No Longer Odd Region Out: Repositioning Latin America in World History

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

Charles W. Bergquist (1942–2020)

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 . …

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.

Elinor G. K. Melville (1940–2006)

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.

Reviewed by: World Without End: Spain, Philip II, and the First Global Empire by Hugh Thomas Matthew Restall World Without End: Spain, Philip II, and the First Global Empire. By hugh thomas. New York: Random House, 2015. 496 pp. $35.00 (cloth). It has now been over a decade since a series of short, brilliant essays on the topic of “Placing Latin America in World History” was published in the Hispanic American Historical Review. In that forum Jeremy Adelman noted, “Latin America’s heterogeneous integration into the world still needs its full nanative exploration.” Erick Langer and Lauren Benton, respectively, lamented that Latin America was still included in world history within a “Rise of the West plus” framework or as the “odd region out.” And Micol Siegel argued compellingly that the persistence of “the battle between civilization and barbarism” as world history’s “most prominent story”—at all levels of pedagogy and popular culture, from school textbooks to Hollywood blockbusters—remained a banier to better understanding the past in general (not just Latin America).4 Since then, historians have made valiant efforts to address these issues, both within the format of world history textbooks5 and at the level of scholarly books.6 But the contraction of the discipline of History has [End Page 571] exacerbated the traditional imbalance of regional fields. Americanists and Europeanists, as the overwhelming majority in almost all History departments, continue to exercise a kind of field tyranny, effectively perpetuating categories of U.S. nationalism and Eurocentrism simply through their numerical domination of cunicula—and by obliging others “to be part of ‘world’ groupings,” while themselves remaining “relatively immune from the pressures to integrate” (to bonow Adelman’s words).7 Into such public, professional, and scholarly contexts (all of which are of course far more complex than suggested in the two short paragraphs above) lands this new book by Hugh Thomas. World Without End is the third in a trilogy on sixteenth-century Spain and its empire and the latest in a notable and influential series of books written by him over the last half-century-plus—a period in which the study of world history and understandings (both academic and popular) of Latin America’s place in the larger narratives have in many ways changed dramatically, while in other ways shifting hardly at all. Evaluated in isolation, World Without End seems unconcerned with meeting the challenges of allowing Spanish, Latin American, Atlantic, and world histories to illuminate each other (is Atlantic history just global history applied to the Atlantic world, as Alison Games observed,8 or is world history by Atlanticists just Atlantic history applied globally, and are Latin Americanists doing likewise with their forays into world history?). On the other hand, seen within the larger context of his career, the book gains some luster; after all, Thomas has, over the decades, helped place Spain firmly within a theater of understanding where scholars are now productively debating how regional and global studies can illuminate each other in new ways (even if such recent debates and studies are not referenced in this book). There are few historians who would not envy Hugh Thomas’s career. His long list of books on the history of Spain and Spanish America [End Page 572] have reached readers numbering in the six figures for over half a century, bringing him international renown, honors, and accolades. The list of international book prizes alone is extraordinary. He has enjoyed academic appointments on both sides of the Atlantic. He held high-profile positions in diplomacy and politics, for which efforts he was made Baron Thomas of Swynnerton at the age of fifty. He is also a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, was given the Cross of the Order of Isabel the Catholic in Spain, and admitted into the Order of the Aztec Eagle in Mexico. Lord Thomas’s working life has had something of an epic sweep to it, and it is thus perhaps fitting that his most recent endeavor has been the creation of a trilogy on the epic rise of the Spanish Empire—close to two thousand pages in total, telling the tale from Columbus’s...

This article explains why historians of Latin America have been disinclined to engage with global history, and how global history has yet to successfully integrate Latin America into its debates. It analyses research patterns and identifies instances of parallel developments in the two fields, which have operated until recently in relative isolation from one another, shrouded and disconnected. It outlines a framework for engagement between Latin American history and global history, focusing particularly on the significant transformations of the understudied nineteenth century. It suggests that both global history and Latin American history will benefit from recognition of the existing work that has pioneered a path between the two, and from enhanced and sustained dialogue.

