book into three
parts: African-Caribbean Landscapes and Settlement; African Caribbean Material Cul-
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ture; and African-Caribbean Health and Burial. The contributors to this volume repre-
sent a good cross-section of North American, European and Caribbean archaeologists
working on African sites in the Caribbean. The contributors also bring a wide range of
archaeological perspectives to the topic including cultural-historical, processual and
post-processual approaches.
The rst part of this volume encompasses the study of the African-Caribbean pop-
ulation and their interaction with the cultural and natural landscape. Landscape archae-
ology, as seen here, occurs at many scales, from distribution of activity areas within a
site (for example, the chapter by Lydia Pulsipher and Conrad Goodwin) to the use of
ceramic analysis to trace inter-island trade (for example, Mark Hauser and Doug Arm-
strong, Paul Farnsworth and Carlos Solis-Magaa). E. Ko Agorsah, a Ghanaian-born
archaeologist, offers a unique perspective of the landscape by comparing settlement pat-
terns in West Africa with those of maroon communities in Jamaica.
The second part of this book will be most appreciated by other archaeologists
investigating African-American sites. It is a straightforward discussion of the material
culture found at these sites. The section begins with an examination of the roles of
metal artifacts and technology in the Caribbean (Candice Goucher) and then focuses on
the place of locally made, Colono-ware ceramics in various historical and cultural con-
texts ( James Petersen, David Watters and Desmond Nicholson, and Barbara Heath).
Havisers own chapter in this volume is an exhaustive look at the spectrum of artifacts
utilized by the creole culture on Curaao and what it says about the choices made by the
slaves after their emancipation. Laurie Wilkie then puts the creolization process in fur-
ther perspective by examining how even European artifacts can indicate continuity with
the African homeland when viewed in context.
The last part of the book touches on the contributions that bioarchaeology has
made and can make to the reconstruction of the quality of slave life. Unfortunately, the
cemeteries excavated by Patrice Courtaud, Andr Delpuech and Thomas Romon, and
Mohammed Khudabux were all done under salvage conditions and the results presented
here are only preliminary.
Many books being published by archaeologists today try to appeal to both a schol-
arly and interested lay audience. This volume, however, is aimed at the professional
scholar or college student. This is not to say that African Sites Archaeology is a turgid,
jargon-ridden tome; far from it. But its organization and value is primarily as a refer-
ence work. Haviser was trying to assemble a single volume consolidating current
research in African-Caribbean archaeology and has succeeded admirably.
There are a few minor quibbles. Part 3 is the weakest section of this volume.
There are more complete studies of mortuary patterns that have been published else-
where, but those are at least referenced here. Also, the lack of an index is lamentable,
but understandable given the pragmatics of an edited volume.
Still, the strengths far outweigh the minor drawbacks. The book does draw together
some of the best work of the leading archaeologists in the Caribbean. It is a successful
exposition of an interdisciplinary approach that is always touted but not always prac-
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ticed by historical archaeologists. The production values are good and there is even a
brief chronological overview of the pertinent literature presented in the introduction.
This is a welcome addition to the literature, not just for the historical archaeology
of the Caribbean, but for African sites archaeology in the New World. It is a clear
demonstration of how archaeology can bring a more holistic perspective to the study of
the creolization process in the Caribbean.
charles r. ewen, East Carolina University
Centering Women: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society. By hilary beckles.
Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers; Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers; Oxford:
James Currey Publishers, 1999. Tables. Figure. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxv,
211 pp. Cloth, $39.95. Paper, $16.95.
Centering Women consists of somewhat altered versions of the authors previously pub-
lished articles, with an introduction and summation that argue for a post-nationalist
history of gender in the Caribbean. The articles are divided into three sections. The
rst focuses on the organization of black womens oppression during slavery; the second
presents a series of case studies of slave-owning white women, demonstrating their par-
ticipation in the construction of a pro-slavery racist ideology. The third section demon-
strates the variety of enslaved womens strategies of resistance and negotiation. The col-
lections focus is on Barbados, although other places in the Anglophone Caribbean
receive some attention.
The book contains some signicant new insights. Perhaps most important is Beckless
suggestion that the seasoning period undergone by newly arrived slaves in the Amer-
icas was an attempt to re-gender enslaved men. Because it required men to perform
hard agricultural labor, reserved for women in West African societies, Caribbean slav-
ery launched a direct assault on traditional West African gender orders (p. 6). As a
result, enslaved mens masculinity was challenged, and they reacted with both outright
violence and the negotiation of demand for entry into prestigious, non-agricultural
occupations (p. 8). This important point could lead to signicant research. However,
rather than presenting case studies to conrm the argument or discussing the difcul-
ties of ascertaining the impact of enslavement on slaves identities, Beckles simply
makes the assertion and moves on. This is characteristic of the book as a whole, which
repeatedly fails to expand on its major theses.
Beckles is critical of previous work in Caribbean womens history for its failure to
attend to gender as conceptual representation or to employ a post-structural [sic]
lens (pp. xivxv). Surprisingly, then, most of the book consists of straightforward
womens social history, describing and analyzing the experience of women with little
attention to the construction and reconstruction of gendered categories. Several of the
chapters, particularly those on slave huckstering and on the family strategies of rela-
tively privileged slaves, read as if the fact that the subjects are women is incidental.
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Comparison of the chapter on huckstering to its original publication in Berlin and Mor-
gans The Slave Economy (1991) reveals why Beckles has taken a piece of work that origi-
nally hardly mentioned gender and altered it so that most references to slaves in the
former read women slaves or female slaves in the new version. Despite his claims
for the importance of taking gender seriously as a category of analysis, Beckless practice
here implies that attention to womens experience literally makes no analytic difference.
The books intended audience is unclear. Specialists in the eld will already have
read many of the essays in their original locations. Many of the originals are actually
more useful than these revised versions, because Beckles in several places removes evi-
dence from one chapter so as to use it in another that is less analytic. Undergraduates
would be better off consulting the specic original articles that they are interested in;
they are likely to be deterred by the unwieldy prose of the more recently written pieces.
Those seeking to orient themselves in a new eld will nd that this book fails them
because it cites little secondary literature. In short, Beckless contribution is limited by
his failure to practice the sound detailed historical research (p. 191) that he advocates.
diana paton, Oxford University
Not of Pure Blood: The Free People of Color and Racial Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century
Puerto Rico. By jay kinsbruner. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Maps. Tables.
Figures. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. xvi, 176 pp. Cloth, $44.95. Paper, $15.95.
This is a most welcome addition to the still relatively limited literature on the free per-
sons of color in the slave societies of America and should be required reading for all
those interested in these themes. The free colored of Puerto Rico were a very large part
of the total insular population from the earliest eighteenth-century censuses onward.
They were three to four times greater than the slave population and reached 127,000 by
1830by then representing almost 40 percent of the total population. Out of this
group the author has selected those who lived in the city of San Juana sample of
probably less than 5 percent of this total classto study in detail. While this sample
eliminates the majority of free persons of color who were rural residents and farmers,
Kinsbruner nevertheless compensates for this with a wealth of archival detail on the life
of this urban minority. He very skillfully uses the property and population census in the
rst quarter of the nineteenth century to explain residential patterns by color, occupa-
tional mobility, and marriage arrangements among the free colored. The resulting pic-
ture is quite remarkable and complex: a group of persons just one of two generations
out of slavery who already were active and competitive members of the society and
economy. They were a signicant group of property owners and could be found in all
skilled occupations; in fact, there were even two free colored women master silver-
smiths working in Ponce and San Juan. He shows in great detail the remarkable lack of
housing segregation which existed in early-nineteenth-century San Juan. His analysis of
housing segregation, in fact, is quite original and is one of the very few such studies to
be found in the literature.
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On the other hand, his study of the selection of marriage partners shows the strong
role of prejudice in the resulting high endogamy rates by race. He also nds relatively
low rates of marriage for free colored and relatively high ratios of free colored families
headed by single women, though whites also were well below traditional norms. From
mid-nineteenth-century data for the island as a whole, he also shows the expected
nding that the free colored had both higher birth and death rates than the richer white
population among whom they lived. Finally, these same mid-century insular data shows
modestly high and relatively equal rates of literacy for free colored women and men in
several municipalities in the island.
In this otherwise admirably written, analyzed and argued book, there are a few
issues that other historians will debate. The rather broad usage of the term caste is
confusing. Since the author does not put the term in quotes or use the Spanish term
casta, he seems to suggest that this is a classic Indian-style caste system, which is
denitely not the case here. He also tends to ignore the slave origins of this class of free
persons and their much lower rates of initial capital and savings compared to whites,
which may account for some of the differences he encounters. His attempts to use the
unbalanced sex ratios of this small urban population (common to all urban populations
in Latin America) to discuss economic inequalities due to prejudice, is not convincing.
The same may be said for his attempts to generalize from the very small differences of
average age by sex. Finally he ignores the fact that the whites often are as different from
the norm he holds of marriage organization as are the free colored, which suggest some
special patterns within the islands own social structure. Despite these reservations, the
data and analysis of this important study provide one of the few well grounded portraits
we have of the urban free colored under slavery for any area of Spanish or Portuguese
America and will be much used and appreciated by all scholars working on African slav-
ery and race relations in the Americas.
herbert s. klein, Columbia University
Shaping the Discourse on Space: Charity and its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan,
Puerto Rico. By teresita martnez-vergne. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.
Photographs. Illustration. Map. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xviii, 235 pp.
Cloth, $32.50. Paper, $17.95.
Teresita Martnez-Vergne is seeking to broaden the horizons of nineteenth-century
Puerto Rican historiography with her new book. She has turned away from the social
and economic history that has previously dominated approaches to this period, toward a
post-structuralist-informed discourse analysis of liberal sensibilities and policies in the
islands capital. Martnez-Vergne traces the rise of a local liberal urban bourgeoisie and
its efforts to dene itself ideologically vis--vis shifting political currents in the Spanish
colonial regime and the increasingly worrisome plebeian classes. Other historians of
Puerto Rico have taken up this theme in the last 15 years, but none have yet examined
its expression through the conceptualization and dispensation of charity. Thus, this
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book has the potential to provide illuminating insights into Puerto Rican class and gen-
der relations, social mores, and changing political culture.
Martnez-Vergne argues that during the nineteenth century, local liberals asserted
their hold on new positions of political and social power opened by Spanish liberal
colonial administrations, particularly local ayuntamientos and the boards of newly
formed charitable institutions such as the Juntas de benecencia. In the process, they
also challenged the Catholic Churchs control over care for the poor. San Juan liberals
constantly negotiated a fragile balance between their beliefs in free choice and the
capacity for individual improvement and their desire to maintain social order. Hoping
to foment and then safely channel the productive capacity of the popular classes, whom
they alternately portrayed as lazy and threatening, the liberals enthusiastically regu-
lated both public space and the private spheres of sexuality, family, and home
through legislation and state philanthropy. Building off the vast European literature on
the subject, Martnez-Vergne shows that assistance and repression were the twin pil-
lars of benecencia (p. 66). The scattershot training for trades and meager material aid
offered to destitute men, women, and children were often overshadowed by the liberals
criminalization of vagrancy and its feminine counterpart, prostitution, the effective re-
enslavement of hundreds of free Africans shipwrecked on Puerto Ricos shores, and the
physical enclosure of unruly plebeian women. Alleged protection of vulnerable chil-
dren also placed them under heavy-handed state surveillance. Early efforts to provide
public education ultimately served the liberals goal of creating a docile, disciplined
labor force.
The most signicant weaknesses of the volume seem to stem from overreaching
the available sources. Despite Martnez-Vergnes protestations to the contrary, the
laboring men, women, and children of San Juan largely remain powerless gures in this
historical narrative, as they often have in other post-structuralist-inspired histories. We
get few examples of the pressures from below which she periodically insists fueled lib-
eral bids for power. The exception is the chapter that examines womens requests to the
Junta de benecencia for child support. Here, Martnez-Vergne begins to explore the
contours of plebeian womens discourse on motherhood. She concludes that both
women applicants and ofciating men were participating jointly in a public perfor-
mance in which both actors beneted (p. 99); the women received material aid, and the
male members of the junta conrmed their superiority to and power over others. For
the most part, however, almost against the authors stated intentions, Shaping the Dis-
course on Space paints a seemingly omnipotent picture of bourgeois agency. The men of
the rising urban professional classes in Puerto Rico consistently create oppressive social
mores, political policies, and economic options, which they successfully inict on the
poor, inltrating their psyches to embed bourgeois notions of social harmony and civic
propriety (p. 116). The dearth of plebeian newspapers from the nineteenth century,
the complete lack of criminal records for this period in San Juan, and the apparent
paucity of surviving petitions from inmates of the Casa de benecencia led Martnez-
Vergne to rely primarily on liberal regulations. Her treatment of such sources does not
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allow her to convincingly demonstrate either signicant popular agency or the extent of
liberal inuence on plebeian worldviews and practices. This does not, however, invali-
date the pioneering spirit of Shaping the Discourse on Space. In her emphases on discourse
analysis, physical space as an analytical category, and public charity as a key to the for-
mation of politics and class identity, Martnez-Vergne has set out to establish new
methodological and theoretical precepts for Puerto Rican historiography. Despite the
projects shortcomings, I applaud her efforts.
eileen surez ndlay, American University
Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 18501898.
By joan casanovas. Pitt Latin America Series. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1998. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Figures. Notes. Glossary.
Bibliography. Index. xvi, 320 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Paper, $19.95.
Emerging from an exhaustive if not exhausting meditation on the causes, contingencies
and conjunctures of 1898, Cuban historiography is now turning to relatively unexam-
ined issues in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Joan Casanovass Bread, or
Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 18501898, opens an important
new area of research as it delves into the formation of an urban working class, com-
prised mostly of tobacco workers, and its intimate relationship to the linked processes
of slave emancipation and the acquisition of independence from Spain. Casanovas chal-
lenges the teleology of narratives that see in the mid-nineteenth century rise of the
labor movement the origins of a militancy that culminated in 1959. Aiming to reinsert
workers agency and aspirations into an account dominated by a notion of workers as
passive recipients of ideologies, the book focuses on local economic and political condi-
tions as principal factors shaping labor consciousness.
With an impressive accumulation of Spanish, North American, and Cuban
sources, Casanovas renders a complex Cuban world of shifting colonial policy, rapidly
changing demographics and a growing export economy. In addition, his eld of vision
rightly includes attention to Spains own transformations with regard to its imperial sta-
tus and the nature of its domestic regime. In his account, currents of reformism, sepa-
ratism, abolitionism, and pro-Spanish sentiment jostled for the loyalty of urban labor-
ers, themselves divided between recent Spanish immigrants and Cubans of both
Spanish and African origin. By the same token, once labor groups formed, they
impinged on the colonial state persistently but only sometimes successfully. Casanovas
integrates the consequences of an emerging collective urban labor consciousness into
the momentous events of nineteenth-century Cuban history. His expansive argument
includes claims that workers supported and in some ways impelled slave emancipation,
dispersed to locations that would later prove strategic, such as Key West, during the war
of 186878 and provided one of the bases upon which Jos Mart built a revolutionary
coalition. The book makes a compelling case for the signicance of the relatively
neglected development of Cubas colonial urban labor movement.
Book Reviews / Colonial Period 599
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Yet it is perhaps a consequence of its well-executed ambition and scope that some
issues do not receive the attention they are due. Although Casanovas includes descrip-
tions of several aspects of workers lives, their making as a working class remains only
tenuously explored. The practice of reading in cigar factories, the creation of mutual aid
societies, the interracial character of many unions and the uctuating degrees of repres-
sion all appear as evidence that some kind of change was indeed occurring. Yet in the
absence of workers voices the texture of these changes is elusive. Hence his assertions
about the appeal of anarchism over reformism only raise the question, why did workers
respond to some ideologies and not others? Although the faltering commitment to
reformism is persuasively argued, the turn to anarchism is given cursory treatment. The
anarchist ranks grew, he argues, because its ideas were disseminated widely. This is not
implausible, but it does beg the question, how did workers come to understand, adopt,
and spread anarchist beliefs and practices? Casanovas has synthesized prodigious
research and made key claims. If this book prompts historians to inquire more closely
into the ways the Cuban urban laboring class was, as E.P. Thompson put it, present at
its own making, that will only add to its achievement.
alejandra bronfman, Princeton University
Dead Giveaways: Indigenous Testaments of Colonial Mesoamerica and the Andes.
Edited by susan kellogg and matthew restall. Salt Lake City: University of
Utah Press, 1998. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Figure. Notes. Bibliography. Index. vii,
318 pp. Cloth, $40.00.
This collection offers readers a persuasive testimony of the value for historians of the
last will and testament through which people attempted to provide for their souls and
their descendants after death. Although the last will and testament were part of Euro-
pean culture, many Spanish American wills were prepared for members of indigenous
societies, thereby offering an opportunity to learn more about the patterns of the colo-
nial cultures that emerged from the interaction of European, Native American, and
African in the Americas.
