Modern Latin American History Research Articles

Teaching the global sixties: a perspective from Latin America

ABSTRACT This article draws attention to some of the contributions that Mohandesi makes in his essay while critiquing one of his central arguments. I primarily approach this response from my teaching position as a scholar of modern Latin American history. From this perspective, I do not feel that we have reached a roadblock in our studies of the Global Sixties, but rather that we have yet to explore many of its meanings.

Afterword: From Colonial History to Colonial Genealogies

Afterword:From Colonial History to Colonial Genealogies John D. Blanco (bio) "How is an opposition resolved?" Marx once famously asked. His answer? "By making it impossible." Marx's comment was directed against a pamphlet published by Bruno Bauer called "The Jewish Question" in 1843; and presented, in summary form, a critique of Bauer's assumption that the Jewish religion was irreducibly at odds with the Christian secular state. Yet Marx's observation just as easily applies, as guest editor Dan Nemser suggests, to scholars of early modern Latin American history and culture confronted with the seemingly irreducible opposition between those who understand globalization to be a universal evolutionary process involving primarily the development of free markets; and the stalwart advocates of a "Latin American difference." The latter has been expressed in various ways throughout the long twentieth century: from the "Nuestroamericanismo" of José Martí to the indígenista theories of José Carlos Mariateguí in Perú; the policies of Mexican President Lázaro Cardenas (1934–1940); the structuralist and now "neostructuralist" adaptations of world-systems theory; to recent proponents of "the coloniality of power" perspective, which subordinates questions of political economy to a lens directed at the power politics of domination, sovereignty, racial hierarchy, and the politico-theological continuity of Spain's Reconquest of the Iberian peninsula overseas.1 Both frames of analysis begin with the observation that "the early modern Iberian world occupies an ambiguous place in the history of capitalism";2 and both have tended to see this ambiguous place as a problem that required some resolution or synthesis in order for the histories of the Americas to "fit" into either the history of capitalism as a structure or as a mode of economic production; or the history of [End Page 130] colonial domination as a tale of what Indian Subaltern Studies editor Ranajit Guha famously called "dominance without hegemony."3 Buoyed by the rise of "new," decentered, and heterogeneous histories of capitalism, the scholars presented in this special issue share not only a common impatience and exhaustion with the limits of traditional political economy and coloniality-of-power as they manifest in Latin American (and increasingly, Pacific and trans-Pacific) Studies (particularly the humanities); but also a willingness to engage directly with the third, triangulating term of the conference (held at the University of Michigan in October 2016), which spurred the publication of this JEMCS special issue: Catholicism or Christian thought, particularly neo-Scholastic and Jesuit. Yet far from attempting to resurrect or generalize a uniquely "Catholic," Christian, or Counter-Reformation approach to the subfields of early modern colonial studies—the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the proliferation of contraband trade and informal economies, the role of accounting and finance in the standardization and expansion of a money economy—the contributors return us ever again to the unexplored or, in any case, undertheorized elements of Marxist thought, which have provided a veritable toolbox of concepts for redrawing the political geographies and ecologies of colonial empire and globalization. These concepts—beginning with Marx's treatment of "so-called primitive accumulation" and extending to the distinction between formal and real subsumption, the prehistories of monetization, the divergent interpretations of "use value," and the subordination of law to the economy of profit—not only explode the myth that the formal coherence of capitalism as a system corresponds to its various realizations in history, but also demonstrate the permanently unfinished, incomplete, and partial character of capitalism as a lived experience and social order in the Americas.4 In this regard, Dipesh Chakrabarty's observation acquires its full weight: that our insistence on theorizing historical transitions to the history of capital from its peripheries, which we identify as the history of Western modernity or Euro-centrism, belies the underlying work of constantly translating the experience of our modern world, "divergent modernities" or "modernity at large," as Julio Ramos and Arjun Appadurai (respectively) call these, into the language of capital and its seemingly unique and extraordinary narrative of gestation, coalescence, consolidation, and crisis.5 It should come as no surprise that one of the original frames for thinking Colonialism-Capitalism-Catholicism together in the expansion of the Iberian powers overseas developed in and around a...