The end of the cold war has opened new perspectives on the history of inter-American relations. Diplomatic historian David Sheinin’s edited volume offers a convenient and stimulating collection of essays that moves beyond the cold war fixations with security questions and the issues surrounding communism to examine different dimensions in international affairs, including the roles of feminists, environmentalists, creative writers, and human rights advocates. In a topical sense, therefore, the breadth of the selections covers some of the more innovative scholarship in international history in recent years. The chronological emphasis is on the period that begins with James G. Blaine’s Pan American Conference of 1889–90 and extends into the late twentieth century (the exception is Peter Blanchard’s “Pan Americanism and Slavery in the Era of Latin American Independence.”)Sheinin’s introduction and 9 of the 14 selections mention the expressions “Pan American” and “Pan Americanism” in their titles. The other five selections comment either directly or indirectly on these expressions or the meanings behind them. Consequently, this volume offers the reader an opportunity to explore the meaning of this concept as interpreted by specialists examining specific case studies. The United States government quickly emerges as the single most powerful actor in this drama, but there are many other important players. Richard Salisbury’s article reminds us that Spain, in spite of its defeat in the 1898 war, continued to have a presence in the Western Hemisphere. There is also considerable evidence in this volume that individual Latin American nations followed their own compasses in policy formulation rather than succumbing to pressure from the United States. Thomas Leonard’s study makes that point regarding Central America, Michael Weis draws a similar conclusion on the Oswaldo Aranha era in Brazil, Jeannie Hey detects a similar pattern in Ecuador, and Stephen Streeter finds a similar hemispheric trend in the 1954–63 period. It would not be unreasonable to conclude that Pan Americanism operated on multiple levels, many of which were beyond the control of Washington officialdom.The volume includes four studies that explore social and cultural manifestations of inter-American relations. Blanchard’s examination of the truncated push toward the abolition of slavery in the postindependence period offers a sound introduction to the interaction of social and diplomatic history. Mark Berger’s condensed survey of U.S. academia’s institutionalization of Latin American studies moves adroitly from the enthusiasms of Herbert Eugene Bolton in the early twentieth century through the heyday of Frank Tannenbaum to the astute observations of Lester Langley in the 1980s. Alberto Prieto-Calixto’s essay on Rubén Darío and Earl Fitz’s “Historical Overview” offer stimulating samplings from the fertile fields of Latin American literature.Another strong point in this volume is the attention given to activists, or individuals and groups committed to the advocacy of specific causes. David Castle’s well-researched biographical sketch of Leo S. Rowe presents a penetrating view of one of the most energetic, if at times naïve, champions of inter-American cooperation. K. Lynn Stoner’s essay highlights the contributions of an international mix of feminists who made up the Inter-American Commission of Women within the Pan American Union. This group took on the challenge of promoting women’s rights within the macho culture that prevailed throughout the hemisphere. Editor Sheinin provides an incisive discussion of the work of environmentalists in the early twentieth century in defense of wildlife and forests. And Jo M. Pasqualucci explains the operations of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, with an emphasis on the 1980s. The actions of these groups and individuals are seldom mentioned in standard textbooks, but these accounts cut across political and pedagogical boundaries to provide insights into the workings of influential nongovernmental organizations.These selections may not meet with the approval of some classroom instructors. A few may point to the absence of articles on business history while others may complain of the slighting of the drug trade. Such criticisms have some validity, but instructors should not overlook the fact that the market is crowded with many choices. The range of specialized collections is impressive including Paul Drake’s Money Doctors, Foreign Debts, and Economic Reforms in Latin America from the 1890s to the Present (1994), William Walker’s Drugs in the Western Hemisphere (1996), David Weber and Jane Rausch’s Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History (1994), and Michael LaRosa and Frank Mora’s Neighborly Adversaries: Readings in U.S.-Latin American Relations (1999) to name a few. This range of choices is a boon to the instructor who can make a selection based on the interests and requirements of his/her institution and student body. Sheinin’s work ranks very high on this growing list in view of the interesting and, in many ways, unique variety of its selections.

What Is Latin American History?