Reecting the editors own background in Mesoamerica, the majority of the arti-
cles in the collection focus on central and southern Mesoamerica; the nal three pieces
deal with the Andes. The collection is introduced by an article by Sarah Cline in which
she analyzes the instructions that priests were to give notaries who recorded indige-
nous wills, which were included by Alonso de Molina in his confessional manual
published in Nahuatl and Spanish in 1569. The author suggests that the differences
between Molinas instructions and the model accompanying them, and the patterns of
actual native wills and bequests, offer clues to Nahua social practices maintained in the
face of Spanish efforts to impose a more European model. The next three articles focus
on central Mexico. Susan Kellogg examines the wills left by both men and women
belonging to a single family line during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, con-
cluding that gender patterns and family relationships shifted in favor of men, and
600 HAHR / August
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womens status in their communities declined. This conclusion is based on these as well
as other Nahua wills, but I cannot but wonder if a database of 64 wills is sufcient to
argue for a major shift in gender relations during this period from a pattern of parallel
spheres for men and women to a more hierarchically ranked system of growing male
dominance.
Both Rebecca Horn and Stephanie Wood use testaments to examine topics that
may not initially seem accessible in sources that usually focus on property and personal
possessions. Horn examines Nahua testaments, together with other sources, as a win-
dow into the active petty trade that was usually absent from standard notarial records.
Wood looks at the testaments embedded in community claims to land. Both articles are
exciting examples of the value of wills, especially when they are analyzed in conjunction
with other kinds of sources. Kevin Terraciano and Matthew Restall stick to more con-
ventional uses of testaments. Terraciano focuses on popular religious concepts revealed
by differences in the concepts expressed in the religious preambles of Mixtec-language
wills and those written in Spanish. Restall analyzes the growing incorporation of Euro-
pean goods and institutions in Maya communities recorded by wills written in Maya
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering the result of his analysis as
evidence that Maya communities neither resisted Spanish culture nor adopted it whole-
heartedly, but incorporated Hispanic elements into their own lives without thereby
becoming hispanized.
Only one of the three studies focusing on the Andes looks at wills for evidence of
changing patterns of material wealth. Susan Ramrez compares three wills left by mem-
bers of the native elite in the area of Trujillo during the second half of the sixteenth cen-
tury to illustrate her contention that the growing involvement of members of the
Andean elite in the monetary economy signied not only changing strategies but also
the elites denition of wealth as material goods rather than people. Thomas Abercrom-
bie compares the wills left by Spaniards and Andean elites in Charcas in the latter part
of the sixteenth century. The content of the wills varied, but the variance cannot be
explained by ethnicity. Some members of both Spanish and Andean elites provided
bequests for the poor Indians under their authority, while others attempted to cheat
Gods justice as well as mans. As Abercrombie points out, wills were Spanish docu-
ments, and the Andean testees were written in Spanish terms. Because of that, Andean
wills cannot throw light on questions that have long vexed researchers, such as the com-
plex relations between status and land in Andean societies. Answers to questions about
Andean tradition must be sought in the records of situations, such as litigation between
communities, in which members of Andean society argued with one another over the
meaning of their own custom and practice.
Karen Powers uses testamentary data to examine the strategies deployed by a local
elite lineage whose members used their links to Spanish society to create themselves as
the caciques of the Kingdom of Quito. Alliance with the Spaniards gave the founder
of the lineage recognition from the new rulers, and the enterprising new cacique
obtained the material wealth that made it possible for him and his descendants to main-
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HAHR 80.3_08 BookReview(569-648 8/4/00 3:30 PM Page 601
tain and reinforce their position with both the Spanish authorities and the members of
their community by marrying his wealthy mestiza mistress. This article, the most excit-
ing contribution in the collection, is a brilliant reconstruction of the complex and cre-
ative strategies used by ambitious people seeking to build their fortunes by using what-
ever tactics were available to them, without concern for whether or not they were
following Andean tradition.
This collection is an example of both the great potential of testaments for social
historians, and their limitations. Some of the pieces in the collection, in particular the
articles by Kellogg, Hill, and Ramrez, offer valuable new evidence on changes in
indigenous material culture in the wake of the European invasion. But a testament is no
more transparent than any other written source; wills were usually drawn up by people
who had reason to fear that their wishes might not be followed after their death, and
their testaments often reect their efforts to use the conventions of Spanish society to
gain objectives of their own. In addition, a testament reects European values and prac-
tices, whatever the culture of the testee. The form of this source, like that of most oth-
ers, both denes and distorts the information that can be extracted from it. For that rea-
son, I found the most exciting and important pieces in this collection to be those that
did not restrict their analysis to wills, but used them together with other sources to offer
answers to questions that are not dened by the character of a single source, even one as
rich as the wills that permitted dead giveaways.
karen spalding, University of Connecticut
Francisco de Miranda und die Entdeckung Europas: Eine Biographie. By michael zeuske.
Mnster: Lit Verlag, 1995. Notes. Bibliography. 298 pp. Paper.
This book deals with the extraordinary and adventurous life of Spanish Americas
forerunner of Independence. In writing this biography the author intended to acquaint
the German-speaking public with one of the most fascinating gures of Latin Ameri-
can history about whom little is known. The author has indeed accomplished this
goal very well.
The book consists of a preface, some 15 chapters with a bibliography at the end of
each chapter, an epilogue, a selection of the most important Miranda documents, and a
chronology. In the preface the author mentions that he developed an interest in the
topic after he read an article written by Anna Seghers, after she returned from her Mex-
ican exile. Seghers work set the basis for the authors study undertaken in the years
198687 which later appeared in a modied version as the fth volume of the Hamburg
Ibero American Studies series.
In his rst three chapters Zeuske delves into Mirandas youth, his studies in Cara-
cas and his experience in Spain (175075). In the fourth and fth chapters the author
deals with Mirandas involvement in the American Revolution where, also, his goal of
establishing a free Colombia was conceived. Chapters 6 through 13 cover Mirandas
discovery of Europe, his 20 years in the Old Continent, rise in revolutionary France,
602 HAHR / August
HAHR 80.3_08 BookReview(569-648 8/4/00 3:30 PM Page 602
and his difcult negotiations with Britain regarding an independent Spanish America.
The last two chapters focus on his return to the New World, role in Venezuelan inde-
pendence, and his defeat and capture by the Royalists.
The epilogue deals with the German and Austrian sources on Miranda, such as the
reports of Austrian diplomatic representatives, and the many reports of other foreign
ofcials. Zeuskes book represents a valuable contribution to the study of Mirandas life.
It is solidly grounded in documentary sources and his methodology is sound. Moreover,
his writing is clear, attractive and stimulating. In sum, this is a book that would not only
appeal to the Latin American specialist and to the historian, but also the general public.
It is a pity that the author paid scant attention to the philosophical background of
the subject. Although there is mention of the Enlightenment (pp. 8, 3536), Zeuske
did not distinguish between the general tenets of the Enlightenment and those of the
Spanish variety. The latter was a Christian Enlightenment in which religious faith and
rational enthusiasm found an extraordinary harmony and balance. Moreover, Scholas-
ticism, the leading philosophical movement, even if in decline, was only briey men-
tioned (p. 15).
Zeuske does not stress enough that his hero, in reality, very much followed His-
panic traditions. He does mention the historic pact between the Spanish monarchs and
the Spanish American people of the sixteenth century, and points out that at the time
(1785) Miranda still thought along traditional lines (p. 85), but the reader gets the
impression that he was solely a product of the Enlightenment. While it is true that
Miranda was inuenced by the Enlightenment, this represents only one aspect of his
philosophy. After all, when Miranda calls for a federation of free cabildos (p. 234) he
simply followed into the footsteps of an old tradition already publicly stated in New
Granada by Bernardo de Vargas Machuca (15551622).
This leads to the nal conclusion which the author does not draw: the Enlighten-
ment did not produce Independence; on the contrary, independence produced the
Enlightenment. Napoleans usurpation of the Spanish throne resulted in the application
of the Scholastic pactum translationis with the establishment of juntas in defense of the
legitimate ruler, which was not a subterfuge.
o. carlos stoetzer, Fordham University
Santidad e identidad criolla: estudio del proceso de canonizacin de Santa Rosa.
By teodoro hampe martnez. Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos
Bartolom de las Casas, 1998. Plates. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. 141 pp.
On 11 August 1670, Pope Clement X publicly announced the sainthood of Santa Rosa
of Lima, also proclaiming her the ofcial patron-saint of all the Isles and Mainland of
the Americas and of the Philippines (p. 71). A year earlier, his predecessor Clement IX
had declared Rosa de Santa Maria patron-saint of Lima, and of the kingdom of Peru.
Santa Rosa was born Isabel Flores de Oliva in Lima in 1586 and died in her native city
in 1617. Within days of her passing, the church began a series of inquiries into her life.
Book Reviews / Colonial Period 603
HAHR 80.3_08 BookReview(569-648 8/4/00 3:30 PM Page 603
The long evidentiary process necessary for her beatication and subsequent canoniza-
tion began in Lima and eventually extended to Italy and the Low Countries.
In this small, well-written and compellingly argued book, Teodoro Hampe
Martnez traces Isabel Flores de Olivas trajectory into sainthood as Santa Rosa de Lima
through an analysis of the witnesses in her canonization process. In elegant narrative
style, Hampe Martnez manages, in few pages, to synthesize a vast historiography on
Santa Rosa complemented with new and previously uncharted documentary evidence
obtained in several American and European archives. Hampes focus is on the political
designs and machinations behind Santa Rosas rise to sainthood. Through a sociological
analysis of the witnesses interrogated in Lima for her sainthood case in 161718 and
later between 1630 and 1632, Hampe shows that behind Santa Rosas promotion to
sainthood lay the political interests of a Limeo creole elite that sought legitimacy and
recognition from the hierarchy of the church. Hampe suggests that the creole elite con-
solidated its position as a new socioeconomic group though the promotion of the saint.
The invention of Santa Rosa of Lima as global icon was the result of an elaborate
production mounted by the Catholic church, the crown, and the Lima elite. These
groups had high stakes in her success and carefully ensured her fame and legitimacy
through the commissioning of paintings, monuments, altars and shrines, the writing,
printing and distributions of hagiographies, as well as the celebration of elaborate
annual estas, all nanced by the Lima cabildo. Hampe builds on recent arguments
made by Ramn Mujica Pinilla (1995) and others to propose Santa Rosa as the utmost
icon of a new and emerging creole identity previously postulated by Bernard Lavall
(1993) and David Brading (1991). Hampe is careful to point out, however, that this
protonationalism should not be mistaken for a notion of allegiance to the patria chica,
but rather with a colonial identity based on a common experience in the Indies (p. 116).
Hampe successfully dispels the notion long held by scholars that Santa Rosa and others
rose to sainthood as the result of strong popular followings and devotions eventually
recognized and made ofcial by the Catholic church. In contrast to this populist view
Hampe argues that behind Santa Rosas campaign for sainthood and her culmination as
the rst American saint lie powerful colonial, church, and peninsular interest groups,
including several Spanish kings, and that at best, her popular followings developed con-
currently with this elite process of creating the saint.
In a eld where books are increasingly evaluated by their weight and countless
footnotes, Hampe Martnez provides a refreshing alternative in a well-researched, well-
documented and tightly argued monograph, which manages to include several good
quality illustrations and appendices of some key unpublished documents useful to
social, economic and cultural historians. This is a must read for all those specically
interested in the gure of Santa Rosa de Lima and the politics behind the making of
saints in the New World, as well as for those interested, more broadly, in the history of
religion, politics, and culture in colonial America.
alejandra b. osorio, State University of New York, Stony Brook
604 HAHR / August
HAHR 80.3_08 BookReview(569-648 8/4/00 3:30 PM Page 604
Pastores y labradores de Buenos Aires: una historia agraria de la campaa bonaerense
17001830. By juan carlos garavaglia. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1999.
Tables. Notes. Bibliography. 385 pp. Paper.
La historia agraria del Ro de la Plata a principios del siglo XIX ya no es lo que era. En
los ltimos aos, ese captulo de la historia tuvo que ser modicado sustancialmente,
cambiando la imagen de un paisaje desolado y arcaico, que alternaba grandes estancias
poco productivas con gauchos errantes que vivan de la generosidad de una frontera
abierta, por otro mucho ms poblado y moderno, en el que numerosas familias de
campesinos convivan en econmica armona con estancieros ms modestos y racionales.
Esta sbita mutacin del Far al Midwest en las pampas se debi a la accin de un grupo
de historiadoresque primero fueron coloniales y luego se autodenominaron tardo-
coloniales, aunque sus trabajos son ahora cada vez ms claramente postcoloniales
que, como un equipo de arquelogos perfectamente coordinado, fueron descubriendo
uno a uno, a lo largo de quince aos y a travs de sucesivos trabajos y monografas,
pequeos fragmentos de un mundo hasta entonces no imaginado. Primero fueron los
diezmos y las sucesiones, cuyo contenido revelaba la presencia inequvoca de un
mundo agrcola; luego los censosy ms tarde los archivos parroquialesque
impdicamente descubrieron familias por doquier, en vez de gauchos; luego las con-
tabilidades de estancias, que revelaron una moderna organizacin productiva, antes
insospechada.
Pastores y labradores es un verdadero diario de viaje de este itinerario. Lder indiscu-
tido de esta rebelin tardocolonialista, Juan Carlos Garavaglia nos ofrece con este
libro un excelente manual sobre la historia tardo- y post-colonial del Ro de la Plata,
que a la vez que repasa con un lenguaje llano y colorido todos sus aspectos relevantes,
realiza a travs de los captulos un completo inventario de los temas y debates funda-
mentales de ese recorrido historiogrco. Adems de los mencionados, el recorrido
incluye otros temas centrales a esa historiografa, como el mundo laboral, los mercados
y los precios, la identidad de los productores, junto a otros ms incipientemente inves-
tigados como los de la tecnologa agropecuaria, los ecosistemas o la ocupacin de la
frontera. Por n, un ltimo captulo dedicado a los aos 181030 apunta sin quererlo,
con su brevedad, a una de las deudas todava no saldadas de esta historiografa, como es
explicar el pasaje en poco tiempo a un mundo tan escasamente agrcola y campesino
como eshasta hoyel del Ro de la Plata a mediados de siglo.
Fruto de una investigacin de los ltimos diez aossegn dice el propio Gar-
avaglia en su prlogo fechado en octubre de 1994febrero de 1996la materia del
libro est claramente hecha de los mltiples trabajos de todo este grupo, entre los que
destacan, adems de los del autor, los de Jorge Gelman, Ral Fradkin, Carlos Mayo y
otros muchos que sera imposible enumerar. Concebido ms como obra de conjunto
que como investigacin individual (de lo que dan cuenta una innidad de notas y la
extensa bibliografa) el valor del libro no reside en proveer las ltimas novedades, sino
en resumir y explicitar la gran novedad que en s misma representa esta historiografa y
Book Reviews / Colonial Period 605
HAHR 80.3_08 BookReview(569-648 8/4/00 3:30 PM Page 605
en brindar una imagen armonizada de esa historia agraria regional en el siglo XVIII y
hasta despus de la independencia. Y es justo que as sea. Porque si esta revolucin his-
toriogrca ha sido nalmente aceptada hasta por los ms escpticos no fue precis-
amente por las simpatas que gener, sino por el peso cada vez ms insoslayable de las
distintas evidencias que se iban encontrando, las mismas que se renen ahora en este
libro en forma de captulos coherentemente hilados de una nica historia.
juan manuel palacio, Universidad de San Martn, Argentina
National Period
Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamrica, 18371995. Edited by jess sanz fernndez.
Madrid: Centro de Estudios y Experimentacin de Obras Pblicas (CEDEX), 1998.
Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Figures. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliographies.
456 pp. Paper.
A work fashioned to commemorate a century and a half of rail transport in Spain, the
Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamrica, 18371995 offers readers a comprehensive
survey of Latin Americas even older railroad experience. Coordinator Jess Sanz Fer-
nndez and his ve collaborators, all scholars with ties to Spanish railway, research, or
university institutions, focus their essays on the factual details of Latin American rail-
road construction, operation, and economic impact, deliberately avoiding rail-related
aesthetic, cultural, political, and social matters. While entire libraries deal with the
latter, at times exhaustively in their view, the authors are determined to ll the void
that has made nding basic quantitative information about Latin American railroads so
exasperating (p. 11).
Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamrica contains a general essay on Latin Ameri-
can railroads in historical perspective and a conclusion that sums up the ndings of the
volume. In between lie eight chapters, each with a useful bibliography of key literature.
One surveys the history of pre-rail transport in Latin American while the rest cover
railroad history regionally. While one wishes that some parts, particularly the conclu-
sion, were more forceful in their engagement with the controversial issues concerning
railroads and Latin American national development, the volume as a whole offers con-
sistency of approach and coverage. The six authors of Historia de los ferrocarriles de
Iberoamrica elucidate essential issues that create a coherent historical picture valuable
to any audience interested in Latin America, not just those concerned with railways or
with economic history.
Latin Americas railways derived from the patterns of national consolidation and
raw material export growth that predominated in the last decades of the nineteenth cen-
tury and the early ones of the twentieth. Over three-quarters of the regions rail routes
were built between 1880 and 1915. Despite the presence of railways in Brazil and all the
Spanish-speaking societies of Latin America, railroad operations remained highly con-
centrated in four countries alone. At the advent of the Great Depression, for example,
606 HAHR / August
HAHR 80.3_08 BookReview(569-648 8/4/00 3:30 PM Page 606
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico contained about 88 percent of all Latin American
railway mileage and produced over 90 percent of all rail activity (as measured in ton-
kilometers of freight trafc). Mirroring this historical pattern, the organization of Histo-
ria de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamrica devotes entire chapters to Mexico and to Brazil, while
Argentina and Chile form the heart of the essays on the La Plata and Andean areas.