Epitaph of a Small Winner: My First 50 Years in Academe. An Interview with Judith Ewell

Judith Ewell has been a major figure in modern Latin American history, both as a research scholar and as a teacher. Just before receiving her PhD at the University of New Mexico in 1972, Ewell began teaching at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, from which she retired in 2004. Ewell's books include The Indictment of a Dictator: The Extradition and Trial of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1981); Venezuela: A Century of Change (1984); and Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe's Hemisphere to Petroleum's Empire (1996, Spanish ed. 1998). Ewell has also published numerous articles and book chapters on modern Latin American history and women's history. She is co-editor of the much-loved biographical essay collection, The Human Tradition in Latin America (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries) with William H. Beezley, with whom she served on the editorial board of Scholarly Resources Press (now Rowman & Littlefield). Most importantly, Ewell served as chief editor of this journal, The Americas, from 1998 to 2003.

A history of political murder in Latin America: killing the messengers of change

Latin America is a continent with a reputation for violence in all its varied forms. Over the last few decades, scholars of all stripes have devoted considerable effort to analysing the phenomenon, both as it has occurred in the history of individual countries such as Colombia—which even refers to a particular period of its recent history simply as La Violencia or ‘The Violence’—and in comparative terms. W. John Green's new book, with its arresting title and intriguing subtitle, is a work of comparative synthesis that ranges broadly over the course of modern Latin American history, yet at whose core are the sanguinary ‘dirty wars’ waged in the 1970s and 1980s by the newly installed military regimes in the Southern Cone and in Central America with its more immediate Cold War dimension. Political murder, according to Green, is such a ubiquitous phenomenon because of its utility for different elite groups (paradoxically, themselves in a state of flux due to new entrants such as Colombian ‘narcos’ and Guatemalan military entrepreneurs) as ‘a mechanism of domination’ (p. 2), a means to eliminating periodic challenges—‘big or small’ (p. 8)—to their hegemony from disadvantaged socio-economic sectors advocating change. This instrumental use of political murder, moreover, is not confined to dictatorships, but can also take place in ostensible democracies. Not all members of the elite partake of such violence: prominent dissident members can also be counted among the victims, and reformist sectors of the military belie its conventional reputation as solely the Praetorian Guard of the wealthy. The political culture of murder ‘is not a static, immutable, universal presence in the region. It is subject to expediency and happenstance’ (p. 10). Political murder, Green contends, is predominantly the province of the right: it ‘drives the creation of guerrilla movements, not vice versa’ (p. 11).

Books in Brief

The editorial office has received a number of textbooks and syntheses of scholarly literature that will be of interest to our readership, especially for teaching purposes. To introduce these works, we occasionally list in this section the publication information and tables of contents entries. The five volumes selected for this issue examine Brazil, economic history, dictatorship, Central America, and modern Latin American history.

Authoritarian El Salvador: politics and the origins of the military regimes, 1880-1940

December 1931, El Salvador's civilian president, Arturo Araujo, was overthrown in a military coup. Such an event was hardly unique in Salvadoran history, but the 1931 coup proved to be a watershed. Araujo had been the nation's first democratically elected president, and although no one could have foreseen the result, the coup led to five decades of uninterrupted military rule, the longest run in modern Latin American history. Furthermore, six weeks after coming to power, the new military regime oversaw the crackdown on a peasant rebellion in western El Salvador that is one of the worst episodes of state-sponsored repression in modern Latin American history. Democracy would not return to El Salvador until the 1990s, and only then after a brutal twelve-year civil war. In Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940, Erik Ching seeks to explain the origins of the military regime that came to power in 1931. Based on his comprehensive survey of the extant documentary record in El Salvador's national archive, Ching argues that El Salvador was typified by a longstanding tradition of authoritarianism dating back to the early- to mid-nineteenth century. The basic structures of that system were based on patron-client relationships that wove local, regional, and national political actors into complex webs of rival patronage networks. Decidedly nondemocratic in practice, the system nevertheless exhibited highly paradoxical traits: it remained steadfastly loyal to elections as the mechanism by which political aspirants acquired office, and it employed a political discourse laden with appeals to liberty and free suffrage. That blending of nondemocratic authoritarianism with populist reformism and rhetoric set the precedent for military rule for the next fifty years.

