Charles W. Bergquist (1942–2020)

Latin American and World Histories: Old and New Approaches to the Pluribus and the Unum

The time has arrived to assess critical pedagogical methodologies for teaching Latin American history incorporating movingimage and sound media. The larger tradition of using film and video in humanities university classrooms is a much more welllaid path. Teaching-scholars who are readers of this journal are no doubt aware of defining works: John E. O'Connor's Film and Humanities and Image as Artifact and Robert Sklar and Charles Musser's Resisting Images-as well as pioneering work by Martin A. Jackson, Nicholas Pronay, K. R. M. Short, Peter C. Rollins, Paul Smith, Robert Brent Toplin, Robert A. Rosenstone, Richard C. Raack, Hayden White, and others. The American Historical Association's newsletter Perspectives alongside Film & History, University Vision, The History Teacher, and a few other scholarly journals have provided over recent decades a forum for exchange of teaching-related issues and ideas and syllabi for courses involving moving-image and sound media. This essay extends this tradition and focuses upon Latin America by briefly surveying most relevant sources and following up on their discussion of pedagogically theoretical issues in current use. The second section of this essay spotlights a sampling of syllabi from leading scholars in field, offering a variety of effective approaches and templates for teaching Latin American film and history in university classroom, especially given issues covered in first section. The final section will list handful of available filmographies and contact points for film distributors and databases relevant to Latin American film and history studies. Rather than simply focus on mechanics and processes of teaching, readers will find that materials collected herein will build upon those practical matters in a conscious application of philosophies behind methods. We find that, since 1970s, critical media studies within history and other humanities courses in academy have grown less rigidly defined by institutional definitions and progressively more inter-disciplinary. In case of many Latin Americanist teaching-scholars, their critical media instruction traverses cultural geography of Latin America, marking for their students both at same time importance of time-tested topics and themes now vantaged by myriad disciplinary models as well as, equally, multiple forms of literacy required to read them. While still expecting students to critically consider veracity of certain documents and materials, pedagogical methodologies must consider historiographie and self-reflexive hermeneutic issues involved in mediated historicizing of past. Readings on Latin American Film and History Instruction Perhaps earliest significant figure for Latin-Americanist who are also critical media educators is E. Bradford Burns, whose Latin American Cinema: Film and History and other works have provided basis for instruction of Latin American history through filmic texts. Standing alongside Burns' pivotal early work are Leon G. Campbell, Carlos E. Cortes, and Robert Finger's Latin America: A Filmic Approach, Cortes and Campbell's Film as a Revolutionary Weapon: A Pedagogical Analysis, Jane M. Loy's Latin America, Sights and Sounds, and Zuzana M. Pick's Latin American Filmmakers and Third Cinema. Where these groundbreaking works laid a foundation, many recent sources have taken up even more directly some of theoretical issues involved in teaching moving image and sound texts. Recent scholarly interest in approaching Latin American topics in humanities curricula demonstrates a new popularity in this field and suggests a growing concern for its careful study. Teaching sections of Radical History Review periodically include syllabi, such as Winter 1995 special section devoted to Latin America, although only syllabus to include film screenings as a course activity claims to examine their historical accuracy, evaluating film texts with the same kinds of questions . …

Elinor G. K. Melville (1940–2006)

Michael F. Jiménez (1948-2001)

Elizabeth “Betsy” Winchell Kiddy (1957–2014)