Railroad transport constituted a decisive factor in the generation of raw material
export economies in Latin America, vastly expanding import-export commerce and
attracting large-scale foreign capital investment while at the same time, however
unevenly, knitting together national markets. Railroads decisively involved the state in
matters of international nance as well as in questions of transport subsidy and domes-
tic regulation. Economic nationalism ultimately placed Latin American railroads under
public ownership. While foreign capital operated three-quarters of Latin Americas rail
mileage in 1900, state control expanded from 15 percent in that year to nearly 50 per-
cent in 1945 and over 80 percent in 1950.
Having energized Latin American economies in the era of raw material exports,
railroads failed to adjust successfully to the new forms and locations of economic activ-
ity that characterized the period of import-substitution industrialization. The Great
Depression initiated a time of railroad decline that accelerated under the inuence of
increasing roadway competition, decaying capital equipment, escalating costs, and poor
quality administration. By 1979, for example, Argentine and Chilean railroads carried
only 40 percent of the tonnage they had transported in 1929. While freight shipped by
Brazilian and Mexican rails more than quintupled over that same period, such growth
depended on heavy public subsidies and ran well behind the fteen-fold expansion
experienced by the combined GDPs of the two countries. During the last decades of the
twentieth century, Latin American railroads operated in a condition of virtual collapse
and became increasingly subject to plans for privatization.
The authors of Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamrica develop these themes with
considerable attention to detail, backed up by the visual and quantitative highlight of
the volume, a companion CD-ROM that allows readers with Windows operating sys-
tems to make use of an extensive data bank compiled from major national and Latin
American statistical sources. The CD-ROM organizes information by country, provid-
ing a list of individual railway enterprises, a chronology of railroad development, histor-
ical maps, and charts that measure national-level rail economic performance. Many of
the statistics can be recongured as graphs or laid out in regional tables that compare
results country-by-country. Material may also be printed out or saved on disk. An
appendix to the book provides instructions in the use of the CD-ROM.
Historia de los ferrocarriles de Iberoamrica offers a highly useful survey of Latin
Americas railroad history. While the inclusion of a CD-ROM may make any request
for an alphabetical index appear greedy, nevertheless any volume containing this level of
detailed historical information should have one.
arthur c. schmidt, Temple University
Book Reviews / National Period 607
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Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic
Books in Mexico. By anne rubenstein. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. 210 pp.
Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $17.95.
Among the enormous wealth of popular cultural productions in Mexico none occupies a
more glorious place than the comic book. For many humble consumers of culture,
comic books may be all that they read on any sustained level and may, in fact, be the key
to any level of literacy they have. Comic books in Mexico have often served as a forum
for biting social satire and the revision of social roles that until at least twenty years
agocontinued to remain rigidly dened in that country. Comic books have also pro-
vided political education, or even basic civic information, especially in the series pre-
pared by Rius. Like other forms of popular culture, comic books have often been the
bearers of information about changing social and political patterns, while others, with
the virtual abolition of censorship that has occurred in post-modern, post-PRI hege-
mony Mexico, have indulged in the scatological, the erotic, and the pornographic.
Finally, major artists like Rius have attracted important critical attention to the comic
book, with the result that there is now an important bibliography of research on the
Mexican comic book from numerous scholarly perspectives.
Rubensteins book is a superb contribution to this bibliography. Making use essen-
tially of a historical and cultural studies approach, she surveys the emergence of the
comic book in Mexico, the controversies surrounding its social function and its moral-
ity, and the sorts of audiences it had or were imagined to have. Rubenstein is particu-
larly interested in the issue of cultural conservatism, the ideology by which governmen-
tal agencies and sectors of societies (such as the church) that had access to those
agencies attempted to exercise control over cultural production. In the years following
the Mexican revolution, it soon became very apparent that the groups and individuals
who assumed control of the state were interested in making use of culture to further
their own understanding of how to go about creating a modern Mexico. It is widely rec-
ognized that such an interest in the possibilities of utilizing culture in the furtherance of
a revolutionary agenda is responsible for some of the best work to have come out of
Mexico in the twentieth century. The standard icon in this regard is the muralist tradi-
tion. However, it is probable that Mexican lmmaking would not have had the enor-
mous development it saw in the rst third of this century had it not been for govern-
ment interest and support, and certainly the theater owes much to governmental
programs, as do other forms of traditionally elite cultural production.
However, it has eventually become both possible and necessary to question the
sort of cultural hegemony this ofcial support came to constitute, both in terms of what
it meant for what did get produced via subsidy and in terms of what either did not get
produced or what was produced outside the scope of such subsidies. Of course, there
existed, from the beginning, cultural manifestations that were either alternative or
opposed to ofcial culture (which is one way in which the contemporneos group can be
approached), but the retardation of a distinctly urban novel (with the exception of the
608 HAHR / August
HAHR 80.3_08 BookReview(569-648 8/4/00 3:30 PM Page 608
potboilers of the irksome Luis Spota) can be attributed in part to the enormous ofcial
emphasis on the rural and the provincial, the folkloric and the indigenista. In a certain
sense, the Mexican comic book lled the gap of the thinness of a record of urban cul-
tural ction. The comic book is narrative ction, and, although there were other inter-
ests (some of Riuss best work is in series like Los supermachos and Los agachados, which
tended to echo, albeit from a highly socially committed satirical point of view, the pre-
vailing interest in the non-urban), so many of the plots of this production dealt with the
trials and tribulations of urban life, recording implicitly not only the enormous growth
of urban life beginning in the late 1940s, but also the experiences of the in-migration of
individuals and families from all over Mexico that fueled that growth. In a very real
sense, the enormous transformations that have taken place in Mexico City during the
past fty years are perhaps best followed in forums like the comic book: novels, plays,
and lms may constitute more insightful and therefore more critical interpretations, but
alongside the sustained production of comic book series, they are sporadic examples.
Because the comic book, in its narrative themes, in its language, in its artistic
codes, and in the singular synergism of its combination of verbal text and image had
such wide distribution and such a committed readership, it is not surprising that it
should attract the attention of both the censor who would wish to ban it and the censor
who would wish to reform it. Rubenstein competently reviews this history and provides
added contextualization for those researchers who have concerned themselves with
more properly textual and semiotic issues of the Mexican comic book.
david william foster, Arizona State University
In the Absence of Don Porrio: Francisco Len de la Barra and the Mexican Revolution.
By peter v. n. henderson. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999.
Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiii, 338 pp. Cloth, $55.00.
In light of this summers presidential election in Mexico, touted by many to be the most
democratic ever, the publication of Peter Hendersons latest work is particularly
timely. Francisco Len de la Barras transitional presidency in 1911 faced many of the
same political issues that contemporary voters will face in July, most importantly cor-
ruption and change from the old regime (Porrian) to the new (Maderista). Similar to
his earlier study of Flix Daz, Flix Daz, the Porrians, and the Mexican Revolution
(1981), Hendersons political biography of de la Barra rescues a controversial gure of
the early revolutionary period from relative historiographic obscurity. Through exten-
sive use of a variety of public and private archival sources from ve countries, Hender-
son carefully demonstrates that de la Barra was more than a solitary and often maligned
gure in Mexican history. De la Barras story is important to revisit (or visit for the rst
time) in order to better understand the social and political rise and fall Porrian elites
and intellectuals experienced during the Porrian, Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary
periods. A motif running throughout Hendersons work is that the demise of de la Barra
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and other educated Porrians represented, the tragic side of the Mexican Revolu-
tion (p. 233). These individuals who could have continued, in Henderson opinion, to
offer great service to Mexico were cast aside and ridiculed by the post-Revolutionary
government.
The study begins by charting de la Barras political ascent, assiduously recon-
structed from family memoirs and correspondence, from the son of an elite Chilean
family to student and then teacher at the prestigious National Preparatory School,
where he established himself as an expert on international law and arbitration. Related
and well connected to high-level polticos, de la Barra quickly moved through the diplo-
matic ranks in Latin America, Europe, and the United States before being appointed as
Mexicos secretary of foreign relations and nally president in May of 1911. Following
the Revolution, de la Barra retreated to Europe and continued his work in international
diplomacy until his death in 1939.
Most of the book examines de la Barras role in the progressive consensus, a
group comprised of many members of the Porrian elite, including most of the civilian
Maderistas (p. 24). Challenging the prevailing view of the Revolution, which holds
that Madero and the de la Barra interim presidency attempted little in the way of social
change, Henderson argues that by the spring of 1911, the progressive consensus had
been committed to reform and call[ed] for political enfranchisement, order, economic
development, and modest social change through nonviolent and legal processes (p. 235).
Henderson shows that de la Barras interim government, largely in conjunction with
Madero, actively pursued pro-labor, agrarian, electoral, and education reforms. Yet,
consistent with Porrian economic practices that demanded social quiescence in order
to attract foreign capital, the de la Barra government often lost patience when people
crossed that thin line into violence or lawlessness (p. 155), as was the case with worker
strikes and the Zapatista uprising in Morelos.
For all of Hendersons judicious insight into de la Barras career, his analysis of the
rst or popular revolution seems overly simplied. Perhaps too eager to resuscitate de
la Barras place in Mexican history he writes, the popular revolution did alter attitudes
and allow previously subjugated peoples to hold their heads high, completing a process
that had clearly begun during the de la Barra presidency (p. 235). While de la Barra
agitated for social reform, his presidency should not be credited with inspiring large-
scale attitudinal change. De la Barra, too wedded to the conservative Porrian diplo-
matic protocol and idealistic notions of political arbitration, failed to adequately
respond to the pressing needs of an increasingly dissatised population.
Nonetheless, Henderson has succeeded in recasting the life and times of Francisco
Len de la Barra, illustrating with subtlety and detail that de la Barras career deserves
more credit for initiating social reform than it has received in the past. Whereas de la
Barra is most often remembered as the hawkish judge of Zapata, Henderson convinc-
ingly portrays de la Barras presidency as a successful bridge between two political
regimes despite its inability to ultimately meet the countrys social and economic
demands. Clearly written and diligently researched, In the Absence of Don Porrio will
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help undergraduates and scholars alike to rethink the continuities and changes taking
place in Mexico during the rst decades of the twentieth century.
mark overmyer velzquez, Yale University
Mexico in the Age of Proposals, 18211851. By will fowler. Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 1998. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiii, 328 pp. Cloth, $ 69.50.
The rst half of the nineteenth century in Mexico is a complex period, characterized
by regionalism, mass politics, governmental instability, economic collapse, foreign
intervention, and the loss of half its territory to the United States. Will Fowler offers a
new interpretation of the countrys politics during those years. He calls the era Mexico
in the Age of Proposals because Mexico was characterized by the intensity of its ideo-
logical debate (p. 13). Although he does not challenge earlier scholars directly, Fowler
dismisses interpretations that divide the nations political idealogues into liberals and
conservatives. In his view, There were no such things as conservatives and liberals. In
broad terms, there were a variety of heterogeneous traditionalist, moderate, radical,
and santanista factions which changed and evolved (p. 267). To provide a framework
for understanding the evolving politics, Fowler divides the era into four periods
according to signicant political events: (1) the time of hope (182128) encompasses
the achievement of independence and establishment of the federal republic; (2) the
period of disenchantment (182835) includes the Parin riots, the ouster of the sec-
ond president, and the federalist-centralist struggles of 1829, 1832, and 183435; (3)
the period of profound disillusionment (1836 47) coincides with the loss of Texas,
the French invasion, and the failure of the centralist republic to end political revolts,
military pronunciamientos, and economic decline; and (4) a nal stage of despair
(184755) that results from the nations defeat and dismemberment at the hands of the
United States.
After an introduction that denes terms and provides a political chronology of the
period, Fowler identies and offers a detailed and subtle account of the ve political
tendencies into which he divides Mexican political idealogues: the traditionalists; sup-
porters of the variant of traditionalism espoused by Carlos Mara de Bustamente; the
moderates; the radicals; and the santanistas. Fowler devotes ve chapters to examining
the political evolution of idealogues who represented the tendencies he has identied.
All began as liberals in the Cdiz tradition. The unruly politics of the masses, the
threats to property and order, the radicalism of some politicians, the economic decline,
and the instability of government undermined their faith in federalism. Over the years,
the representatives of various groups favored different solutions to national problems.
The socially conservative traditionalists rst proposed centralism and ultimately favored
a constitutional monarchy. The prolic lawyer, author, and politician Carlos Mara de
Bustamente also preferred centralism, but he never deviated from his commitment to
nationalism, constitutionalism, and republicanism. The moderates believed in reform-
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ing the country slowly, while the radicals favored revolutionary transformation. The
santanistas went from defending a popular representative system to supporting a con-
trolled dictatorship (p. 226).
Fowler provides a sophisticated account of the changing views of the idealogues
he studies. That is a signicant achievement, but his analysis fails to address a series of
questions that had a profound impact on the evolution of ideologies in Mexico.
Although he notes that all political factions emerged from the liberalism of the His-
panic Constitution of 1812, he begins his discussion in 1821 and therefore does not
examine the crucial political and ideological developments that shaped later events.
The autonomists of 1808 continued to be politically active for many years after 1821.
They were among the principal signatories of the declaration of independence of 1821
and authors of the Constitution of 1824. That document, based on the Hispanic Con-
stitution of 1812, established legislative dominance. The governments of the age,
whether federalist, centralist, or authoritarian, were structured with weak executive
branches and strong legislatures. In part, that is why chief executives, military as well
as civilian, remained in ofce only a short time. Yet Fowler ignores the debates and
votes of congress.
This work is a top-down analysis that fails to address the extensive political
debate and mass political participation that characterized the period and ignores the
importance of regions in forging the national agenda and shaping ideologies. It was an
era when countless authors published thousands of papers and pamphlets, but Fowler
examines only a few well-known idealogues. Many of those studied, such as Alamn,
Bustamente, Zavala, Mora, Tornel, and Bocanegra, wrote histories and memoirs justify-
ing their actions. Too often, Fowler accepts their self-serving rationalizations at face
value. He ignores the ideas and aspirations of both urban and rural popular groups,
concentrating exclusively on a few elites in Mexico City. His decision to focus on the
nations capital is particularly unfortunate since the era under consideration (182153)
was a time when regions, whether called states or departments, played a signicant role.
Many important ideological and political movements, such as attacks on the church, on
Spaniards, and on federalism, began in the regions. By divorcing his topic from the
broader social, political, and economic context, he loses the opportunity to explain
Mexicos apparent political failure during those decades.
Despite these criticisms, Mexico in the Age of Proposals is a signicant study that will
serve as the focus of the historiographical debate on the period. Fowler is to be congrat-
ulated for demonstrating that there were more than two political groupsLiberals and
Conservativesin Mexico, that political ideas and politics evolved over the years
because conditions changed, and that Mexican politicians and Mexican political ideas
and practices were important and are worthy of serious study.
jaime e. rodrguez o., University of California, Irvine
612 HAHR / August
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Nationalist Myths and Ethnic Identities: Indigenous Intellectuals and the Mexican State.
By natividad gutirrez. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Maps.
Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvii, 242 pp. Cloth, $50.00. Paper, $25.00.
The Mexican pedagogues who launched a standardized national curriculum during the
1960s would likely be dismayed by the attitudes that Natividad Gutirrez encountered
among indigenous intellectuals thirty years later. Having largely rejected the assimila-
tionist goals of the Ministry of Education (SEP), the students educated in these pro-
grams are now Mexicos most ardent advocates of multiculturalism and self-empowerment
for indigenous peoples. According to Gutirrez, indigenous Mexicans rejected the
SEPs project because it failed to address their own myth-symbol complexes. They
nd nationalist narratives rooted in Aztec origin, the mestizo nation, and the valoriza-
tion of heroes such as Benito Jurez either irrelevant or racist, and have instead looked
within their own communities to promote cultural revival.
While these observations vis--vis the efcacy of SEP nationalism do not shed
much new light on state formation in twentieth-century Mexico, Gutirrezs focus on
the changing role of indigenous intellectuals in civil society represents an original con-
tribution to Mexican scholarship. The most valuable portions of the study examine a
series of interviews and surveys Gutirrez conducted with approximately 80 students,
professionals, and members of the intelligentsia during the early 1990s; a number that
while small, still represents a signicant percentage of the overall number of indigenous
intellectuals in the country. All of them come from indigenous communities, speak
indigenous languages as natives, and are committed activists. Within the text the infor-
mants often speak in long uninterrupted passages, providing some truly fascinating
glimpses into the ways that indigenous cultures are a dynamic product of local ethnic
and linguistic traditions and national historical processes. Gutirrez credits these
activists as a whole with undermining incorporationist indigenismo and making cultural
self-determination, linguistic self-management, and the defense of indigenous rights
important political issues. Furthermore, she sees their thirty years of activism (rather
than the 1994 rebellion in Chiapas) as the impetus for recent changes in federal policy
towards indigenous peoples. These developments include constitutional reforms recog-
nizing Mexico as a multicultural society, efforts to empower indigenous leaders as rep-
resentatives of their own communities, and the creation of programs focusing on
indigenous education and Indoamerican linguistics in several Mexican universities.