This volume gathers a selection of the papers presented at the conference of the Association of European Historians of Latin America (Asociación de Historiadores Latinoamericanistas Europeos, AHILA) held in 2014. The conference tackled multiple questions concerning the ‘global turn’ in historiography, such as the impacts of current globalisation and global history on historiography and the place of national histories in these contexts. More specifically, the volume also aims to focus the relations between Europe and Latin America in the production of global historical knowledge. The volume is arranged in four sections, each of them with four, five, two and three chapters, respectively. The first section, ‘History in Uncertain Times’, opens with a lecture by Reinhart Koselleck on the 50th anniversary of its delivery (1970) on ‘What History Is Still Good For’ and is followed by three pieces pointing in three different directions. In ‘Clio: The Names of History’, François Hartog concludes that we transitioned from a Eurocentric History, with capital H, to multiple histories, with lower-case h, which no longer are being drafted in Europe alone. Karl Schlögel explores space after the ‘spatial turn’ highlighting the tension between the narrative structure that privileges diachronic time and the global perspectives that focus on synchronicity. Finally, Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht ponders on the contemporary meaning of ‘Universal Literature’ stressing the tension between the local focus of literary works and their global reverberations. The second section, titled ‘Approaches to History in Times of Globalization’, is more coherent than the first one as its four first chapters gravitate towards the concept of globalisation. In ‘Globalization and Global History’, George Zeidan Araújo points towards the pitfalls of Global History such as superficiality and under-conceptualisation, as well as its blurred demarcation from world, transnational and international history. Fábio Franzini focuses on the experiences of Brazilian historians' engagements in historiographical discussions as the necessary backdrop for understanding the challenge of their handling of the global turn. In the longest (more than double the average length) and most informative chapter of the volume Juan Andrés Bresciano provides the most clear, analytic and systematic mapping of the emerging field Global History and some of its cognate fields, such as World History, the History of Globalization and the World System Approach. In commending this chapter, I admit my bias, as Bresciano's classification is surprisingly similar to my own. The last two chapters in this section diverge from the historiographical focus of the previous ones. Lizette Mora offers a theoretical piece (which may have been better placed in the next section) on multiplicity in historiography as a symptom of global capitalism and Luis Ferla touches on a few aspects of digital humanities. In the third section, dedicated to ‘Globalization, Philosophy, History, and Anthropology’, Francine Iegelski confronts the historiographical projects of Koselleck and Hartog with the anthropology of Viveiros de Castro and Lévi-Strauss, as well as the concept of modernity with indigenist perspectives. Federico Navarrete Linares outlines three procedures to articulate an indigenous ‘cosmohistory’ that defies the Western linear ‘monohistory’. In connecting with the works of Koselleck and Hartog, these two chapters provide the volume with a degree of coherence, which otherwise is less apparent. The final section on ‘Global History in Movement’ presents the works of Stefan Rinke and the volume editors, Ingrid Simson and Guillermo Zermeño Padilla. Rinke explores the relationship between Area Studies and Global History by advancing the idea of Latin American history as a bridge between the two. Simson advances another idea: incorporating fictional components into the historical narrative, given that this is all history can provide, namely, a narrative. Finally, Zermeño Padilla summarises some aspects of the collective research project on Iberconcepts, the uses of the same political concepts such as libertad, nación and pueblo in the Spanish-speaking world, as a case in point of global simultaneity. The time lag between the celebration of a conference and the publication of its papers is always a drawback as many assertions made in 2014 may be dated, as is the case here, for instance, on the clarity with which the field of Global History has been defined so far. The volume offers more diversity of perspective than a cohesive horizon. Its diversity includes multidisciplinarity, thematic variety, and the geographical spread of its authors across parts of the Atlantic basin. These are some of the merits that make it a welcomed addition to the ongoing multi-perspectival takes on Global History and the relationship between contemporary globalisation and historiography.

<i>In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American History</i> ed. by Geoffroy de Laforcade and Kirwin Shaffer

Ann S. Blum (1950–2015)

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).

The First World War was a global event that intensively involved Latin America. From the beginning, Latin Americans sensed that this war had worldwide scope. For many observers, the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 represented a profound turning point in the unfolding of history. Because of the breakdown of the European civilizational and development model, and in the unreserved belief in human progress in the years from 1914 to 1918, a world where Latin America had occupied a fixed position was effectively gone. Many contemporary witnesses agreed that an era had ended in the days of August 1914, and a new, still uncertain age had begun. The war stimulated the massive utilization of new forms of media like photography and cinema. Press photography proved to be an important instrument of propaganda, which contributed to the worldwide circulation of war pictures that seemed to depict objective reality. The understanding of reality expanded, for what was real no longer simply pertained to one’s own life, but also to events mediated through imagery. It was precisely in places like Latin America, where there was a geographical separation from the front lines that people experienced the war, both privately and publicly, through media-produced images. What is more, the World War I took place there especially as a propaganda war, which also caused a largely unprecedented form of radical hatemongering among rivals to spread in the subcontinent. Consequently, the traditional bias toward European models proved to be obsolete and the future had to be conceived anew. Due to this attitude, the call for a reorientation of identities on a national and regional level, which had already gained momentum before the war, became even louder. Scholarship on Latin American history has for decades largely ignored the First World War as a major event in which the continent played a part. This was mainly due to historiography’s focus on the nation and as well as initially on military and diplomatic, and later social and economic, topics. Only recently, with the rise of the new cultural history and global history, have the tides started to turn. Several important studies have now been published.