This book recounts the history of the last half century in Colombia, focusing on the violent contention between the Colombian state, Marxist-inspired guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitary forces. Author Marco Palacios, a Colombian historian now based at the Colegio de México, is at pains to place his account against the background of US Cold War and terrorist concerns as well as the dynamics of the illegal drug trade, both of which color every aspect of the events he chronicles.Most of the information in the book is not new, drawn as it is from Colombia's major newspapers and news magazines as well as reading in an increasingly rich and sophisticated secondary literature on the period. Palacios is content, as he puts it, to “revise, correct, amplify, and restate” information and interpretations previously advanced in his own work and that of others (p. 20). In fact, his interpretations of the salient issues of the period — from the meanings of La Violencia (the civil commotion of the mid-twentieth century that pitted Liberals against Conservatives and resulted in 1958 in the power-sharing arrangement, the Frente Nacional, which marks the beginning of Palacios's study) to the ebb and flow of the different guerrilla groups' military strength over the decades and to the fate of efforts at negotiated peace between the armed contenders — follow mainstream understandings widely shared by specialists in the field of Colombian studies.Why then write and publish a book like this? Palacios himself seems somewhat at a loss to answer that question (pp. 20–21), but he concludes that his bird's-eye historical synthesis is meaningful. He is quick to point out that his interpretation is one of many possible ones and that it does not offer prescriptions for a future political settlement.Be that as it may, not all the information and analysis in the book is commonplace. There is an attempt to statistically analyze police records, for example, and although many of these labor-intensive exercises yield banal conclusions, such as the fact that most of the violence is “rural” (table 4.4, p. 175) or that it is largely perpetrated by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (figure 4.1, p. 179), there is important statistical information in the book, most notably a comparison of the degree of land concentration in 1964 and 2009 (appendix 2, p. 196). That data reveals a radical transformation of land tenure in the last half century, an agrarian counterreform of unprecedented proportions. Tens of thousands of small and medium-sized farmers, displaced by the violent contention between government forces, guerrilla groups, and paramilitary forces in rural areas, have been dispossessed by large landowners, many of them bankrolled by drug money.Palacios rightly emphasizes the growing influence of large landowners (latifundistas) in Colombian politics and society, but he curiously ignores the ideological and political legacies of the remarkable diffusion of property ownership, especially in the all-important coffee zones, during the middle decades of the twentieth century. That largely market-induced agrarian reform, I have argued elsewhere, sets Colombian history off from that of its Andean neighbors and of Latin American nations generally, and it helps to explain many of the exceptional features of Colombian history during the last half century. These include the remarkable staying power of Colombia's traditional, clientelistic two-party political system and the poor showing of third parties of both the Left and the Right; the weakness of labor and the Left, and the paradox of the longevity of an armed Left unable to win widespread political and ideological support and consequently relying on kidnapping, extortion, and drug trafficking to support itself; and the degree of Colombian acquiescence to neoliberal economic reform and the appeal of right-wing, US-allied governments like that of Álvaro Uribe's eight-year presidency, which ends the period covered by Palacios's book.A useful feature of Palacios's book is its bibliography of secondary works. But even here there are glaring omissions. These include the classic collection on La Violencia edited by Gonzalo Sánchez and Ricardo Peñaranda and the compelling critique by ex-Communist Alvaro Delgado of the Colombian Communist Party's strategy of pursuing, simultaneously, electoral and armed strategies of achieving power, a policy that proved disastrous for the peaceful Colombian Left and for labor leaders in particular.On page 79 (footnote 12), the author announces that he is at work on a study dealing with the first decade of Colombia's second most important guerrilla group, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional. Hopefully, that monograph will do more than the present survey to advance our understanding of violence in Colombia.