Gutirrez recognizes that their participation in state institutions, and reliance on
federal support, has limited the effectiveness of these intellectuals and dictated a more
conciliatory attitude towards the state. However, she might have gone further in analyz-
ing the ambiguities that this relationship creates for her informants. As with other social
movements, the question of autonomy from or dependence upon the state is an impor-
tant issue confronting these activists, and needs to be explored in signicant detail.
These tensions may be present in some of the seemingly dissembling answers given by
her informants, as when educated individuals claimed unfamiliarity with the national
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emblem, and when interviewees both rejected and appealed to pan-Indianism. Simi-
larly, Gutirrez occasionally conates the views of these intellectuals with those of the
communities that they supposedly represent, which may be unwarranted given their
small numbers and relatively privileged position. Deeper analysis of these issues would
provide a better understanding of the ways in which these subjects are not just nave
informants, but strategic agents using this forum to further their own ends.
Despite these weaknesses, this study provides valuable insights into the emerging
political importance of indigenous intellectuals in Mexico, and uses an innovative
approach to explore their responses to attempts by the state to undermine indigenous
cultures. These strengths make this a useful contribution to the study of indigenous
peoples in the Americas, and particularly the eld of Indian-state relations. Clearly
written and carefully documented, it will be of interest primarily to graduate students
and specialists interested in ethnic politics.
alexander s. dawson, Montana State University
Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico: The Agraristas and
Cristeros of Michoacn. By jennie purnell. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Map. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. x, 271 pp. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $17.95.
This book signicantly advances the paradigm of studying state formation as negotia-
tion of rule, exemplied by Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugents pathbreaking collec-
tion, Everyday Forms of State Formation (1994), by demonstrating that it can help us to
answer comparative questions. Purnell seeks to explain why a socially, economically, and
ethnically diverse set of rural actors rebelled against the state under the banner of the
cristeros in the period 192629, to be opposed by equally diverse agrarista peasants who
backed a secularizing state, despite, in many cases, retaining personal Catholic convic-
tions. Although the cristiada has evoked a distinguished historiography, this book pro-
vides new and more satisfying answers to the two major conundrums. Why was the
rebellion concentrated in the center-west of Mexico? What determined alignment with
the cristero and agrarista causes?
Purnells insightful analysis of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century history is
capped by close discussion of three sub-regions of Michoacn: the agrarista Zacapu
region, made famous by Paul Friedrichs studies of Naranja, the Purpecha highlands,
where Purnell focuses on San Juan Parangaricutiro and its neighbors, and the ranchero
communities of San Jos de Gracia and Cojumatln, in the northwestern part of the
state. The analysis is wonderfully rich, both in its detail and in its use of local history to
confront bigger theoretical issues. Purnell highlights the inadequacies of both orthodox
and revisionist models of the revolution, and the limitations of state-centered, class-
centric, and new social movements theorizing alike. Her own analysis reconnects eco-
nomics and social property relations with political identities in a sophisticated way. In
the case of San Juan Parangaricutiro, for example, we need to explain why this particu-
lar community actively rebelled as cristeros. San Juan was not unusual in the Meseta
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Purpecha for having survived the Porriato with its communal property intact and
under the control of a still functioning cabildo, in contrast to the communities of the
Zacapu region. Haciendas were not central to agrarian conict in the Meseta, and the
efforts of post-revolutionary state builders to establish agrarista client groups provoked
opposition from Catholic majorities linked to communal institutions. Yet, as Purnell
points out, while long-term structural conditions set the stage for conict, which did,
indeed, intensify in the period of Crdenass governorship and presidency, we need a
conjunctural explanation for one communitys precocious mobilization. She nds it,
convincingly, in the threat posed by mestizos allied to revolutionary ofcials to San
Juans property and governmental institutions and, through their anti-clericalism, to the
communitys historical identity, which intersected, at this historical moment, with a
longstanding dispute with neighboring Paracutn. As the latter community accepted the
leadership of families that aligned with agrarismo, San Juan rose up under the banner of
the cristeros.
Inspired by Steve J. Sterns work, the linking of short, conjunctural, time frames to
frames spanning centuries is integral to the books success in illuminating how historical
memories and strategies shaped the goals and consciousness of rural rebels. Purnells
contribution to Mexican revolutionary history is further enriched by its analysis of
Catholic lay organizations. She offers a comparative analysis of Oaxaca and Sonora to
underscore the importance of this differentiating feature for explaining why anti-state
movements in the center-west expressed themselves in the cristiada. The history of the
more clandestine organizations, notably the U, remains in need of further explo-
ration. More attention might usefully have been paid to passive identication with the
cristero cause, and I remain unconvinced that the grotesque and gratuitous violence
of the forces mobilized by the infamous Jos Ins Chvez Garca can be explained sim-
ply by labeling the Chavistas bandits (p. 170). Yet it seems churlish to complain about
any detail of a book that advances explanation so signicantly. Purnell helps us under-
stand much that is of national signicance, such as the enduring local struggles that
nally obliged the state to recognize the corporate juridical status of the comunidad
agraria in 1971. The book also offers valuable lessons for a world still given to applying
the label fanatics to grassroots movements that impede the projects of its centers of
power.
john gledhill, The University of Manchester
Sponsored Identities: Cultural Politics in Puerto Rico. By arlene m. dvila. Puerto Rican
Studies. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. Photographs. Illustrations.
Notes. Bibliography. Index. xviii, 301 pp. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $19.95.
In one of the few books written in English on the topic, Arlene M. Dvila highlights the
struggles of contemporary cultural politics in Puerto Rico. She achieves this through a
case study of the pseudonymous southeastern town of Caone. The book consists of six
chapters and a conclusion. Chapters 1 and 2 review the hegemonic role played by the
Book Reviews / National Period 615
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Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (ICP). Since its founding in 1959, the ICP has pur-
ported to dene what constitutes Puerto Rican culture. The resistance proffered by
local grassroots groups to ICP hegemony is precisely the core of Dvilas work in these
two chapters. Chapter 2 also reviews the signicance of the New Song Movement in
Puerto Rico. Lacking here, however, is an analysis of the foundational role played by
pathbreaking icons Roy Brown Martnez, and Antonio Cabn Vale, El Topo.
Chapter 3 begins with a case study of Caone, its cultural centers politics, and the
relation of the cultural center to independent (meaning not approved by the ICP) cul-
tural groups. Chapter 4 concludes the study by exploring the role of two grassroots cul-
tural groups in Caones cultural politics. Notable are Dvilas insights into the class and
racial makeup of both groups; the countrys African heritage is still a taboo topic in con-
temporary Puerto Rico. Signicant also is her review of beauty pageants and sports
competitions as expressions of nationhood in Puerto Rico, a reality that bafes non-
Puerto Rican social scientists studying Puerto Rican culture and national identity.
Chapter 5 reviews the rebarbatively ubiquitous presence of U.S. corporations in
contemporary Puerto Rican cultural fairs and festivals. The astute observer will note
that the presence of these corporate giants underscores Puerto Ricos overall colonial
dependence on the U.S. behemoth. Advertising jingles accompanied by folkloric music,
the establishment of awards for cultural excellence, and other corporate ploys lull
Puerto Ricans into believing that national cultural survival lies in the consumption of
U.S. corporate products. These corporations thus help Puerto Ricans sublimate politi-
cal activism into a preference for one or another U. S. product and forget the islands
colonial dependence on the United States.
Chapter 6 wraps up Dvilas theoretical work by adding case studies of two premier
cultural fairs, the National Indigenous Festival and the Bacard Folk Arts Festival. Both
case studies augment Davilas review of the themes and analyses of the two Caone cul-
tural groups.
Dvilas work is based on sound ethnographic research. It is a ne contribution to
an understanding of the raging struggle for survival that Puerto Rican culture has
waged against U.S. colonialism for the last 102 years. Historians of Puerto Rico, and
U.S.-Puerto Rico relations, Latin America, U.S. social history, the so-called Third World,
and social scientists studying contemporary metropolis-dependent nation relations and
cultural imperialism would benet from Davilas work. While mostly clear, the style is
too anthropological at times. Coupled with the books theoretical approach and concep-
tual weightiness, this militates against popular reading.
Dvilas work is a resounding testament to the resilience of Puerto Rican culture in
fending off the assimilationist, colonialist onslaught of American cultural imperialism
throughout the twentieth century. It should also serve as a clarion call to people of good
will everywhere who support the inalienable right of Puerto Rican culture to survive in
the twenty rst century.
jos-manuel navarro, Philadelphia
616 HAHR / August
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The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica. By sterling evans. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1999. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Appendixes.
Notes. Bibliography. Index. xviii, 317 pp. Cloth, $40.00. Paper, $19.95.
The history of conservation in Latin America offers insights into the dramatic environ-
mental transformations the region has undergone, particularly in the twentieth century.
Sterling Evanss Green Republic explores the history of conservation in Costa Rica, with
an emphasis on environmental policy. While journalists, policymakers, and others have
pointed to Costa Rica as a model of conservation policy, Evans questions whether it is
appropriate to call Costa Rica a green republic. Using a wide range of sources, includ-
ing interviews, archives, and newspapers, Evans paints a complex and nuanced picture
of how conservation emerged in twentieth-century Costa Rica.
Costa Ricas exemplary and well-publicized conservation projects have emerged as
a response to an equally dramatic but less well-known process of environmental
destruction. Between 1950 and 1990, Costa Rica lost 65 percent of its forest cover. The
causes of this deforestation included the expansion of export agriculture (particularly
bananas and coffee), cattle ranching, and forestry. Government programs to distribute
land to landless peasants ( precaristas) also inadvertently promoted forest destruction.
Evans argues that Costa Rica, like many other countries in Latin America, has faced an
agricultural dilemma in which policymakers try to balance the drive for agricultural
development with the need for environmental conservation.
Part 1, Costa Ricas History of Conservation, traces the emergence of conserva-
tion policy in Costa Rica as a response to this agricultural dilemma. Until the 1950s,
most conservation policy in Costa Rica was ad hoc. The government created a few
national parks, and some wildlife conservation agencies. Several conservation laws had
been decreed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they were never adequately
enforced. Evans argues that the key turning point in Costa Ricas conservation policy
was the Ley Forestal of 1969. The law did not improve the problem of deforestation
overnight indeed, some of Costa Ricas worst deforestation happened after the law
had passedbut it did provide the basis for later conservationist action.
The centerpiece of Costa Ricas ofcial conservation programs was its system of
national parks. This system was the brainchild of Mario Boza, an energetic Costa Rican
naturalist who worked for the government. Boza began building the system of national
parks during the 1960s and 1970s, with the political backing of international conserva-
tion groups and inuential Costa Ricans such as Karen Olsen de Figueres, the wife of the
president. His projects bore fruit, and conservation efforts in Costa Rica continued
unabated even through the economic crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Govern-
ment agencies became more entrepreneurial, soliciting funding from international orga-
nizations such as the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Federation. In the late 1980s,
the national park system underwent a philosophical change in strategy, that empha-
sized incorporating national parks and preserves into the nations larger socioeconomic
context. Once again, Costa Ricas scal problems were turned into a conservation oppor-
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tunity, through the debt for nature swap programs that allowed Costa Rica to write off
parts of its foreign debt in return for placing more lands under conservation.
The chapters of part 2, Building a Green Republic, explore other forces that pro-
moted conservation in Costa Rica. Environmental education at all levels has con-
tributed to forming a rudimentary environmental ethic in Costa Rica, although Evans
questions how deeply rooted it is. Costa Rican and foreign non-governmental organiza-
tions have played an increasingly important role in promoting conservation through
research, training, grassroots activism, and legislation. Ecotourism took off during the
1980s and 1990s, bringing the hoped-for economic boom to Costa Rica. But it has
become such a success that it threatens to harm the very ora and fauna that attract the
visitors in the rst place. Costa Ricans have also organized a national institute for bio-
diversity (InBio), to do a survey of Costa Ricas biological resources.
While Costa Rica is not the ecotopia that many people claim, Evans argues that
it has enjoyed a number of short-term conservation successes. This lucid and thoughtful
work will be useful to historians and policymakers, and as a textbook for graduate and
undergraduate courses on agriculture, development, and conservation in Latin America.
stuart mccook, The College of New Jersey
Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 17801840.
By charles f. walker. Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Illustration. Maps. Tables. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. xiii, 330 pp. Cloth, $39.95. Paper, $17.95.
Charles Walker has set out to write the history of the transition from ancien rgime to
republic in the Cuzco region. The chief practical obstacle to this aspiration is the dis-
parity in the amount of extant documentation available: holdings for late colonial Cuzco
are enormous, while those for the early republic are relatively meager. The author has
negotiated this difculty with considerable skill, no mean feat.
This is an exceptionally well-written account, and a pleasure to read. Walker has
an eye for the telling quote, an uncommon ability to distill complex debates cogently,
and a uid literary prose. He is well versed in the relevant theoretical and comparative
literature, but the book is mercifully free of jargon. Walker is the rst historian to sys-
tematically use the regions early republican newspapers as a source, and does so with
prot; he deploys other early printed materials tellingly. This book is, however, exces-
sively reliant upon printed sources, though this is to some extent unavoidable for the
republican era.
The book commences with a tight synthesis of the Tpac Amaru rebellion, notable
for a ne set-piece account of the Sangarar massacre. He argues, probably rightly,
that rebel ideology was a creative synthesis rather than an inchoate version of Western
thought, and he joins Florencia Mallon in characterizing the movement as proto-
nationalist; the rebellion certainly had strong nationalist elements, but proto-words
are always a worry. Walker accepts the contemporary estimate of 100,000 deaths in the
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combined tupamarista and katarista movements; this is usually considered to be
highly exaggerated. Walkers emphasis on discourse is welcome, and he returns time
and again to the contemporary pejorative image of the Indian. This is very well done,
but it might have been shortened: it is mainly the familiar colonial discourse carried
over into the republican era. There are many good things in this book: a convincing
portrayal of the justice system as political arena; the welcome attention given the
public sphere; the new biographical treatment of Gamarra; the attention given to
the poorly-understood 181524 interregnum; the sustained argument that caudillos
ruled through the state apparatus and not above it; the emphasis on the tax system
and its multiple effects on indigenous groups. Moreover, his succinct summaries of
economic and scal conjunctures are deftly executed. Particularly welcome is the return
to center-stage of narrative and military history, on which Walker writes vividly and
usually convincingly.
The author is principally interested in political history. There is not much social
history in this book, and hardly any ethnohistory. This is surprising, in that the author
explicitly places the Indians at the center of his concerns, even championing their cause.
He condemns reductionist treatment of the Indians, but then gives us more of the same.
Indian society in the Cuzco region was parsed in numerous ways, yet we hear little of
this: there is constant mention of Indians, peasants, communities, and mestizos,
but we are left none the wiser as to social differentiation within those categories. Simi-
larly, while caciques/kurakas receive some attention, there is scarce mention of the
numerous cabildantes, though Walker controversially argues that these were the princi-
pal beneciaries of the disintegrating cacique network. In what is a political history, the
role of the rural Cabildos de indios y de espaoles deserved some space, though it is
only fair to note that Andean sources on these institutions are scarce. Just as controver-
sial is his argument that Indians were little affected or even better off after the failure of
the Tpac Amaru rebellion, and (more convincingly) that the early republican era was
relatively benecial to them. Early on, he announces that he has read one thousand
causas criminales, but mentions only a handful; it is a pity that he did not weave more of
these into his analysis. He ascribes a high degree of autonomy and a clear anti-colonial
intent to the Indian subalterns of southern Peru, and it would have been interesting to
have seen these contentions backed up with a lot more hard data.
Walker builds much of his analysis around the concept of an Andean utopia,
coined by Manuel Burga and the late Alberto Flores Galindo, and John Rowes national
Inca movement thesis, both of which the author endorses unreservedly. These notions
turn inter alia on the search for an Inca redeemer, the presumed existence of a distinct
colonial Inca culture, and the Inca symbolism apparent in the subversive movements
and conspiracies of the era. However, Walkers account overlooks Cuzcos many hun-
dreds of Inca nobles, their response to those movements, and the components of colo-
nial Inca culture and their political dimensions. Plainly, analysis of the Inca nobilitys
participation (or lack of it) in key political and cultural events is essential to sustaining
any utopian or nationalist thesis.
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Overall, this is a ne piece of historical writing that is a signicant addition to the
literature on the transition era and the nature of the early colonial state. It deserves to
be widely discussed, and will certainly be read with pleasure.
david cahill, University of New South Wales
Gender and Modernity in Andean Bolivia. By marcia stephenson. Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1999. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi,
259 pp. Cloth, $42.50. Paper, $18.95.
With attention to gender now rmly joining class and ethnicity as critical factors in the
experience of Latin America, scholars have called for efforts to better understand how
all three variables interact. The publication of Marcia Stephensons excellent book, Gen-
der and Modernity in Andean Bolivia, is a substantial contribution to such efforts.
Stephenson begins with the assertion that modernization and miscegenation are
inextricably linked and that modernity tries to relocate subjects in terms of their cultural,
racial, gendered and spatial identities. She makes her case in a series of well-constructed
arguments linking fashion, hygiene, education, and hunger, emphasizing the nations
role in promoting modernity and the reformulation of and resistance to that project on
the part of the indigenous population.