The Violence after “La Violencia”

Arguably the longest civil war in modern Latin American history took place in Guatemala from 1960–1996, a period known as “La Violencia” (“The Violence”). The United Nations successfully intervened to halt the genocide of indigenous peoples resulting from the blatantly racist politics of the national government in a prolonged series of brokered negotiations. Unfortunately, the index of violence in Guatemala has returned to levels similar to those of the worst years of the civil war. While today's violence is no longer officially mandated, the consequences remain basically the same. Guatemalan indigenous peoples and those of primarily indigenous descent, especially women, are bearing the brunt of the violence after “The Violence”.

Open Veins, Public Transcripts: The National Security Archive as a Tool for Critical Pedagogy in the College Classroom

Since 2004, I have used various document sets from the National Security Archive (NSA) to teach students about modern Latin American history at Georgia College and State University, a medium-sized public liberal arts university in central Georgia. The NSA has the largest non-governmental online collection of US national security government documents in the world. Its research staff compiles, introduces, contextualizes, analyzes, and sifts through thousands of declassified materials. These include inter-agency memos, embassy communications, executive directives, confidential correspondence, and other once-classified materials. This essay will critically examine the NSA as a way of teaching the histories of US imperialism and intervention, state suppression of popular dissent, militarism, human rights abuses, and counterinsurgency tactics and training in Latin America from the beginning of the Cold War until today. First, I will provide an explanation of the assignments that I use. These consist mostly of document analysis exercises and larger research papers. I will also share which topics students tend to explore, while noting several potential methodological pitfalls in using the NSA documents. Secondly, I will share testimony on how students' views on US foreign policy have changed. The general consensus at the beginning of the semester is that one of the principal aims of US foreign policy is to promote democracy above all other values. After examining the NSA documents, however, students seriously re-examine this idea. Indeed, introducing students to the `raw material' provided by the NSA is a powerful pedagogical tool for delivering and teaching radical history.

Remembering a massacre in El Salvador: the Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the politics of historical memory

In January 1932, thousands of peasants in western El rose up in armed rebellion. Armed mostly with machetes and a few guns, they attacked military garrisons, occupied towns, and looted or destroyed businesses, government buildings and private homes. In response, the army and local paramilitary bands killed thousands of citizens in a few days, most of them innocent of any involvement in the rebellion. Recalled as a massacre, the government's actions are regarded as one of the most extreme cases of state-sponsored repression in modern Latin American history. The left generations of Salvadorans and internationals alike attempting to make sense of the events. Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador examines national and international historical memories of the events of 1932 and the factors that determined those memories. It also analyzes Miguel Marmol, by Roque Dalton, a well-known and influential narrative of the 1932 Matanza and one of the most important texts in modern Salvadoran history. The authors employ an array of primary evidence, including the personal archive of Roque Dalton, made available by the Dalton family for the first time. They argue that a systematic look at rivaling memories of the Matanza reveals the close association between historical narratives and political action. The book is complemented by a valuable appendix of primary documents that reveal the evolving memories of these important events in 1932.

The Neoconservative Turn in Latin American Literary and Cultural Criticism

This paper argues that we are witnessing a neoconservative turn in Latin American literary and cultural criticism. That turn is doubly paradoxical: first, because it occurs in the context of the re...

Squaring the Circle: Recent Textbooks on Modern Latin American History

Squaring the Circle: Recent Textbooks on Modern Latin American History

Bringing It Back Home: Perspectives on Gender and Family History in Modern Mexico

AbstractLately, study of the family as a special set of historical questions has fallen out of fashion in modern Latin American history. Yet in increasing numbers, gender historians are examining courtship and sexual behavior, marital conflict, reproductive health, women's domestic labor, institutions that intersect with families, like education, medicine, and welfare, and political deployment of family‐based ideologies. Has gender history replaced family history? This essay argues that it has not, but explores some of the ways that gender history has changed not only what we know about past families but also what we ask. Examining recent studies of the working classes in late‐nineteenth‐ and early‐twentieth‐century Mexico, the era punctuated by the revolution of 1910–1917, this essay finds that scholarly assessments of the impact on the gender order of the economic and political restructuring that preceded and followed that upheaval have expanded the frame of how we think about families while at the same time affirmed the centrality of family in the dynamics of social and ideological change.

Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910

Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910

Book-review - Problems in Modern Latin American History: Sources and Interpretations (rev.). Edited by John Charles Chasteen and James A. Wood. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2004. Pp. xii, 323. Illustrations. $65.00 cloth; $24.95 paper.

book-review - Problems in Modern Latin American History: Sources and Interpretations (rev.). Edited by John Charles Chasteen and James A. Wood. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2004. Pp. xii, 323. Illustrations. $65.00 cloth; $24.95 paper.

History of political parties in twentieth-century Latin America

The general perception of modern Latin American political institutions emphasizes a continuing and random process of disorder and crisis, continually out of step with other regions in their progress toward democracy and prosperity. In History of Political Parties in Latin America, Torcuato S. DiTella demonstrates that this common view lacks context and comparative nuance, and is deeply misleading. Looking behind the scenes of modern Latin American history, he discerns its broad patterns through close analysis of actual events and comparative sociological perspectives that explain the apparent chaos of the past and point toward the more democratic polity now developing. DiTella argues that although Latin America has peculiarities of its own, they must be understood in their contrasts - and similarities - with both the developed centers and undeveloped peripheries of the world. From the slave revolt in Haiti to that of Tupac Amaru in Peru, the Mexican Insurgentes of 1810 and those of 1910, and so many other later instances, the local dominant classes have been subjected to a greater degree of popular menace than has usually been acknowledged. This has diminished their liberal, democratic convictions and also accounts for the weakness of conservative parties in the region. DiTella analyzes, as well, such significant exceptions to this pattern as Chile, Colombia, and, to a large extent, Brazil. On the other side of the social spectrum, he shows how the underpriviledged classes have tended to support strongman populist movements, which have the double character of being aggressive toward the established order, but at the same time repressive of public liberties and of more radical groups. DiTella provides a necessary examination of the concept of populism and divides it into several variants. History of Political Parties in Latin America is rich in historical description, but also in its broad review of social structures and of the strengths and weaknesses of political institutions. It is an important volume for Latin America area specialists and historians, political scientists, and sociologists.

Secret dialogues: church-state relations, torture, and social justice in authoritarian Brazil

Secret Dialogues uncovers an unexpected development in modern Latin American history: the existence of secret talks between generals and Roman Catholic bishops at the height of Brazil's military dictatorship. New archival sources demonstrate that the church sought to retain its privileges and influence by exploring a potential alliance with the military. From 1970 to 1974 the secret Bipartite Commission worked to resolve church-state conflict and to define the boundary between social activism and subversion. As the bishops increasingly made defence of human rights their top pastoral and political goal, the Bipartite became an important forum of protest against torture and social injustice. Based on more than 60 interviews and primary sources from three continents, Secret Dialogues is a major addition to the historical narrative of the most violent yet, ironically, the least studied period of the Brazilian military regime. Its story is intertwined with the central themes of the era: revolutionary warfare, repression, censorship, the fight for democracy and the conflict between Catholic notions of social justice and the anticommunist Doctrine of National Security. Secret Dialogues is the first book of its kind on the contemporary Catholic Church in any Latin American country. It is written for undergraduate and graduate students, professional scholars and the general reader interested in Brazil, Latin America, military dictatorship, human rights, and the relationship between religion and politics.

Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890–1939

Given the important role that the Right has played in Latin America, it is remarkable how little scholarly attention has been paid to it. Sandra McGee Deutsch’s book on the extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile in the first half of the twentieth century contributes greatly to filling this void. This thorough and well-documented study offers the reader a clear and compelling portrait of the history, ideology, programs, membership, impact, and legacy of the extreme right in the ABC nations. The book begins in the late 1800s in order to establish the evolution and continuity, along with the discontinuities, in the extreme Right’s ideology and organizations in each nation. Because they reached their zenith in the 1930s, the book focuses on the three dominant fascist parties of the period: the Movimiento Nacional Socialista in Chile, the Argentine Nacionalismo, and the Ação Integralista Brasileira. The comparative nature of this study allows Deutsch to explore the domestic roots of each organization, the differences between them that emerged in response to local conditions, and the similarities that persisted across national boundaries.Nationalism offered these rightists a principle to unite behind, a goal to strive for, and a belief by which they could identify themselves. In the name of nationalism the Argentine Right opposed immigration, the Brazilian Right rejected international finance but not local capitalism, and the Chilean Right urged Latin Americans to unite against the “Yankee economic yoke” (p. 166).Deutsch’s book effectively dispels certain myths about the extreme Right, which she carefully distinguishes from the more moderate Right. Two of the more pervasive misconceptions are that the extreme Right (like the Right in general) “consists of moneyed interests” and “ha[s] uniformly opposed the struggle of the impoverished for economic improvement” (pp. 2–3). Although most of the organization’s leadership came from the upper classes, a significant sector of the membership came from the lower classes. This was particularly true for the Chilean Nacis, whose membership, according to the party, was 60 percent lower class. Part of the Right’s appeal for the poor stemmed from the former’s opposition to poverty, which it feared could generate conflicts that would prevent the construction of a strong and unified nation.Women participated in the extreme Right, although they were never as numerous as men. Most rightist women worked in the different charity projects that the groups established as part of their effort to end poverty and unite the nation. Few women held leadership positions and most viewed their political work as an extension of their familial and patriotic duties. Fairly rigid ideas about gender defined these organizations. Men were to be virile, “strong and audacious” and women were to be mothers and “delicate and conciliating” (p. 235). The family, like the nation, depended on hierarchy, with men in control.Although Deutsch defines these organizations as fascist, it is interesting to note that they did not adopt automatically the racial politics of the German Nazi Party. Indigenous peoples belonged to the Integralistas and Nacis (as did Blacks), and Jews were members of the Liga Patriótica Argentina and the Integralistas. The Argentine Nacionalistas were the most virulently anti-Semitic and the only group known to have physically assaulted Jews.Las Derechas successfully illustrates why it is essential to examine the extreme Right in Latin America. Not only did it have a significant impact on political developments in the earlier part of the previous century but its legacy continues to influence society today. While this book will be of particular interest to specialists in the field, it is an important work for all students of modern Latin American history.

Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies. DONALD F. STEVENS (ed.): Wilmington, Delaware: SR Books, 1997.

Anyone who has ever had to teach an introductory course in colonial or modern Latin American history has grappled with the question of whether to use historical films, and if so, to what extent. The historian's aversion to films as a way of depicting the past is well known. Nevertheless, today's teachers are increasingly attracted to the use of films as an incentive to study history, recognizing that more and more undergraduates have trouble coping with large quantities of reading and that "more people today get their history in movie theaters, from broadcast and cable television, and on prerecorded videocassette tapes than from reading print" (p. 4). What is more, one need not be a post-modernist to feel uncomfortable with the idea that "fact" and "fiction" are clearly distinguishable categories.

From two republics to one divided: contradictions of postcolonial nationmaking in Andean Peru

From Two Republics to One Divided examines Peru’s troubled transition from colonial viceroyalty to postcolonial republic from the local perspective of Andean peasant politics. Thurner’s reading of the Andean peasantry’s engagement and disengagement with the postcolonial state challenges long-standing interpretations of Peruvian and modern Latin American history and casts a critical eye toward Creole and Eurocentric ideas about citizenship and nationalism. Working within an innovative and panoramic historical and linguistic framework, Thurner examines the paradoxes of a resurgent Andean peasant republicanism during the mid-1800s and provides a critical revision of the meaning of republican Peru’s bloodiest peasant insurgency, the Atusparia Uprising of 1885. Displacing ahistorical and nationalist readings of Inka or Andean continuity, and undermining the long-held notion that the colonial legacy is the dominant historical force shaping contemporary Andean reality, Thurner suggests that in Peru, the postcolonial legacy of Latin America’s nation-founding nineteenth century transfigured, and ultimately reinvented, the colonial legacy in its own image.

Notes on Teaching Comparative Modern Latin American History

Notes on Teaching Comparative Modern Latin American History