The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia

The participation of children in war doesn’t begin from modern times, and it could be traced back from the civilization of ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and the Bible. Any country, which is facing a long-timed war, its troops is going to be exhausted, and during that time it will often recruit children to get into the battlefield. According to interpretation of child soldiers of UNICEF and the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, children who are under the age of 18, participate in any regular or irregular armed groups, including combatants, bombers of mines, baits, logistics, porters, sentries, spies, messengers, cooks, laborers and some of them are forced into the marriage with the commander or to be bodyguards and shields for the commander. Colombia is currently the only country of Latin American which has civil war. Since Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia was founded in 1964, the problem of guerrilla already existed for nearly 50 years, it’s estimated that about 20 million people died in the armed conflict between Colombia government, the guerrillas and paramilitary. It’s originated from ideological differences and the Colombian internal conflict, and things could be different as time goes by that it finally became the struggle territorial control. Nearly 40 percent of territory in Colombia has controlled by the guerrillas. In Colombia, children who are under 18 years old have to face many challenges in their daily lives. As a result of armed conflict, children forced migration, displacement, kidnapping and get involved with street retaliatory war and military crackdown. The biggest threat is forced to become child soldiers on the battlefield. In Latin America, Colombia is estimated that about 11,000 to 14,000 children get involved with the war between in left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary and government army. Making child soldiers to reintegrate into society is a complicated and long-term issue. The United Nations and NGOs over the world spare no efforts to alleviate poverty, improve education and employment opportunities, and establish pipeline for children to participate in the development of regions and countries. These efforts are trying to achieve a future of peace and security which are indispensable.

It is commonplace to say that Colombia is facing one of the longest armed conflicts to date (1964-2009). Today, Colombia has the second largest number of internally displaced people after Darfur, some four million, and one of the worst human rights records documented.1 This “new war,” to use Kaldor’s term,2 in which the distinctions between private/public, international/national, and combatant/civilian are blurred, has attracted the scholarly interest of political scientists and international relations and conflict studies scholars alike.3 What is not common, however, is to find scholars discussing the occurrence of genocide in Colombia. As I have argued elsewhere,4 however, genocide happened and is still ongoing today. Between 1985 and 2002, an entire political party, the Union Patriotica (UP), was annihilated in the midst of the 40-year Colombian armed conflict. The UP was a political front bringing together the Communist Party and other leftist and centrist political forces. It was the product of the Uribe Agreements between the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), a MarxistLeninist oriented guerrilla movement, and the Colombian government in 1984. Although the UP was thought of as the means for the FARC to demobilize, the year itself seemed not to be the right moment for such a strategy. In fact, the UP was set up at a time of adverse conditions. Internationally, Reagan was carrying out his campaign against communism in order to defy the belief that the United States’ hegemony was declining.5 In Colombia itself, the counterinsurgency campaign led by the Colombian government had stepped up since 1981 when the army, drug traffickers, and governmental officials established a paramilitary group based in the Middle Magdalena Valley in order to defeat various guerrilla groups. This, together with the FARC’s own new (1982) strategy of government takeover, which meant a rise in kidnapping for ransom and ever more harassment of landowners and other sectors of the population in order to increase their finances, resulted in a degenerate war in which all the actors increasingly targeted non-combatants as a means of winning the war. In spite of these conditions, the UP was publicly launched in May 1985. According to some UP survivors, the assassination of civilians involved in the UP process started even before the official launch.6 It is estimated that, since 1985, between 3,000 and 5,000 of its members have been assassinated, hundredshave been disappeared, thousands displaced and many others rejected their UP affiliation so as to survive the violence.7 Over the last 20 years or so, different genocidal practices have brought down the social and political power of the UP resulting in its annihilation. Cepeda8 suggests that the UP genocide occurred in three phases: first, the weakening of organizational structures (1984-92), then, the coup de grâce phase that normalized its destruction (1992-2002), and finally, although the UP formally ceased to exist in Colombian politics in 2002 due to a lack of affiliates and support in the polls, the last stage is the destruction of the survivors which is, according to Cepeda, still ongoing today. This chapter is an attempt to explore some dynamics within the first period of the UP genocide. Given that the first stage of the genocide developed along with the international turmoil of the unexpected end of the Cold War, which saw, in the early 1980s, the re-emergence of the US crusade against communism, I pay special attention to the role that US-Colombian relations played in the development of the genocide. This analysis, I believe, demonstrates Grandin’s assertion that “the conception of democracy now being prescribed as the most effective weapon in the war on terrorism is itself largely, at least in Latin America, a product of terror.”9