As a literary scholar, Stephenson brings the tools and language of postmodern lit-
erary criticism to bear on a range of studies. She offers original readings of literary and
political texts and weds these to an insightful interpretation of Bolivian social change
over the course of the twentieth century.
For political scientists, anthropologists, historians, as well as students of literature,
this is a book well worth reading. Stephensons conception is brilliant. She opens the
book with a fascinating account of the acculturation advice proffered to those cross-
ing the ethnic divide between indigenous and criollo culture. She persuasively argues
that the goal of such advice was to convince indigenous girls that on their path to mesti-
zaje they should avoid the cultural forms of the chola. Using the work of Rossana Bar-
ragan, Stephenson argues that the chola came to represent a woman of notable strength
and independence, capable of independent and successful market relations and marked
by sexual desire and availability. The goal of the Bolivian modernization project was to
insure that as acculturation took place, the ideal model for womanhood rejected the
chola model and adopted an idealized version of womanhood, clearly subordinated to
husband, dedicated to the care of the family. Cholas were women who refused to be
refashioned; they are examples of cultural resistance to the modernization projects of
national governments.
Stephenson identies the states modernization project in a variety of sources
including novels, hygiene, education and fashion. Her original combination of these
factors provides a new perspective on the exercise of power. Moreover, her analysis is
synthetic and deeply layered, providing no singular template. She concludes: the com-
620 HAHR / August
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plex ways in which pedagogical practices, fashion, and hygiene converge and reconverge
throughout the twentieth century suggest that there is no simple way to generalize
about the relation between modernity and identity in Bolivia (p. 156).
Stephenson is careful to emphasize the agency of Andean women. They are not
the unwitting tools of a central governments design for national integration. With
respect to indigenous education, Stephenson concludes that despite the desire of the
dominant groups to use the rural schools to produce acculturated mestizos: the schools
became an important vehicle with which the Aymara resisted repressive political pro-
grams (p. 117).
A powerful chapter on the politics of hunger completes the study. In it, Stephen-
son traces the historical battles between the subordinated indigenous population as
producers and providers of food and the dominant yet hostage criollo population
dependent on the labor and produce of the subordinated.
Gender and Modernity is a valuable contribution to our understanding of ethnic and
gender relations in Bolivia. Stephenson achieves an original reading of the complex role
of the state efforts to produce modernity and to utilize gender and ethnic cleavages to
enhance their project. She provides us with an appreciation of the challenges faced by
indigenous Bolivians to maintain their cultural identity and integrity in the face of a
design to mask ethnicity. This is a rich book, full of intriguing and original ideas, and a
must for students of modernization and social change.
susan c. bourque, Smith College
Peoples of the Gran Chaco. Edited by elmer s. miller. Native Peoples of the Americas.
Westport, Conn: Bergin & Garvey, 1999. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Notes.
Index. xii, 166 pp. Cloth, $65.00.
Historians interested in Native Americans will nd valuable the seven contributions
by anthropologists in this book. Examining several groups of the 260,000 indigenous
peoples of the Gran Chaco, most authors concentrate on developments of the 1980s
and 1990s.
The introduction by Jos Braunstein and Elmer S. Miller surveys the post-contact
ethnohistory of the Chaco, now in Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. They outline its
geography, ecology, and subsistence patterns. They provide new information on recent
Chaco missions and on increasing contacts between indigenous peoples and dominant
societies, mostly resulting from military clashes and wage labor. The environmental
decline of the Chaco in the late twentieth century has coincided with new Argentine,
Paraguayan, and Bolivian policies favoring indigenous autonomy.
John-ke Alvarsson explains how the Weenhayek (Mataco) of Bolivia and Argentina
have adapted aboriginal foraging patterns to urban life. He concludes that the pressures
of modernity have strengthened the Weenhayek as an ethnolinguistic group.
Stephen W. Kidd shows that the Enxet (pejoratively known as Lengua), threatened
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by development, have resisted assimilation and retained an indigenous morality. They
have struggled for the land essential to resist the forces of globalization that threaten
their culture (p. 57), although the ethnocentric assumptions of ofcial Paraguay are
troubling.
Silvia Mara Hirsch reveals the growing political sophistication of the Guaran, as
they identify themselves, of eastern Bolivia. They have evolved new leadership pat-
terns that provide an opportunity for their self-determination and, encouraged by cler-
ical and secular non-governmental organizations (NGOs), have experienced an ethnic
revival.
Marcela Mendoza examines family life among the western Toba, formerly hunter-
gatherers now largely sedentary. Her impressive contribution summarizes Toba history,
their relations with neighbors, and seasonal economic activities. She analyzes traditional
male and female roles and shamanic activity. On gender differences, she shows that
girls actually engaged in physical aggression more often than boys (p. 103), which
contradicts our traditional views about the adaptive value of males as more aggressive
than females (p. 104). She shows the survival of Toba patterns of aggression in seden-
tary settings.
Miller analyzes ethnic consciousness among eastern Toba, whose culture he has
investigated over the course of his distinguished career. Observing recent missionary
activity, he concludes that many Toba accept the Pentecostal message because it is com-
patible with a traditional shamanic ideology that stressed direct encounter with spiri-
tual powers (p. 114) and has provided a haven (p. 130) for Toba traditions.
Pablo G. Wright sees the Toba struggle to remain Toba through the experience of
Valentn Moreno, who moved from the Chaco to Buenos Aires in 1954 and with whom
Wright has maintained a close relationship since 1980. The biographical approach illu-
mines the nature of work, religion, adjustment to urban life, and a new Toba awareness
of other indigenous peoples.
Many contributors are unapologetic advocates for the people they study, applaud-
ing their struggles for human rights and access to land. Reassessing older assumptions,
Miller concludes that anthropologists can serve best as partners, not leaders, in this
process (p. 158).
Themes common to these articles include the positive though limited impact of
late-twentieth-century missions and other NGOs and the effective resistance of
Chaco cultures to the pressures of assimilation. Sadly one concludes with the con-
tributors that the possibilities for future reform are nite. To study the indigenous
peoples of the Chaco today, I can recommend no better starting point than this vol-
ume. Each essay is meritorious. The contributors represent several nations and a full
range of scholarly generations. The coherence of the ndings testies to the reliability
of the work.
james schoeld saeger, Lehigh University
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Beneath the Equator: Cultures of Desire, Male Homosexuality, and Emerging Gay
Communities in Brazil. By richard parker. New York: Routledge, 1999. Maps.
Tables. Figures. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. 280 pp. Cloth, $75.00. Paper.
In the last ve years there has been a mini-explosion of anthropological and literary
studies of same-sex eroticism in Latin America. In part this is due to the growing inte-
gration of gender into the categories and frameworks of analysis employed by scholars.
New research has reached beyond the unilateral investigation of women in Latin Amer-
ican society and culture to examine both hetero- and homo-social interactions, multiple
expressions of sexuality, and the ways in which notions of gender are mutable over time.
Parker, whose Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil (1991)
was one of the rst books in English to address some of these questions, now offers in
Beneath the Equator another valuable contribution to this trend by questioning time-
honored myths about the Brazils sexual economy. Instead of reifying the exotic tropical
other, this study carefully maps out the multiple manifestations of Brazilian homosex-
uality and the subcultures in which they operate. It then goes on to analyze their rela-
tionship to both a globalized economy and foreign cultural patterns that have pene-
trated and transformed national expressions of same-sex desire.
In Brazil an additional factor has contributed to the wealth of new sociological and
anthropological investigations about patterns of sexual behavior. The rapid increase in
the incidence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s required a much more sophisticated under-
standing of erotic interactions. Parker, as the Secretary General of the Brazilian Inter-
disciplinary AIDS Association, was at the forefront of a wave of new research projects.
He has employed the wealth of knowledge collected from a multitude of surveys and
studies to chart the changes in patterns of men who have sex with men. The result is a
book that vividly documents the contours of gay urban subculture in Rio de Janeiro and
Forteleza, another beach-front city in Brazils northeast, while offering an analysis of
the political economy of homosexuality. A generation after most Latin Americanists
have abandoned many core notions embedded in the controversial theories of eco-
nomic, political, and cultural dependency, Parker has imaginatively used these con-
structs to capture the complex dialectic between same-sex sexuality as it has evolved in
Brazil and as it has been transformed by the tidal wave of gay culture emanating from
the United States and Europe.
There is an almost general consensus among scholars of the various manifestations
of homosexuality in Brazil that the major paradigm that structures social and sexual
behavior closely mirrors dominant gender patterns in which men are seen as active
sexual partners and women as passive participants in erotic activities. Thus, many
effeminate men have traditionally sought out their masculine opposite for sexual
liaisons and engaged in receptive anal intercourse with them, reecting hegemonic bi-
polar social norms. In these relationships the effeminate bicha (fairy/faggot) is socially
stigmatized while his partner, in assuming the active inserter role, presumably maintains
his masculinity. In the post-World War II period, less gender-bound relationships
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developed among some urban middle-class Brazilian men, as general shifts in notions of
gender occurred. These men assumed an identity somewhat similar to contemporary
U.S. and Western European gay identities where sexual-object choice predominated
over sexual roles that were imitative of heterosexual norms. While both systems cur-
rently operate among middle-class men engaged in same-sex erotic activities in urban
areas, the active/passive, masculine/effeminate model still prevails among many rural
and urban working-class Brazilian men. The challenge of Brazilian AIDS activists, as
Parker documents in this work, has been to reach out to those men who assume these
differing sexual and social identities. It requires developing education and prevention
strategies that take into account the ambiguous and shifting self-formulations of men
who have sex with men but do not see themselves as gay.
Equally daunting was responding to this public health crisis during the Lost
Decade of the 1980s, when foreign debt obligations and run-away ination aug-
mented social tensions and weakened the countrys already precarious social service
structure. Parker argues that the impact of that decade and the neoliberal policies of
the 1990s have transformed sexual and social identities. Thousands of men have
slipped out of the country for better economic and personal opportunities abroad,
including many Brazilian transvestites who in recent years have even offered stiff com-
petition to Parisian and Italian female streetwalkers. Moreover, both the transnational
ow of individuals and the Americanized gay culture that has reshaped Brazilian sexual
identities have had an impact on the countrys politicized gay, lesbian, and transgen-
dered movement. An expanding gay-oriented consumer market has encouraged
increased visibility. That in turn has provoked media attention, political campaigns for
domestic partner benets, and gay and lesbian pride parades not dissimilar to celebra-
tions in San Francisco and New York, complete with rainbow ags and oats, although
on a much more modest scale.
In plotting the complex transformations of identity and behavior among men who
have sex with men that result from the intersection of world markets, local cultures, and
a international gay modality, Beneath the Equator joins the ranks of the best new works
about homosexuality in Latin America. It is also a perceptive analysis of the effects of
United States-dominated globalization on countries around the world, and, as such, it
reaches out to multiple audiences.
james n. green, California State University, Long Beach
Brazilian Legacies. By robert m. levine. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997. Map.
Notes. Index. ix, 209 pp. Paper $21.95.
Robert Levines Brazilian Legacies is an interpretive essay for the non-specialist; it
explores the legacies of history for contemporary Brazilian society. This is one of the
rst in a new series by M.E. Sharpe, aimed at an undergraduate or general audience. In
it, one of the United Statess most prolic and well-known Brazilianists brings his forty
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years of research and observation of Brazilian society to bear on the promise and the
problems of modern Brazil.
In chapter 1 Levine examines the impact of slavery on modern Brazil, arguing that
questions of color and race have been and are central to Brazilian society and culture. In
chapter 2 he discusses class divisions, and how they emerged and have been maintained
over time. In chapter 3 he explores a theme of insiders and outsiders, and roots that
trend in Portuguese colonial policy. Chapter 4, The Brazilian Way, looks at patron-
client relations and political corruption, linking them to a Brazilian political and cul-
tural history that has reduced the role and status of the citizen in politics, and to weak
national institutions that allowed the development of informal local powers. Chapters 5
through 7 examine the strategies that Brazilians have developed for coping with and
resisting this system, from religious beliefs to carnival to crime. The book concludes
with an essay, Towards a New Civil Society, in which the author outlines some of his
thoughts on the Cardoso presidency and the way that Brazil has been changing in the
last ten years.
Brazilian Legacies is in many ways a rewarding book. It is lled with the stories and
insights of its author, who has broad familiarity with the Brazilian northeast and the
center-south alike. The author has a sympathy for Brazilians and their daily struggle to
survive (whatever their social class), and an enthusiasm about his subject that makes
reading this book quite enjoyable. Many of the passages, including those on the Collor
impeachment, are gripping, especially for one who lived through the dramatic eco-
nomic reforms of the rst days of his presidency. Those alone make the book worth
reading.
Nevertheless, the book is frustrating: there is no clear framework here, nor any
clear argument. Instead this is a jumble of fascinating stories, anecdotes, and observa-
tions mixed with some of the historiography on Brazil written since World War II.
Much of the newer historiography does not seem well integrated with that of the older
tradition. For example, chapter 3, Outsiders, contains a great deal of new material on
women, children, gays, indigenous people, and rural migrants, yet the central organiz-
ing theme outsiders seems dated. Arguably, many of the people whom Levine terms
outsiders are subordinates in Brazilian society, but that is not the same as being an
outsider. Scholars have long shown that race, ethnicity, class, and gender intersect in
complex ways, but those intersections do not emerge here. Similarly, religious belief is
treated in a ways that seem contradictory: the religious movement of Antonio Consel-
heiro and his followers at Canudos is treated an example of resistance against oppres-
sion, while the Afro-Brazilian religion and liberation theology are simply coping mech-
anisms which the poor use to make their daily struggle manageable. Moreover, use of
the patron-client system by the poor counts as part of the system, but not as a coping
strategy.
These comments should not be taken to mean that Brazilian Legacies is without
merits. It is engagingly written and full of information about contemporary Brazil as
well as Brazilian history. It would work reasonably well as the last book in a Brazilian
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history class, allowing students to learn about the contemporary scene and debate the
merits of the arguments. It would also be a good book for non-specialist and Brazilian-
ists alike to read for an update on events in Brazil in the 1990s.
mary ann mahony, University of Notre Dame
A era do saneamento: as bases da poltica de sade pblica no Brasil. By gilberto hochman.
So Paulo: HUCITEC-ANPOCS, 1998. Tables. Bibliography. 261 pp. Paper.
How do political power and jurisdiction over public policy shift between state and fed-
eral government in Latin Americas largest country? Gilberto Hochmans A era do sanea-
mento offers an intriguing analysis of the development of federal authority over health
and hygiene in early-twentieth-century Brazil. This is not a history of health and
hygiene programs; instead, Hochman explores the campaign to build federal jurisdic-
tion over public health, and shows how this campaign contested the decentralization of
public power set by Brazils 1891 Constitution.
Hochman contends with the political outcomes of an emerging Brazilian con-
sciousness: in the face of several devastating epidemics and a growing awareness of the
extent of endemic disease in the countrys interior, the Brazilian medical community
realized that when one state invested in public health and its neighbors did not, that
states efforts were squandered. Contagious diseases did not respect the decentralized
boundaries of political power. This growing consensus about the need for national
health programs converged with the statist nationalism that emerged during the First
World War. Following the war, the public health and sanitation movement pushed the
federal government into creating a nationalized public health and sanitation program
that abrogated states rights.
The movement culminated in 1916 with a speech by Dr. Miguel Perreira declaring
that Brazil is a vast hospital and with a report by physicians Artur Neiva and Belissario
Penna condemning health conditions in Brazils interior and calling for the creation of a
federal Ministry of Education and Health (which would not happen until the Revolu-
tion of 1930). While rhetoric could not overcome regionalism and political inertia, dis-
ease could. After the 1918 inuenza epidemic claimed the life of the president, his
successor established the National Department of Public Health and gave it sole juris-
diction over public health and preventive medicine.
The most sophisticated element of Hochmans analysis is his handling of So
Paulo, the one state that remained outside of the federal health umbrella. The Paulistas
saw their own advanced programs as the locomotive of public health and sanitation,
raising the bar for the rest of Brazil. So Paulos ability to opt out of federal programs
created the impression that participation was voluntary and became the key to other
states collaboration: states could choose not to participate, but only So Paulo had the
resources to do so. Indeed, far from rejecting federal jurisdiction, So Paulo politicians
campaigned for its acceptance by other states in order to reduce the costs to So Paulo
of those states shortcomings.
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Hochman is more sympathetic to the sometimes authoritarian health projects of
the era than have been other scholars, who focus on those programs hostile approaches
to gender, race and class. Writing at a time of neoliberal assaults on public institutions,
Hochman sees generosity and idealism in the health projects of the era, and reects that
there are few moments in Brazilian history in which so much attention was paid to
improving public health.
A era do saneamento won Brazils National Association of Post-Graduate Research
in Social Sciences (ANPOCS) prize in 1996 and is highly deserving of translation into
English. There is no comparable work for understanding the politics of public health
or the challenges to regionalism in Brazils First Republic. Indeed, by showing the last
years of the First Republic to be a time of growing political centralization, Hochman
both challenges us to rethink the model of the Revolution of 1930 as a watershed and
invites us to look more closely at public health policy after 1930. Hochmans skillful
analysis of both public health and political centralization should make this book
widely read.
jerry dvila, Gustavus Adolphus College
Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in
Brazil. By jeffrey lesser. Latin American Studies/Race & Ethnicity. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Bibliography. Index. xvi,
281 pp. Cloth: $49.95. Paper, $17.95.