Violence, State Formation, and Everyday Politics in Latin America* John Bailey (bio) Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina: The Gray Zone of State Power. By Javier Auyero. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 208. $70.00 cloth, $22.99 paper. Rituals of Violence in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico: Individual Conflict, Gender, and the Law. By Astrid Cubano Iguina. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Pp. 209. $59.95 cloth. Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present. By Lessie Jo Frazier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. 405. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper. Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America. By Angelina Snodgrass Godoy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. 250. $19.95 paper. Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875–2002. By Marcos Palacios. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. 315. $79.95 cloth, $22.95 paper. Guatemalans in the Aftermath of Violence: The Refugees’ Return. By Kristi Anne Stolen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 280. $59.95 cloth. The books reviewed here address two important topics in studies on Latin America and the Caribbean: the origins and formation of the state in the nineteenth century, and the political uses and effects of violence in everyday life. Comparatists are increasingly focused on the significance of state weakness and the poor provision of security and justice as factors contributing to the low quality of democracy in the region.1 Also, the dual political and economic transitions beginning in the late 1970s were accompanied by significant upsurges in criminal violence, to the point [End Page 239] that delincuencia ranks as one of the top two issues cited in the 2007 Latino-barómetro report.2 Weak states and poor-quality justice amid a heightened sense of insecurity undermine public support for democracy. By the (good) luck of the draw, most of the works reviewed here deal with outliers in the sense of their atypical routes toward state formation (Chile, Puerto Rico) or of the degree to which violence marks their daily life (extreme in Colombia and Guatemala; comparatively less in Argentina). Outliers can provide interesting clues about violence, state formation, and everyday politics. Violence and the Origins of Modern States How important are the origin and first years of the state for its subsequent coherence and effectiveness? Students of path dependence argue that origins are critical for creating incentives to follow given paths, and that departures from these paths become less likely over time.3 It is surprising that most scholars, with few exceptions, focus on the 1870s as the starting point for their analyses of the origins of the modern state. Implicitly, they discount the importance of the extraordinary violence and instability of the wars of independence and their aftermath, or roughly 1810 to 1860.4 Related to path dependence, the bellicist theory of state origins suggests that interstate wars can have positive effects on the formation of effective nation-states.5 Oversimplified, the notion is that such wars force states to raise revenues and field an army, which requires competent bureaucracies that can extract resources and regulate behavior. Successful extraction and regulation also implies functioning police-justice systems. War making, especially when successful, can promote solidarity and patriotism, thus reinforcing the nation-building project. [End Page 240] Drawing on Charles Tilly and others, Miguel Centeno writes that “Latin American state power has always been shallow and contested.”6 Violence in the region has been more internal than interstate. Centeno contrasts “total war” in the European case with “limited war” in Latin America, finding that the latter is more likely to incur large debts, promote the development of a professionalized military with little popular participation, hamper the creation of patriotic symbols and unifying myths, and retard economic growth: “The most generalizable trend may be that limited wars rarely leave positive institutional legacies and often have long-term costs. Instead of producing states built on ‘blood and iron,’ they construct ones made of blood and debt. It is precisely this latter pattern that we may observe in Latin America.” For as Centeno goes on to emphasize, it is “not war in itself...

This excellent book is the first to be published specifically on the history of childhood in Latin America. Its 13 chapters amply demonstrate the important role played by children in the histories of institutions such as the family, social welfare, education, the church, and the army. The history of industrialization and crime control are likewise intimately associated with issues of childhood and education. Tobias Hecht argues that the study of children is indispensable to understanding Latin American society and history. Familiar aspects of Latin American history can be seen in a new light by examining the experiences of children and notions about childhood. He also notes silences on issues of child labor, child abuse, and child mortality for periods prior to the late nineteenth century. The book contains historical research articles on Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Peru, and Mexico, plus a testimonial and a short story. The volume addresses issues such as the depiction of children in colonial Andean art, prescriptive literature on childhood in Mexico, the incidence and meaning of illegitimacy, child abandonment and foundling homes in Havana, children as criminals in Lima, the relationship of the state to children in the nineteenth century, and the vision of childhood in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Brazil.Several chapters either focus on the colonial period or consider it within a longer time frame. Carolyn Dean addresses the characterization of indigenous populations as “unruly children,” which informed debates about the appropriate relationship between colonizer and the colonized. Children were seen as unruly and in need of education, but also more malleable than adults were. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera notes that while children were seen as capable of reason from age seven (and at that point were expected to work), it was believed that they often resisted reason and had to be disciplined. Similar attitudes pervaded the administration of Spanish and Portuguese colonies, and such ideas continued to be important in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Donna Guy explores discussions on children’s contribution to the state and the economy as future citizens and on state responsibility for education and social control. Bianca Premo analyzes legislation that focused on children who were seen as marginal: abandoned, orphaned, criminals, illegitimate, or simply vagrant. Children born into legitimate, two-parent families were subject to the rule of their fathers (patria potestad) and thus rarely appear in the records. Poor children were often seen as “dangerous” and in need of work and social control, even as they were also called the “key to the future.” Irene Rizzini’s article shows how these latter children were generally viewed as a pressing social problem.The picture of childhood that emerges for the popular classes in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries is complex and revises a previous vision of family life that was focused on elite experience. Ondina Gonzalez argues that this new picture framed infant and child mortality as an aspect of daily life, while Nara Milanich shows that children frequently circulated among households and institutions. Premo argues that orphaned, illegitimate, and vagrant children were subjected to efforts at discipline and control after the age of 10.5 (before that age, children were seen as incapable of malice and a recognition of wrongdoing). The relationship of children to the state was complex and important, considering the high proportion of children in the population—most of them not members of legitimate families. This relationship included social welfare (which might actually take the form of forced child labor in a workhouse), labor (as the state distributed children through apprenticeships), crime, and education.LeGrace Benson introduces us to the extraordinarily expressive depiction of contemporary children’s lives in Haitian art, which focuses on race, poverty, moth erhood, and play. Articles by Anna Peterson and Kay Read delve into the interaction between children and war in Central America: as victims and soldiers, orphans and refugees, often forced into adult roles. Tobias Hecht argues that today childhood itself is socially constructed in multiple ways and that perhaps “in Brazil childhood is a privilege of the rich and practically nonexistent for the poor” (Hecht, citing Goldstein, p. 247). In addition, the volume includes a testimonial piece written by Bruna Verissimo, who grew up in the streets of Recife, Brazil. A short story, “The Children’s Rebellion,” reflects on the sometimes offensive and exploitative nature of elite efforts to help abandoned children. This thoughtful, accessible, and worthwhile collection will appeal to scholars of family history, and professors will find it attractive for undergraduate and graduate courses in Latin American and family history.