A homogenized Brazilian national identity could be achieved by recruiting white immi-
grants to bleach out the native multiracial masses, eventually creating a modern, Euro-
peanized society; thus spake the eugenics-intoxicated policy planners and the scholars
who followed their lead. Now here comes Jeffrey Lesser. Having previously explored
the non-white, non-black image imposed upon Jewish immigrants in Welcoming the
Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question, Lesser next put his emerging theoretical
framework at the service of the pathbreaking comparative study, Arab and Jewish Immi-
grants in Latin America: Images and Realities. The present work builds on this earlier
research, expanding the realm of immigration history into an exploration of the psycho-
jungle awaiting those who confuse biology with culture. Categorizing individuals accord-
ing to their racial origin, with its corollary belief that culture is biologically determined,
resulted in some astonishing non-sequiturs: the Portuguese discovery of both Brazil
and Japan would cause those two countries to develop along similar lines; or a supposed
biological link between Arab and Tup would allow contemporary Syrians and Lebanese
to blend effortlessly into a Brazilian identity.
Lesser examines serially the various phases of Brazils immigration policy. Nine-
teenth-century plans to import Chinese laborers to replace the soon-to-be-emancipated
slaves came to little effect but did establish the grounds for discourse over admission of
immigrants who were neither black nor white. An effort by League of Nations repre-
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sentatives to resettle Christian Assyrians in Brazil failed despite initial enthusiasm, as
nativists portrayed these refugees from Muslim Iraq as pawns of British imperialism.
Meanwhile, successful Arab immigrants to Brazil beneted from the perception of them
as insiders, because outwardly they looked like Brazilians, though they also partook of
outsider status, being neither black, white, nor yellow. This ideological disjunction,
claims Lesser, combined with the immigrants economic success, allowed them to carve
out a hyphenated identity for themselves despite the resistance of native Brazilians to
any dilution of national identity that might diminish the cherished vision of themselves
as Europeans.
The bulk of the book treats of the immigration of Japanese to Brazil. This migra-
tion was sponsored with equal vigor by Brazilian landowners and by the Japanese gov-
ernment, which was interested in ofoading its surplus farm population. Utilizing
Brazilian government archives, the press in Brazil and in the immigrants countries of
origin, as well as a wide range of secondary sources, Lesser takes us far beyond immi-
gration statistics and the policies that created them, to ransack the political, social, and
psychological dimensions of immigration by Japanese and the subsequent appearance of
their Brazilian-born nikkei offspring. Whiteness remained an important standard for
acceptance of immigrant groups and inclusion in the Brazilian race well into the
twentieth century. But as the Japanese immigrants endeavored to turn themselves into
acceptable and accepted Brazilians, Lesser argues, what it means to be white changed
from a racial to a cultural category. Ethnicity remained a bad word, but mestiagem led
to the creation of a multiplicity of hyphenated Brazilians (p. 5). Not only has no dis-
tinctive new Brazilian race emerged, but Lesser argues that Brazil remains a country
where hyphenated ethnicity is predominant yet unacknowledged. Instead of the elite
imposing a homogeneous national identity on immigrants, the immigrants and their
descendants altered the notion of what the nation truly was meant to be.
In a nal apotheosis, many Brazilians began looking to postwar Japan for the
model of a modern nation. Increasing numbers of nikkei began migrating to Japan:
between 1950 and 1990, 200,000 nikkei left Brazil for Japan, where at last they became
known as Brazilians; while one quarter that number of Japanese settled in Brazil.
Negotiations over national identity [are] far from over, (p. 165) Lesser remarks. The
author has moved the discussion of ethnicity substantially beyond its traditional bounds
with this study of the ways in which immigrants may renegotiate the national identity of
their host nations.
judith laikin elkin, University of Michigan
Claridad y el internacionalismo americano. By orencia ferreira de cassone.
Buenos Aires: Claridad, 1998. Index. 309 pp. Paper.
Revista Claridad appeared in Buenos Aires, usually on a monthly basis, between 1926
and 1941. It featured a wide range of essays and articles about and by major gures of
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the socialist and what might be called progressive Left in Argentina and Latin Amer-
ica. It was edited by a Spanish immigrant, Antonio Zamora, who wrote most of the edi-
torials and exerted a strong inuence over the content of the review. The revista was
closely associated with Argentinas Socialist party, but under Zamoras direction it
sought to maintain an independent position, unafliated with any particular political
group. While the revista was forced to cease publication due to a wartime shortage of
newsprint, the publishing house that was co-founded with it continues to exist and
indeed published the volume under review.
Ferreira de Cassone justies her study of Claridad by arguing that it was, among
other things, el rgano ms representativo del pensamiento de izquierda en nuestro
pas (p. 23). Given the extensive material provided by the revista, she chooses to focus
on the emphasis Claridad placed on revolutionary internationalism and Latin Ameri-
can solidarity in the face of European and North American imperialism. Important con-
tributors to Claridad in this regard were men like Jos Ingenieros, Manuel Ugarte,
Alfredo Palacios, and particularly Vctor Ral Haya de la Torre, all of whom shared a
vision of what has been described as continental nationalism.
The author begins with a general introduction of the revista and its importance as
well as some of the methodological difculties involved in studying such material within
the general framework of the history of ideas. She provides considerable context con-
cerning the cultural and publishing world in Latin Americas main center of such activ-
ity, Buenos Aires, and a description of the role of Zamora in establishing the enterprise;
in addition, she explains Claridads position with regard to the famous division in the
1920s between the writers of Boedo (a street in the working-class district of Buenos
Aires), with their social orientation, and the writers of Florida (the fashionable shopping
street in the heart of the city), with their more aesthetic literary interests, with Claridad
rmly in the camp of the former. This is followed with a description of the various col-
laborators and some of the nuts and bolts of the publication and its format. A section on
the editorial policy delineates the revistas position on various important issues of the
1920s and 1930s, including its general sympathy for the Bolshevik Revolution, if not for
Moscow-directed communism, its opposition to fascism and dictatorship, and its sup-
port for the Spanish Republican cause in the Civil War.
In the second half of the book, Ferreira de Cassone analyzes Claridads opposition
to imperialism, which begins with a strong condemnation of United Statess actions in
the hemisphere, but gradually moderates as Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal and
Good Neighbor policy take effect and as the Axis and the threat of fascism loom on the
horizon. Another chapter deals with the impact on Claridad of the University Reform
movement, with its continental scope and shared positions on such matters as opposi-
tion to dictatorship and imperialism. The revista deals with various aspects of the move-
ment during this period, including reports on international student conferences, and
features contributions from gures associated with the Reform.
Much of the latter third of the book is taken up with a detailed description and
analysis of how Claridad covered developments in other Latin American countries, usu-
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ally through essays and reports from natives of the countries in question. Peru receives
principal attention as the home of Aprismo and because various Peruvian leftists found
exile in Buenos Aires in these years. A conclusion argues that while the aspirations of
the socialist left have yet to be realized in Latin America, many of the issues raised in
publications like Claridad have become part of the national and continental dialogue
about such matters as the equitable distribution of resources and wealth, concerns with
human rights, and alternatives to the prevailing neoliberal model.
In analyzing Claridad, Ferreira de Cassone has performed a useful service. Most
scholars who have examined twentieth-century Latin American history have consulted,
to one degree or another, similar publications and can appreciate the difculties in try-
ing to organize and to make sense of such a large body of material covering a diverse
range of subjects. One might quibble with the authors decision to focus on the interna-
tional as opposed to the national aspects of the journal, but such an approach offers an
appeal to a wider audience than otherwise might be the case. Overall, the story of Clar-
idad is placed into a solid historical and historiographical context, buttressed with refer-
ence to a good range of secondary sources, especially in the rst half of the book.
Although there is some repetition and some of the lengthy lists of names might t bet-
ter into footnotes, overall the history of Claridad is told in a clear, engaging, and inter-
esting manner. In sum, this is a volume of considerable value for those interested in the
cultural, intellectual, and political history of both Argentina and Latin America during
the inter-war years.
richard j. walter, Washington University
Spiritual Bonre in Argentina: Confronting Current Theories with an Ethnographic Account
of Pentecostal Growth in a Buenos Aires Suburb. By daniel mguez. Latin American
Studies Series, no. 81. Amsterdam: Centro de Estudios y Documentacin
Latinoamericanos (CEDLA), 1998. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. viii, 204 pp.
Paper, $25.00.
This case study of a Pentecostal church in a poor suburb of Buenos Aires greatly
illuminatesif it does not bring closure tomuch of the ongoing debate about the
causes and consequences of Pentecostalism in Latin America. Daniel Mguez calls in
question the emphasis that writers have placed on Pentecostalism as essentially a func-
tion of structural change, whether the phenomenon is viewed primarily as reinforcing
traditional culture or supporting the modernization process. While he concedes that
some authors like Cecilia Mariz and Elizabeth Brusco have avoided this reductionism
by their attention to personal perceptions and initiatives, he criticizes the failure of
actor-centered scholars to report their ndings in a way that permits data taken from
specic social contexts to be used comparatively. Both structuralist and actor-centered
researchers have used too broad a conceptual brush to describe Pentecostals, distorting
rather than clarifying the nature of their development and, probably, overestimating
their social impact.
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Mguez compares his eld research with various theoretical models to demonstrate
the inadequacy of the prevailing constructs. He shows, for example, that Pentecostalism
has often grownor not growncontrary to theoretical expectation, and points out
that the supposed continuities between popular Catholicism and Pentecostalism fail to
recognize the complex processes that occur when individuals change religion. Further-
more, he contends that most studies of the movement rely too heavily on (usually
North American) stereotypes of Protestant and Latin cultures. Moreover, authors have
severely distorted local circumstances and individual perceptions by lumping together
in their studies groups with signicant social differences.
For Mguez, practice or structuration theory, especially as applied by Anthony
Giddens, provides a better model for explaining emergent Pentecostalism. While indi-
viduals act within the social framework imposed by their circumstances, they may exer-
cise a signicant degree of volition in determining whether and how to come to terms
with their perceived options. Mguezs ethnographic case studies help to demonstrate
the frequent disparity between the groups ideals and the way participants apply them.
In his use of a more revealing analytical method, Mguez in effect presents an instru-
mental conceptualization of Pentecostalism that allows it pragmatically to assume a
variety of forms and functions. Pentecostalism, Mguez concludes, has grown as part of
the marketplace of religious ideas that has ourished in a democratizing society. But the
phenomenon has far more implications for the future of Latin American religion than it
has for political or economic change.
Apart from demonstrating that studies of Latin American Pentecostals need much
more specicity, what does Mguez tell us that should guide future research? He con-
cludes that there are inherent limits on the potential for growth in the suburb of Villa
Eulalia (and by extension in Latin America). The effectiveness of Pentecostalism, the
solidarity it promotes among members, necessarily limits its appeal to outsiders. Mem-
bers of the group often feel the tensions of measuring up to high expectations and may
drop out. Others adherents are marginalized within the church because of their lack of
commitment or live with the anxiety of cognitive dissonance. Conversely, the sense of
personal dignity that members derive from their inclusion in the group may have lim-
ited signicance outside the congregation.
Mguezs family background in Argentine Protestantismhe is the son of a distin-
guished Methodist theologiangives him unusual insight into the nuances of his sub-
ject. The result is an incisive, authoritative study that is theoretically sound, well orga-
nized and clearly written. While much more about religious change in Latin America
needs investigation, Mguezs methods and conclusions need to inform future research
on Pentecostalism in the region.
everett a. wilson, Bethany College
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Desarrollo industrial y subdesarrollo econmico: el caso chileno (18601920).
By marcello carmagnani. Translated by silvia hernndez.
Introduction by eduardo cavieres f. Coleccin Sociedad y Cultura. Santiago:
Ediciones de la Direccin de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos; Centro de
Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, Departamento de Ciencias Historcas,
Universidad de Chile, 1999. Tables. Figures. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. 241 pp.
Paper.
This is a classic work. Originally published in 1971, the major reasons for reviewing
it are to notify Chileanists and students of modern Latin American economies that
they no longer need to consult it with an Italian dictionary in hand, and to reect on
what remains after so much time. Carmagnani made the decision, as he explains in a
brief comment, not to revise the work. Eduardo Cavieres helps maintains the works
value with an excellent introduction, placing it in the context of Chilean economic
historiography.
The core of the work consists of four lengthy essays followed by 22 appendixes
(anexos) and 17 graphs. The economic data that Carmagnani pulled together, from price
and wage series to government revenues and trade indices, remain fundamental. The
essays consist of two closely reasoned analyses of industrial formation, concentrating on
a series of census information from the 1890s to 1920. The most important sectoral
analysis focuses on the period with the best numbers, that is, from 1910 to 1919. These
two concentrated descriptions of numbers and their meanings are followed by a couple
of essays that are more expansive and reective: one on the origins and gradual success
of industrial protectionist views and another on Chiles insertion into the world econ-
omy from 1860 to the end of World War I.
Throughout these essays, Carmagnani asks the key questions of underdevelop-
ment: Why did Chile develop industry in the pattern it did? Why did these industries
lack dynamism? Why did they not become the center of economic growth rather than
the periphery of a trade-based economy? And nally, how did Chiles dependence on
Great Britain shape its own economic prospects? The essay on the rise of protectionist
sentiment and the obstacles it faced before gaining prominence is alone worth the price
of this book. Carmagnani demonstrates that protectionism had strong support by the
1890s and argues that it was triumphant and industries were receiving government sub-
sidies by 1920.
Camagnani offers insights on the absence of labor contracts and what that meant
for the demand side of growth, the nightmarish consequences of a government that
covered its bills by printing money, and the importance of Chiles balance of payments
as the key to its sorry economic record. Then, he proposes a theory that should have
received far more attention since he wrote this book. Many have argued that Chile took
a wrong turn at the start of the nitrate era, around 1880. Carmagnani makes the case
that linkages between Chile and Great Britain became seriously unbalanced only in the
1870s. Until then, despite its structural weaknesses, Chile had a balanced economy in its
international payments but was vulnerable to external shocks. After the late 1870s and
632 HAHR / August
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throughout what European historians call the Great Depression, that is, into the 1890s,
Britains role within Chile allowed the dominant power to pass on the costs of its own
troubled economy to a weaker partner. In making this argument, Carmagnani traces
out sectoral linkages rather than imperialist actors as the engines of dependence. After
the onset of the Great Depression, Chiles economy was never, in terms of international
payments, balanced again. Cycles of government indebtedness and transfer payments to
foreign investors led to a steady monetary devaluation and an ever more asymmetrical
relationship with foreign powers.
While the analysis stays close to key economic issues, it never becomes bogged
down in jargon of any kind. The works new accessibility will mean that a new genera-
tion of Latin American economic historians will pay attention to what it says.
michael monten, University of California, San Diego
International and Comparative
Bitter Fruit: The Story of an American Coup in Guatemala. By stephen schlesinger
and stephen kinzer. Introduction by john coatsworth. Foreword by richard a.
nuccio. The David Rockefeller Center Series on Latin American Studies. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography.
Index. xxxviii, 331 pp. Paper, $19.95.
Secret History: The CIAs Classied Account of its Operations in Guatemala, 19521954.
By nick cullather. Afterword by piero gleijeses. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999. Photographs. Maps. Appendixes. Notes. Index. xi, 142 pp. Cloth, $39.50.
Paper, $14.95.
In 1982 two inuential books dispelled any lingering doubts about the Central Intelli-
gence Agencys (CIA) involvement in the coup that deposed Guatemalan president
Jacobo Arbenz. Richard Immermans The CI A in Guatemala provided the scholarly
analysis of the agencys operations. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzers Bitter
Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, gave professors a less analyti-
cal but more engaging narrative that appealed to students. Both books, based on the
rst declassied documents of the governments operations, criticized the United States
for launching a covert operation against a popular and democratic government.
In the past 18 years, researchers have gathered and analyzed new evidence, rening
the interpretations of the Guatemalan revolution. Piero Gleijeses uncovered Guatemalan
documents and interviewed prominent actors, most notably Mara de Arbenz, the
widow of the deposed president. His book, Shattered Hope: The United States and the
Guatemalan Revolution, 19441954, focused on the internal dynamics of the revolution,
providing the intellectual counterpart to Immermans analysis of the Washington for-
eign policy apparatus. Gleijeses, an admirer of Arbenz, produced irrefutable evidence of
Arbenzs gravitation toward the Communist Party and ideology, shattering previous
Book Reviews / International Period 633
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portrayals of Arbenz as an economic nationalist or reformer. He also reassigned a por-
tion of responsibility to the Guatemalan military, which ultimately betrayed Arbenz and
allowed Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to march unopposed into Guatemala City. Jim
Handy mined the archives of Guatemalas Agrarian Reform Institute to produce a
sophisticated analysis of Arbenzs agrarian reform. Revolution in the Countryside demon-
strates how Arbenzs agrarian reform triggered conicts far beyond the United Fruit
Company (UFCO) and the United States government. The agrarian reform generated
conict within and between indigenous communities, alienated Guatemalas landown-
ers, and disturbed the Guatemalan military because it disrupted the order that had long
prevailed in the countryside.