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ AND GAITÁN: VIVIR PARA CONTARLA AND THE PERSONALIZATION OF HISTORY David Bost Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez’s long-awaited autobiography–Vivir para contarla , the first of three planned volumes–was published in 2002 and represents the culmination of a literary and journalistic career spanning six decades. Vivir para contarla tells the fascinating story of Garcı́a Márquez’s early years as a high school and university student in the 1940s struggling to find pathways to his authentic vocation as a writer. Readers familiar with his prose will find, as Edith Grossman observes in a commentary of her own translation (Living to Tell the Tale, 2003), a recognizable style and many memorable landmarks from his novels and short stories: Garcı́a Márquez makes it clear that he sees little distinction between the practice of journalism and the writing of fiction. This is certainly not a question of his confusing truth and imagination or reality and fantasy, and it is much more than a clever turn of phrase or thought. Over and over again in the memoir, he refers to incidents and situations that are familiar to the reader because they have appeared, transmuted and transposed, in the works of fiction. Even more important than events mined from the mother lode of his experience, however, is the reportorial narrative technique common to both genres in Garcı́a Márquez’s writing. (37) In this sense, Vivir para contarla is a hybrid narrative in that Garcı́a Márquez weaves into his life story commentaries not only resembling his own imaginative narratives, but also Colombia’s literary history, national and international political analysis, personal genealogy, economic geography, biography and national history. Autobiography is such a flexible and loosely defined genre, suggests literary theorist James Olney, that “there are no rules or formal requirements binding the prospective autobiographer—no restraints, no necessary models, no obligatory observances gradually shaped out of a long developing tradition and imposed by that tradition on the individual talent who would translate a life into writing” (3). Robert Folkenflik puts it rather succinctly: “Autobiography, as I understand it, has norms but not rules” (13). With such autonomy readily available within the autobiographical genre, Garcı́a Márquez thus freely creates space in his own story also to comment extensively on Colombia’s often violent and tragic historical reality. His life story intersects with Colombian history over and C 2010 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 87 The Latin Americanist, March 2010 over again throughout Vivir para contarla to such an extent that it is sometimes difficult to separate his life, at least as he remembers and reports it, from larger events that have shaped his homeland. To a certain degree, Colombia’s history intrudes into his life, and, in a more limited sense, his life forms part of Colombia’s story. Vivir para contarla therefore tells multiple stories simultaneously and seems particularly focused on narrating seminal historical events from a personal perspective. Throughout much of his literary career, Garcı́a Márquez has interlaced many different facets of Colombian and Latin American history into his narratives, fiction and non-fiction alike. His vast experience as a journalist—his first calling—has honed his considerable skill as an astute observer and commentator on the inordinately complex Colombian political and social world that formed him. Apart from the countless historical allusions sprinkled throughout many of his novels and short stories, Garcı́a Márquez has also published several non-fiction texts that explore particular aspects of Colombian and Latin American history and culture: Relato de un naúfrago (1970), a first-person account of a shipwrecked Colombian sailor; La aventura de Miguel Littı́n clandestino en Chile (1986), the tale of the movie director who sneaks back into Pinochet’s Chile in order to film a testimony of the dictatorship’s failures and abuses; and Noticia de un secuestro (1996), an account of Pablo Escobar and the problems of extradition resulting from the contemporary drug trade and resulting civil conflicts. In these non-fiction works he communicates a historical and political sensibility with such novelistic devices as first-person narrators...

"Even by Latin American standards, Colombia is a violent country. It is also an exceptional laboratory for researchers interested in crime, conflict and more generally, in violence. Violence in Colombia is not a recent phenomenon: The country experienced six major civil wars during the course of the 19th century. A period of relative calm followed the bloodiest of these confrontations: “The War of the Thousand Days,” that lasted literally 1000 days (1899–1902), and resulted in the deaths of a large fraction of the population. In the late 1940s after the assassination of a liberal presidential candidate, partisan grievances flourished and a new civil war (know as “La Violencia”) began. It was ended by a power-sharing deal between the liberals and the conservatives in the late 1950s. By most accounts, the current conflict began in the mid 1960s, when two guerrilla organizations – Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN) – (both are still active today) were formed. The largest of them, FARC, emerged from communist guerrillas dissatisfied by the exclusion of the left from the power-sharing deal, and from the remnants of liberal guerrillas that did not laid down their arms when the deal was brokered."

Over the past several decades, the environmental history of Latin America has emerged as a vibrant field. Historians have produced innovative studies exploring nature’s central role in Latin American history. Most of these studies, however, are local or regional in scope. Miller’s Environmental History of Latin America is an excellent synthesis of the literature, inflected by his own original and thoughtful analytical voice.Miller traces the environmental history of Latin America from the eve of the European conquest to the present. The book’s unifying analytical theme is sustainability, in short, “whether the project of tropical civilization has been sustainable” (p. 3). Miller analyzes “four recurring themes: population, technology, attitudes towards nature, and attitudes towards consumption” (p. 4). The book’s treatment of precontact Amerindian societies carefully debunks the “Pristine Myth,” which argues that these societies lived in a purported equilibrium with their natural world. Miller replaces this myth with a more complex story that shows the diverse ways in which Amerindian societies transformed their nature(s). Sometimes, these societies consumed far beyond their biological needs. He lists nine pre-Columbian societies that collapsed before the European conquest, although he does not suggest that these societies collapsed because of environmental mismanagement alone.Miller then turns to the conquest and colonial Latin America, retracing the (now) familiar story of how epidemic diseases contributed to the demographic collapse of the New World populations. Miller argues that this population collapse was the defining feature in shaping Latin American environments from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Low population densities allowed for the recovery and regeneration of Latin America’s landscapes, giving them the appearance (if not the substance) of being “pristine.” The biological conquest, in Miller’s analysis, was not a total catastrophe. Old World plants and animals increased the New World’s biological diversity. They also increased the food supply, making famine a rarity in the colonial New World, at a period when famines were commonplace in Europe. The colonial commodity booms, especially in sugar and silver, did create localized environmental catastrophes, especially on the smaller islands of the Caribbean. But the extent of the depredations was limited by colonial mercantilist policies and imperial monopolies, both of which limited the scope and intensity of export commodity production.The independence movements of the nineteenth century bought an end to the colonial ecological order. Freed from imperial restrictions, commodity production expanded almost unchecked across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This created environmental problems on a new scale: massive soil erosion, increased vulnerability to natural disasters, and epidemic crop diseases. Latin America’s populations also began to expand in this period, a demographic revolution driven by improved “death control” (p. 172), innovations in medical and public health that sharply reduced mortality across the region. At the same time, the turn to fossil fuels and other technologies allowed Latin American societies an unprecedented control over the natural world. Here, as in the earlier section, Miller does not tell a story of unremitting environmental decline. He points to the impressive public transportation infrastructure of Curitiba, Brazil, as an alternative to Latin America’s growing dependence on the car. He also explores the emergence of conservationism and environmentalism in Latin America. Here, he relates some unfamiliar stories, such as the history of Joaquín Balaguer’s persistent and sometimes violent efforts to preserve the forests of the Dominican Republic. The book ends with an epilogue presenting Cuba’s (involuntary) shift to organic, local, and sustainable agriculture as a model of modern environmental and ecological sustainability.The book’s greatest strength is its ability to capture complex and nuanced positions on the environment, an area in which simplistic and polemical stories are all too commonplace. The book’s greatest shortcoming is that it frequently reifies “nature” and “culture,” especially at the beginning and ending of each chapter. Sentences such as “in the war against nature, culture will frequently sacrifice its own members” (p. 132) present, at best, a caricature of a more complicated reality. It reinforces a commonly held but overly simple dualist perspective that most environmental historians take great pains to dispute in their research and teaching. Neither nature nor culture is monolithic, nor are they independent of one another. Miller himself recognizes this, noting in the introduction that “as much as we may protest, humans are nature too” (p. 5).Nonetheless, this lucid and concise synthesis will be a welcome addition to undergraduate survey courses on Latin American or global environmental history. For advanced scholars, too, it is a useful overview of the scholarship to date, informed by Miller’s original and provocative historical voice. Miller has captured the intellectual vitality of a field where there are still many live questions and few definitive answers.

This paper analyzes two contemporary Canadian documentaries about Latin American history, specifically the ways in which the films provide an aesthetics of resistance to stereotypical and homogeneous representations of Latin American countries. Canadian documentaries on the history and the people of third world countries not only document Latin American countries but also criticize the conflicting relationships and forms of representation involved in the making of the documentary, revealing the documentary as a narrative form in its making of Latin American subjects and histories. Within this theoretical context, the study here proposed analyses two documentaries about Latin-American geopolitical conflicts. The World is Watching: Inside the News (1988), a British-Canadian production directed by Jim Munro and Peter Raymond, and a Place Called Chiapas, a Canadian production, directed by Nettie Wild (1998).