Bitter Fruit remains a beautifully written, fast-paced narrative with colorful per-
sonality proles and dramatic scenes. For that reason, it will remain on many college
syllabi. However, professors will now have to use it with caution because many of the
original interpretations of people and events have changed substantially since its rst
publication in 1982. Bitter Fruit, though billed as an expanded edition of the original,
is not revised or updated to take into account the new evidence and interpretations. The
authors only changed the title from The Untold Story to The Story of an American
Coup in Guatemala. Stephen Kinzer wrote an afterword, but the body of the narrative
remains the same. Given that Schlesinger and Kinzer focus on CIA operations in
Guatemala, one would think that they would have consulted Nick Cullathers Secret
History: The CI As Classied Account of its Operations in Guatemala, 19521954. Cul-
lathers history, published originally and exclusively within the CIA, was released along
with over 1,200 documents to the National Archives in 1997. Schlesinger and Kinzer
concluded, however, that the declassied documents revealed nothing that would com-
pel them to alter their narrative. According to historian John H. Coatsworth, who
wrote the introduction to this expanded edition, this new information tends to conrm
rather than alter Bitter Fruits account of events (p. xi).
While some of Bitter Fruits general conclusions may remain intact, recent
research calls into question Schlesinger and Kinzers characterization of important
events and people. They maintain their original position on Arbenzs ideology, arguing
that Arbenzs primary ideology was nationalism and that accusations that Arbenz was a
communist dupe were farfetched(pp. 60 61). Their characterizations of Arbenzs
ideology and his program lose credibility in the wake of Piero Gleijeses. Based on
interviews with Arbenzs widow, Jos Manuel Fortuny and other Communist leaders,
Gleijeses concluded that although Arbenz did not join the Guatemalan Communist
Party until 1957, he considered himself a communist during the last two years of his
administration.
Arbenz apologists have long felt compelled to deny Arbenzs communist inclina-
tions to maintain the case against the CIA. Yet Gleijeses, an open admirer of Arbenz
and his program, explains how and why Arbenz believed that the triumph of commu-
nism in Guatemala and around the world was both inevitable and desirable. To reach
that stage, Arbenz and other Latin American communists believed that Guatemala had
634 HAHR / August
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to pass through a capitalist stage in its inevitable evolution toward socialism. Hence, the
agrarian reform was indeed designed to make Guatemala into a modern capitalist state,
as Schlesinger and Kinzer argue, but that did not make Arbenz a capitalist. Arbenzs
long-term objective, as his opponents in UFCO and the CIA alleged, was the creation
of a communist state.
Schlesinger and Kinzer maintain some positions that are no longer tenable. They
argue, for example, that the Czech weaponry carried on board the Alf hem and con-
scated by the Guatemalan Army in May 1954 was intended solely for the Guatemalan
Army(p. 153). However, Arbenzs closest political associates have conrmed that a por-
tion of the Alfhem weapons were to be used to arm workers militias. Schlesinger and
Kinzer insist that the Americans trumped up the charges about the workers militias in
order to prove their case about a communist conspiracy. But the Americans did not lie
in this case; at least a portion of the arms were intended for the workers.
None of this justies the American intervention, but assessing responsibility for
the collapse of the Arbenz regime hangs in the balance. In the Bitter Fruit account,
the CIA orchestrated the counterrevolutionary movement on behalf of The Over-
lord, or the United Fruit Company. After an inept and bumbling covert campaign,
spearheaded by a poorly-trained army of only 150 men, Arbenz simply resigned.
According to Schlesinger and Kinzer, Arbenz did not ght because he was never
more than he seemed to bea bourgeois reformer whose ideology did not extend
beyond basic precepts of nationalism and the stimulation of domestic industry and
agriculture (p. 198). It is now clear that Arbenz was a communist who did not ght
because he did not have an army or workers militias to lead into battle. He failed in
his gamble to arm the workers militias, and the army, even knowing that it would
win, refused to ght because the ofcers did not want a direct military confrontation
with the United States.
The academic community should be grateful for the republication of Bitter Fruit
by Harvard University Press, for it clearly sets a high literary standard to which other
historians should aspire. It is disappointing that Schlesinger and Kinzer did not engage
the new evidence and revise their narrative accordingly. None of the new works by
Gleijeses, Handy, or Cullather are cited in the text or notes. As a result, the depiction of
some events and people in Bitter Fruit is either inaccurate or misleading.
The academic community should also be grateful to Nick Cullather, an associate
professor of history at Indiana University, for reviewing the CIAs declassied docu-
ments and producing a carefully constructed history of the CIAs operations in Guatemala.
After graduating with a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1992, Cullather joined
the history staff of the CIA. The CIA had just launched an openness initiative,
promising to lift the veil of secrecy which keeps intelligence and espionage in the shad-
ows of history(p. viii). Cullather and seven other historians, hired to write internal his-
tories of major covert actions, formed the center of the openness campaign. When
offered complete access to the agencys les, Cullather asked for an assignment to the
Guatemalan operation. According to Cullather, the history was never intended to be a
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full account or an ofcial version of the campaign. It was meant to stand alone
only as a training manual, a cautionary tale for future covert operators (p. xiv).
Cullather received Top Secret clearance and had access to all of the records he
needed. Over 260 boxes of material had already been found in Job 79-01025A, over
180,000 pages. Ironically, the collection of documents had been assembled as a result of
a lawsuit led on behalf of Schlesinger and Kinzer by the American Civil Liberties
Union. Confronted with a nearly unmanageable cache of documents, Cullather chose
to limit the scope of his research by eliminating research on the cost of the operation as
well as the radio propaganda effort known as SHERWOOD. The cost could not be
ascertained with certainty, and David Atlee Phillips had already written about the pro-
paganda campaign in his book.
Cullather completed research and writing within a year of his hiring. The brief
account he wrote was eventually released to the National Archives, with a small portion
of declassied CIA documents on the Guatemalan affair. Cullather had hoped for the
release of a signicant portion of the CIA papers, but the agency, having lost interest
in its openness campaign, released only one percent of the total collection. Even Cul-
lathers account was excised and censored by the agency. These excisions, reproduced in
this Stanford University edition, reveal the agencys obsession with secrecy and leave
readers still begging for the complete story. In any case, Cullathers Secret History is the
only account based on the complete collection of CIA documents, over 180,000 pages.
Schlesinger and Kinzer, in contrast, reviewed only 1,000 pages of documents released
by the State Department, Defense Department, and the FBI.
Fortunately, Cullather did not produce an ofcial history to whitewash the
agencys covert operations. His research exposed the many weaknesses in the agencys
campaign, including chronic lapses in security, the failure to plan beyond the opera-
tions rst stages, the Agencys poor understanding of the intentions of the Army, the
PGT (Guatemalan Workers Party), and the government, the hopeless weakness of
Castillo Armass troops, and the failure to make provisions for the possibility of defeat
(p. 109). Moreover, while PBSUCCESS succeeded in removing a government, it failed
to install an adequate substitute (p. 113).
Cullather also concluded that the United Fruit Company played a minor role in
the decision-making process. He argues that the CIA recognized Guatemala as a serious
threat even before Arbenz expropriated the companys property. According to Cul-
lather, the threat to American business was a minor part of the larger danger to the
United States overall security (p. 37). In Cullathers account, United Fruit is not the
overlord of the operation but a tool used by the CIA to remove a perceived security
threat. Once the companys usefulness expired, the Eisenhower administration pro-
ceeded with its suspended antitrust action, which ended in 1958 with a consent decree
that forced the company to divest of its Guatemalan holdings (p. 118).
Cullathers account is in line with recent research on the Guatemalan revolution. It
is signicant that Piero Gleijese wrote the afterword to Secret History, giving the
account his approval by praising Cullathers intellect and integrity. Cullathers research
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in the CIA les conrms that the UFCO played a minor role in the Guatemalan
tragedy. He prefaces his account with a quote culled from Gleijeses interview with Jos
Manuel Fortuny, who concluded: They would have overthrown us even if we had
grown no bananas (p. 7). For those who want to believe that the CIA overthrew
Arbenz simply to protect a banana company, Bitter Fruit is required reading, and a great
read at that. For those who want a full account of the complex array of factors involved
in the Guatemalan affair, Cullathers Secret History has now been added to the required
reading list.
paul dosal, University of South Florida
The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s.
By daniela spenser. Foreword by friedrich katz. American Encounters/Global
Interactions. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Photographs. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. xiv, 254 pp. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $17.95.
Multiarchival research has been the hallmark of thorough scholarship in the eld of for-
eign relations for a long time, but in recent years this methodological dimension of
diplomatic history has received a boost, becoming a kind of litmus test for new work in
the discipline. Daniela Spensers The Impossible Triangle is a ne example of an ambitious
international research agenda yielding an authoritative account. The densely inter-
woven texture of history produced in this fascinating study is the result of a far-ung
search for evidence illuminating the foreign policies of three nations, Mexico, the
Soviet Union, and the United States, during a tumultuous and pivotal decade.
The importance of delving into many repositories in many countries in order to
write comprehensive accounts of how nations relate has been enhanced and encouraged
by several developments. The most newsworthy is the opening of new troves of old
documents in the former Soviet Union, among many other places where historians have
been unwelcome until the last few years. Some of the most engaging material presented
in The Impossible Triangle reposed in two archives in Moscow until Spenser dug it out.
This information on spicy topics such as the secret travels of Comintern agents and the
social lives of Soviet ambassadors, combines with lively accounts from the Mexican,
British, and U.S. diplomatic records to produce a montage of cloak-and-dagger diplo-
macy. The memoirs of colorful international radical activists and editorial prose from a
wide range of periodicals in three languages augment the diverse and commanding
research that is the major contribution of the volume.
Spensers book belongs to a new series, edited by Gilbert Joseph and Emily Rosen-
berg, which has the stated goal of encouraging multiarchival approaches. The series
seeks to examine the complex ways that power works across international borders and
across different cultural domains, and to scrutinize historical narratives with an eye to
their representational character, their mutability and mutual contradictions. The
Impossible Triangle pursues these objectives masterfully, delineating the lines of inuence
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and illusion that motivated and restrained ties between Mexico, the USSR, and the
USA. The organization of the book itself evokes the textual dissonance between histor-
ical accounts that postmodern analysts underline. This book is divided into three sec-
tions, and Spenser relates the same basic story three times, with a chapter rst on United
States policy, then one on Soviet policy, followed by a chapter on Mexican responses to
the two competing giants. The effect is vaguely like that of a Borges novel, as the events
play out three different ways. Unfortunately, the tripartite organization is sometimes
difcult to follow, with a particular event or individual often being mentioned, some-
times several times, before being explained in a later reference. The staccato organiza-
tion of the book also undermines the natural plot of the history, reducing its page-
turning qualities.
Lacking introductory chapters on the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, the book
assumes a good deal of prior knowledge on the part of the reader about these events and
their aftermath, which limits its appeal to a general audience. And although the content
of the book is the stuff of spy novels, the style is not, lacking much sense of drama.
The Impossible Triangle is an important contribution to our understanding of Mex-
icos tangled post-revolutionary diplomacy and the Soviet Unions internationalist ambi-
tions during the same period. Its treatment of the origins of the Good Neighbor policy
in the United States is not as strong, but that is a subject voluminously examined by
others, whereas the interrelationship between U.S. policy and the policies of revolu-
tionary Mexico and Soviet Russia is new territory. On that ground, this book succeeds
remarkably well, setting a high standard of globe-trotting historical inquiry that stu-
dents of foreign relations would do well to emulate.
eric paul roorda, Bellarmine College
USA und Mittelamerika: Die Auenpolitik von William J. Bryan, 19131915.
By ralph dietl. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1996. Notes. Bibliography. Index.
496 pp. Paper.
This study analyzes U.S. Secretary of State William J. Bryans Latin America policy
from 1913 to 1915, a period in which the Woodrow Wilson administration confronted
the Mexican Revolution, as well as civil wars in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican
Republic. Inuenced by Arthur S. Link, Dietl portrays Bryan as the key architect of the
initial idealist phase of Wilsonian diplomacy. In contrast to the Dollar Diplomacy
that preceded this period, Dietl argues, Bryan and Wilson elevated the ideal of foster-
ing representative government in Latin America to a key, although not exclusive, posi-
tion in the formulation of U.S. policy. According to Dietl, although limited in the quest
of this ideal by the perceived strategic imperatives of the Monroe Doctrine, Bryans
Latin America policy amounted to an international version of Midwestern populism.
Rooted in isolationism as well as a deep-seated fear of Eastern nancial circles, it sought
to limit European inuence in Latin America as well as U.S. intervention on behalf of
big business. Dietl contends that Bryans resignation as Secretary of State in 1915
638 HAHR / August
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allowed the Anglophile and pro-business wing of the Democratic Party to prevail. Soon
thereafter, Robert Lansings Department of State reversed course and embroiled the
United States in a series of costly conicts throughout the globe. In effect, Dietl claims,
the Bryan years constituted a hiatus in an era marked by the aggressive defense of U.S.
economic interests in Latin America.
Dietl begins his argument in four introductory chapters devoted to Bryans opposition
to the War of 1898, his anti-imperialist candidacy for president, his advocacy of interna-
tional arbitration of disputes, and his role in the Wilson administration. The following
chapters discuss these four case studies of Bryans foreign policy in Nicaragua, the Domini-
can Republic, Haiti, and Mexico. The treatment of the rst three of these cases remains
brief, while Dietls analysis of U.S. intervention in the Mexican Revolution takes up a third
of the book. The nal chapter focuses on Bryans isolationist position toward World War I.
This book leaves much to be desired. While Dietl argues persuasively that Bryan
attempted to serve as an apostle of peace, his own examples demonstrate that isolation-
ist intentions all too often translated into interventionist actions. It was the Wilson-
Bryan tandem that sought to teach Latin Americans how to elect good men, and this
team was at least as ready to use force as the preceding Taft administration. Not sur-
prisingly, two of the most ignominious example of U.S. imperialism in Latin America
the occupation of Veracruz and the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty that destroyed the Central
American treaty systemoccurred under Bryans watch. Dietls argument that these
numbers forestalled even more aggressive policies appears a feeble attempt to defend
Bryan. Moreover, the book provides an overabundance of background information that
proves tedious to the specialist and confusing to the lay reader. Concerned primarily
with U.S. diplomacy, it does not yield any new insights on Latin American responses to
Bryans policies. Finally, a myriad of minor factual and spelling errors concerning Latin
American leaders and historical processes create the impression that Dietl did not care-
fully consider the impact of Bryans policies on those most affected by themthe gov-
ernments and people of the Latin American countries.
In sum, this book adds to our understanding of the complexity of the formulation
of U.S. foreign policy during the early twentieth century. However, it fails to draw the
inevitable conclusion from the material it presents: that Bryans Quixotic quest to sub-
stitute political principle for dollars and bullets did not slow U.S. interventionism.
While this book should prove interesting to historians of Wilsonian diplomacy, it adds
little to our understanding of the presence of el coloso del norte in Latin America.
jrgen buchenau, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
The Second Century: U.S.Latin American Relations Since 1889. By mark t. gilderhus.
Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2000. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvi,
282 pp. Cloth, $55.00. Paper, $21.95.
As one of the leading scholars of U.S.Latin American relations, Mark Gilderhus has
heard the complaint before: for those who teach inter-American relations on a regular
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basis, nding a good, single-volume synthesis of the most important scholarship on the
subject is often a frustrating search. In an effort to at least partially address that concern,
Gilderhus has produced a ne brief book that not only summarizes the most important
events and issues which have made up the relationship between the United States and
Latin America since the 1880s but also the debates and interpretations through which
historians have attempted to dene those relations.
Gilderhus begins his study with the First International American Conference held
in 1889. During the 1880s and 1890s the United States began to shift its diplomatic
endeavors away from the reactive, improvisational style so characteristic of the imme-
diate post-Civil War era and toward a more systematic, expansive approach and the
1889 conference was the rst concrete example of this new diplomacy in regards to
Latin America (p. 2). Successive chapters take the reader through the early twentieth
century uses of gunboat- and dollar-diplomacy, the Good Neighbor policy, Cold War
relations between the United States and Latin America, and conclude with the Clinton
Administrations struggles with NAFTA, drug trafcking, environmental issues, and
immigration. The focus of the study is on inter-American political and economic rela-
tions, though social and cultural interchanges are not entirely ignored. Gilderhus is
clear about the main approaches he uses in telling his story. First, he examines the
goals and tactics of the United Statesthe nature of hegemony in the Western
Hemisphere. Second, he looks to illuminate the responses of Latin Americathe
often nationalistic reactions to unwanted dependencies upon the Colossus of the
North. Finally, Gilderhus seeks to dene the place of U.S.Latin American relations
within the larger contexts of politics and economics (p. xi).
As a synthesis, Gilderhuss book naturally relies exclusively on secondary literature
as its source of information. Unlike many other studies of this type, however, the author
truly allows the historians he cites to have their say. Rather than merely summarizing
the important points from the relevant monographs and articles, Gilderhus quotes
freely from authors such as Louis Prez, Stephen Rabe, Gaddis Smith, Peter H. Smith,
Frederick B. Pike, Walter LaFeber, John Coatsworth, and Victor Bulmer-Thomas. The
result is not, however, a mish-mash of quotations, one after the other. Instead, Gilder-
huss approach allows the reader to see how historians work: how they dene the
signicant historical issues; what evidence they use to support their points; how and
why they disagree; and, nally, how this sometimes slow-moving, sometimes rancorous,
but always essential process lies at the heart of the historians task of making history
valuable and meaningful for todays world. For example, in one section of the book
LaFeber, Robert Beisner, and Michael Hunt examine the question of what forces drove
Americas foreign policy during the late 1800s. LaFeber looks at trade and production
statistics to emphasize the economic underpinnings of that policy; Beisner studies the
political foundations, arguing that U.S. policy was too amateurish at the time to have
the focus and power described by LaFeber, and that economics was but one aspect of
Americas diplomacy; while Hunt takes an in-depth look at the intellectual and cultural
evidence of the late 1800s to discover what he calls Americas diplomatic ideology,
640 HAHR / August
HAHR 80.3_08 BookReview(569-648 8/4/00 3:30 PM Page 640
which included denite strains of racism, anti-revolutionary attitudes, and an often
arrogant denition of Americas mission in the world (pp. 57). As Gilderhus sug-
gests in his conclusion, participants in the next century of U.S.Latin American rela-
tions would do well to consider that those relations are not often given to monocausal
explanations and that a careful consideration of the varied evidence and aspects relating
to inter-American affairs is essential to understand both U.S. goals and Latin American
responses.
As with any project of this sort which tries to bring together such a vast body of lit-
erature certain gaps and problems inevitably crop up. Despite the fact that Gilderhus
does not ignore the social and cultural aspects of U.S.Latin American relations, they
are often thrust into the background. The role of racism and cultural stereotypes in
U.S. policy formulation, for example, is sketchy. In addition, Gilderhuss attention to
the Latin American side of the relationship is sporadic; we learn much more about U.S.
goals than Latin American responses. Finally, the brief nature of the book sometimes
works against the authors goal of examining the historiography of inter-American rela-
tions. In the section dealing with interwar diplomacy, for example, Michael Hogans use
of corporatist theory is mentioned, but this complex approach is never truly dened.
Gilderhus is clearly aware of these problems, and his extensive endnotes and bibliogra-
phy are ample roadmaps for the student or scholar seeking additional information. As
such, this book admirably fullls its task of providing the reader with a solid and infor-
mative summary of the second century of U.S.Latin American relations.
michael l. krenn, University of Miami
Puerto Rican Women and Work: Bridges in Transnational Labor.
Edited by altagracia ortiz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.
Tables. Notes. Index. xi, 249 pp. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $19.95.
This book is a collection of essays, most of which were previously published or form
part of a larger project, which collectively and with the assistance of the editors adroit
introduction propose to construct the history of Puerto Rican working women on the
island and in the United States. With this goal in mind, the book is organized as fol-
lows: Eileen Boris writes on the needlework industry in Puerto Rico from 1920 to 1945;
Altagracia Ortiz on garment workers in New York City from 1920 to 1980; Virginia
Snchez Korrol on substitute auxiliary teachers in New York City in the fties and six-
ties; Alice Coln-Warren on female employment in the mid-Atlantic states in the
1970s; Carmen Prez-Herranz on garment workers in Mayagez, Rincn, and Aasco
in the early eighties; Marya Muoz-Vzquez on female leadership in the CPNRS
(Comit Pro-Rescate de Nuestra Salud), formed in Mayagez in the late 1980s to
demand a safe work environment; Rosa M. Torruellas, Rina Benmayor, and Ana Juarbe
on workfare mothers who participated in New Yorks Puerto Rican Studies Center lit-
eracy program in the late eighties; and Geraldine J. Casey on clerical workers in the
early 1990s at the University of Puerto Rico in Ro Piedras. The volume seeks to place
Book Reviews / International Period 641
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Puerto Rican womens labor in the context of colonial capitalism, immigration to the
United States, and Latin Americas work culture patterns.
The research for this volume in each and every case meets the most rigorous aca-
demic standards, as do for the most part authors expositions of the historiographical
debates within which they wish to insert their work. Through Prez-Herranz inter-
views with 157 factory women on the western part of the island, for example, we learn
that garment workers developed strategies to cope with stress at work and home that
were peculiar to their social upbringing and life experience. These included avoiding
the company-sponsored union ( ILGWU) for conict solving, forming family networks
in the workplace, and recruiting the aid of kin to meet obligations at home. Although
unquestionably proletarianized and actively braving the consequences of world capital-
ism, these women, Prez-Herranz suggests, continue to rely on traditional support sys-
tems to face the day-to-day difculties.
Similarly, Torruellas, Benmayor, and Juarbe document the empowering effect for
13 welfare mothers in an adult-learner collective of attempting to comply with the Fam-
ily support Act of 1988. Contrary to Linda Chvezs belief that Puerto Rican women on
public assistance lack purpose, the three authors record their subjects conviction that
they have been denied their cultural citizenship rights when the culturally valued task
of motherhood is not considered work by government agents.
A nal example of ne scholarship within an explicit historiographical context is
Muoz-Vsquezs account of the grassroots efforts of the workers in Guanajibo-Castillo
Industrial Park to receive compensation for ailments induced by toxic emissions and to
secure a safe environment in the future. In promoting their cause in the media and deal-
ing with government agencies and plant supervisors, the female leadership of the ad hoc
health committees developed political skills that promoted alternative conceptualiza-
tions of social activism.
My only criticism of this book is that it is dated. Even when one takes into account
that it was published nearly four years ago, the absence of any kind of reference to glob-
alization or neoliberalism is suspect. I am not advocating indiscriminately throwing
about the current buzzwords for the latest round of unbridled capitalism and classical
economics. Rather, I am suggesting that the book would prot from situating Puerto
Ricos relationship with the United States in the context not of colonialism, but of global
markets. In either case, however, the point is convincingly madePuerto Rican women
were the vanguard of the transnational labor force we are so familiar with today.
teresita martnez-vergne, Macalester College
The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 Present.
By kenneth pomeranz and steven topik. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharp, 1999.
Bibliography. Index. xii, 256 pp. Cloth, $34.95. Paper, $23.95.
Using a series of vignettes, Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik seek to elaborate upon
the social dimensions of trade and economic activity. They argue that markets are . . .
642 HAHR / August
HAHR 80.3_08 BookReview(569-648 8/4/00 3:30 PM Page 642
socially embedded and socially constructed (p. xiv). In order to support this notion, we
are presented with narratives ranging in time from the ancient Greeks to the Marlboro
man. The resulting work is similar to a collection of documents for a world history survey.
At once reminiscent (at least in intent) of the edited collection of Arjun Appadurai
and the recent detailed work of A.G. Frank, this volume is neither as theoretically chal-
lenging as the former nor as intricate or expansive as the latter. In fact, the authors
treatment of markets, transportation, drugs and other commodities may have more in
common with James Burkes television series, Connections, although less evocative, infor-
mative or entertaining.
While they reject a Eurocentric teleology (p. xiv), Pomeranz and Topik cannot
avoid a heavy emphasis on Europe and Europeans. What emerges most clearly from
this collection is a growing dominance of Western supply, demand, culture, and foreign
policy. Fully three-quarters of the text treats relations between the West and the rest,
with England playing a pivotal role.
Latin Americanists will nd familiar gures throughout, yet the presentation can be
somewhat disturbing. A discussion of Aztec traders closes with the usual reference to
Spanish conquest and destruction. One hundred pages later, in a vignette on guano, we
receive word of the role of disease. Another twenty pages later, in an essay on African slav-
ery, we learn that ten million Africans crossed the Atlantic in response to the Amerindian
depopulation resulting from the Spanish introduction of small pox and measles. Spanish
American silver receives similar treatment, while Brazilian gold is ignored. Dyewood,
sugar, cacao, coffee, tobacco, and coca all receive mention, but largely in reference to
European markets. There is little of the social, ecological or demographic impact on local
producers, unless the reader is willing to ip continuously back and forth across dozens of
pages to grasp the frequent cross-references within the text.
What originally began as a series of columns in World Trade on the origins of the
global economy carries no more force of argument as a unied whole. That warfare
and economic growth . . . are not contradictory or what Grace Slick felt about the
Vietnam War (p. 152) are as meaningful as the authors observation that success . . .
came to the successful, not necessarily to the most virtuous, hardworking or clever (p. xv).
For a more thorough rendering of this case, see David Landess Wealth and Poverty of
Nations. Taken together with the absence of footnotes throughout, the scholarly value
of this book may be somewhat less than its declared sale price.
david j. weiland, Utah State University
Business History in Latin America: The Experience of Seven Countries.
Edited by carlos dvila and rory miller. Translated by garry mills and
rory miller. Liverpool Latin American Studies, New Series 1. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 1999. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xiv., 241 pp. Paper.
The eld of Latin American business history remains at an incipient stage of develop-
ment, but this collection of essays offers an important assessment of its accomplish-
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ments thus far, as well as suggestions for future research agendas. The authors offer
some fairly coherent observations about business history in the seven countries that
they examine. They agree that the level of development of business history varies dra-
matically from country to country, with Brazil and Mexico leading the list while Chile
and Venezuela appear near the bottom. The essays also stress certain common limita-
tions in the business historiography of the region. While there is general agreement
that social and economic histories have contributed to a better understanding of busi-
ness, the authors are critical of the focus on dependency and imperialism, which typied
these works in the 1960s and 1970s. That focus on externalities, most of the authors
believe, stereotyped Latin American business elites as weak and prone to domination by
foreign capitalists, and discouraged more thorough research on local corporations.
They are also critical of the fact that even as more researchers turn to the rm as the
focal point of their interests, most have failed to apply the methodologies developed by
such noted business historians as Alfred Chandler. While recognizing these shortcom-
ings, the essayists do an impressive job of leading the reader through the literature on
the subject.
Most of the essays, especially those by Ral Garca Heras (Argentina), Rory Miller
(Peru), Colin Lewis (Brazil), Luis Ortega (Chile), and Carlos Dvila (Colombia) pro-
vide effective surveys of the literature that include not only the narrow base of works
strictly concerned with business, but the broader range of works in economic and social
history as well as those from other disciplines that have contributed to our understand-
ing of corporate history. The articles also provide some limited observations and sug-
gestions about archival materials although the emphasis is on secondary literature.
While it would be difcult to summarize the research agendas for seven countries, there
seems to be a consensus on the need to focus on individual rms and their institutional
development, the history of business associations, and the legal and economic environ-
ment in which corporations developed in each country.
The one signicant disappointment in this collection is the essay by Mario Cerutti
on Mexico. Cerutti notes that in the last three decades Mexico developed an impressive
business historiography; he supports this assertion with a sixteen-page bibliography, but
the essay itself is only ten pages long. Because of its brevity the article offers few
specics to guide the reader through this rich array of materials. As a group the essays
provide limited treatment of the literature from labor historians, despite the fact that
labor has been a central formative factor in the evolution of Latin American business
enterprises. Finally, while the criticism of works on developmentalism and imperialism
is warranted, it is also true that the concern with the economic, social, and political
effects of private enterprise, typical of research concerned with Latin America, has
given business history an immediacy and import that contrasts positively with studies
that concern themselves exclusively with the internal working of corporations, as if they
operated in splendid isolation from the world around them. But these are essentially
quibbles with what is a valuable addition to business historiography that will guide
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scholars and students through the existing literature and encourage and direct future
research.
thomas f. obrien, University of Houston
Deepening Democracy? The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru.
By kenneth m. roberts. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Tables. Figures.
Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvi, 370 pp. Cloth, $55.00. Paper, $19.95.
Kenneth M. Robertss book is one of a handful of political science studies to take into
consideration structural and sociological factors that have shaped and constrained the
Latin American Lefts political project. Its argues that as a wave of transitions from
authoritarian rule swept across Latin America in the 1980s, the idea of deepening
democracy emerged as a guiding principle of the political Left and social movements
in much of the region. Roberts denes deepening democracy as the intensication of
popular sovereignty in the political sphere, that is, moving from hierarchical forms of
elitist or bureaucratic control to forms of popular self-determination by means of more
direct participation in the decision-making process or more effective mechanisms for
holding elected representatives and public ofcials accountable to their constituents
(p. 30). Particularly appealing is Robertss argument that the failure of efforts to
deepen democracy is attributable to problems of collective action and political coordi-
nation that arise in the process of translating popular social majorities into political
majorities through democratic reforms, especially considering that this process is tak-
ing place while the state has adopted neoliberal policies. To prove this thesis, Roberts
studies the cases of Chile and Peru. His selection for comparative analysis is especially
interesting since he takes polar opposite cases: the Chilean one highlights the ambigu-
ous nature of success for the Left in contemporary democracies; and the Peruvian case
provides Latin Americas most striking and unmitigated failure of the democratic Left
in recent times.
Historians will be concerned by Robertss ambiguous and ahistorical denition of
the Left; however, Deepening Democracy? seems to be at its best when it concentrates
on describing the ins and outs of the 1990s. Part 1, Theoretical Considerations,
although suggestive, suffers from theoretical abstraction, unhelpful use of political models
and jargon. The introductory chapters to each country (chapters 4 and 7)taking the
story from the 1920s to the 1970sare likely to be more useful to beginners than spe-
cialists. When we reach more recent timesthe true core of the bookthe discussion
becomes altogether richer and more nuanced. According to the author, the cases of
Chile and Peru demonstrate that the inability of the Left to mobilize social and political
opposition to neoliberalism has been a poignant symbol of its failure to deepen democ-
racy and to promote collective self-determination as an alternative to market individual-
ism. Consequently, Robertss study shifts the scholarly attention from conditions for
democratic transition and consolidation in Latin America to the character and conse-
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quences of democratic rule, suggesting that the crucial question for Latin America
today is not what leads to democracy but what limits it.
Interviews with left-wing party militants during the process of democratization in
Chile, provide the new empirical information of the book. Such analysis from the bottom-
up is what would really validate Robertss main thesis; unfortunately, this potentially
exciting examination is too general for the case of Chile and non-existent for Peru. For
the rest, Roberts relies on published information, particularly recent studies by social
scientists, a few left-wing political programs, and international organizations like the
World Bank, which he uses to good advantage to show the two countries growing
social inequality and declining importance in the world economy.
In sum, Robertss attempt to illustrate theory with historical narrative works better
with the Chilean case that it does with the Peruvian one. I still believe the historical
peculiarities of the Lefts evolution in the two countries deserve much more attention.
Despite these concerns, Roberts has written an ambitious book that will be of interest
to specialists and students of Latin America, comparative history and politics.
m. elisa fernndez, University of Louisville
Huellas de las transiciones politcas: partidos y elecciones en Amrica Latina.
Edited by silvia dutrnit bielous. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones
Dr. Jos Mara Mora, 1998. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliographies. 280 pp. Paper.
This collection of essays examines the political transitions of the 1980s and 1990s in
Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Mexico, focusing on parties and elections. In the
opening chapter, Fernando Lpez-Alves presents a useful inventory of transition studies
and locates the present volume within the vast literature on the topic. In contrast to the
bulk of transition studies, the case studies in this book take a long view of recent
changes by grounding themselves in the party and electoral patterns of the pre-dictatorial
political systems or, in the case of Mexico, in the era of uncontested PRI supremacy.
Csar Tcach nds that Argentinas transition was completed by 1990, after (1) the
countrys rst presidential election (1989) in which the incumbent ceded power to a
candidate of an opposition party and (2) the effective subordination of the military to
civilian authority. An essential part of the transition was the resurrection and strength-
ening of the historic Peronist Party and the Unin Cvica Radical. Rachel Meneguello
examines the 1985 and 1989 Brazilian presidential elections and the emerging party
conguration against the backdrop of Brazils republican history in which parties came
and went as instruments of populist leaders and/or the state. Drawing on the 1988
plebiscite and 1989 and 1993 presidential and congressional elections in Chile, Carlos
Huneeus nds that, despite changes in leadership and names, the pre-1973 party con-
stellations re-emerged. But he also notes the decline in party activism in Chile and
other Latin American countries that followed the euphoria of the earliest post-dictatorial
elections.
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Vctor Reynoso dissects the 1988 and 1994 presidential and the 1991 congressional
elections in Mexico to gauge the direction and extent of the countrys unique transition
toward a multiparty democracy. Silvia Dutrnit examines the Uruguayan elections of
1984 and 1989, including the plebiscite on prosecutions of human rights violators under
the military regime. These reveal a marked evolution in Uruguays party system, with
the decline of the Colorado/Nacional two-party system and the rise of Frente
Amplioa trend dramatically conrmed in the 1999 election. In the concluding chap-
ter, Gonzalo Varela extracts the common threads from the ve countries transitions.
The enhancement of parties roles in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil and the resuscita-
tion of traditionally powerful parties in Chile and Uruguay form part of a broader trend
toward strong party systems throughout Latin America after the passing of populism,
statism, and dictatorship.
Without breaking new theoretical ground, these case studies are well argued, thor-
oughly documented, and endowed with a wealth of detail, much of which is presented
in numerous tables and graphs. Although published in 1998, the book does not cover
some of the more recent elections, such as the 1997 Mexican and Chilean congressional
elections, which were pivotal points in those countries recent political history.
Nonetheless, this book will serve well as a source for historians of contemporary Latin
American politics.
thomas c. wright, University of Nevada
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