Twentieth-century Latin America Research Articles

The State, Civil Society, and Revolutions: Building Political Legitimacy in Twentieth-Century Latin America

The State, Civil Society, and Revolutions: Building Political Legitimacy in Twentieth-Century Latin America

Latin American Political Armies in the Twenty‐first Century

Outlining the debate1 Twentieth-century Latin America has been the continent of political soldiers and military politicians. Effectively, the true significance of the Latin American armed forces is in their political nature. As a 'stabilising force', as 'disinterested arbiter', as a 'protecting power of the constitution', as 'guardian of national development', the military constantly intervened in political matters. In this intervening capacity, generals became politicians in uniform, more than the leaders of soldiers. Political militarism continued to affect Latin America during the 'third wave' of d?mocratisation (Diamond, 1999). During the 1980s and early 1990s, military discontent with the civilian governments' performance erupted into barrack revolts or attempted coups in Argentina and Venezuela. The military in Brazil and Chile gave occasional shows of force to air their views on key issues such as constitutional reform, labour policy, or human rights. In Peru, the military backed the 'self-coup' of elected president Alberto Fujimori in 1992. In Venezuela, former revolt leader Hugo Chavez was elected president in 1998, while in Bolivia former military strongman and dictator Hugo Banzer made a political comeback through the ballot box. After Guatemala's presidential elections in December 1999, the former military dictator Efrain R?os Montt became the president of the nation's congress. Not only did elected presidents resort to the instrument of the military-backed coup and former dictators or putchists re-entered politics through the ballot box. The classical pronunciamiento also renewed its lease on life. In Paraguay, Colonel Lino Oviedo helped bringing down the long-standing regime of the old dictator Alfredo Stroessner in the late 1980s. Subsequently promoted to general,

Michael F. Jiménez (1948-2001)

Michael F. Jiménez (1948-2001)

Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America

Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America

The Fits and Spurts of Latin American Economic History and Historiography - Enrique Cárdenas, José Antonio Ocampo, and Rosemary Thorp, eds. An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Latin America, vol. 1: The Export Age: The Latin American Economies in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. New York: Palgrave, 2000. xiii + 329 pp. ISBN 0-333-91304-3, $75.00. - Rosemary Thorp, ed.

In fits and spurts throughout the twentieth century, Latin Americans improved their material well-being. The Inter-American Develop ment Bank has sponsored a major project to document the economic history of Latin America during the long twentieth century, with the goal of making that story accessible to a wide public and univer sity audience. The three volumes under discussion here provide the background papers that formed the basis of that effort (which ap pears as Rosemary Thorp, Progress, Poverty and Exclusion: An Eco

An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Latin America. Edited by Enrique Cárdenas, José Antonio Ocampo, and Rosemary Thorp. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Volume I: The Export Age: The Latin American Economies in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Pp. 329. $75.00. Volume II: Latin America in the 1930s: The Role of the Periphery in World Crisis. Pp. 297. $69.95. Volume III:

These three volumes bring together a set of very useful essays on Latin American economic growth since the late nineteenth century. The first volume focuses on the so-called “export age,” the period 1870–1930. The second (a reprint of a volume originally published in 1984) focuses on the impact of the Great Depression and the process of recovery throughout the 1930s. The third focuses on state-led industrialization from the 1940s to the early 1990s. The essays in these volumes are, with few exceptions, organized around national histories. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico receive particular attention. Some of the volumes also include essays on Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, and Central America. The goal of the volumes is not to provide a synthesis of the literature on each country, running the gamut of economic sectors and the institutions that governed their growth, but to focus on a set of themes related to the industrial development of each country.

Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America

As its cover announces, the book reviewed here is a new edition, not a revised one. Magical Reels’s previously published chapters are unchanged since their original appearance in 1990. The new edition’s new addition is an afterward, covering developments during the last century’s last decade. This substantial final chapter offers John King’s cautious, yet shrewd, observations about macro issues—such as transnationalism, globalization, and neoliberalism—pertinent to (Latin American) cinema’s contemporary history (and intellectual discourse about mass culture). It also replicates the earlier chapters’ admirable mixture of material and representational analysis as well as their nation-by-nation survey of Latin American filmmaking. In doing so, this new final chapter makes good use of recent works about fin de siglo filmmaking to explore the interplay of contemporary economic patterns and cultural production. The previous chapters, however, do not benefit from interpolation of significant scholarship published since 1990 about pre-1990 Latin American film.Magical Reels’s cover photograph indicates, too, what is different and the same about its millennium edition. As with the earlier version, the current one features a production still, depicting a heterosexual couple, from an “internationally acclaimed” Mexican film (that is, one well-received in U.S. and European art house film circuits). An image of María Rojo and her dance partner from María Novaro’s Danzón (1991) replaces one of Pedro Armendáriz and Dolores del Río from Emilio Fernández’s María Candelaria (1943). This change announces the most obvious difference between this edition and its predecessor: coverage of the 1990s. It also perpetuates Mexican cinema’s dominant visibility within English-language scholarship about Latin American film. To a large degree this is derived from the overrepresentation of internationally influential films (that is, relative critical and commercial “successes” in North America and Europe) in scholarly discourse about cinema. It is often a story of “winners,” judged as such by their presence among elite audiences outside of Latin America more often than by their resonance among popular ones within the region. This too-common convergence of international market and scholarship belies Magical Reels’s comprehensive geocultural scope. However, by displaying, in the first case (1990), an iconographic marker of canonical film history, and in the second (2000), a widely identifiable contemporary commercial symbol, the book’s cover anticipates its broad audience. Neither film represented was mere quotidian fodder, but international film-festival fare; both feature not just any actors but movie stars; each is the work of an auteur.Magical Reels is essentially a political history of culture. Its top-down approach foregrounds national production and individual accomplishment. It focuses more on the formation of famous filmmakers, state policies, and business ventures than on life in and around the movie theater. The impact of economic and political power on filmmaking takes precedence over that of cinema on national and international history. Its representational analysis privileges particular plots and genres over discursive patterns and practices. But Magical Reels is particularly effective in demonstrating the centrality of state intervention and (more recently) nonintervention in the development of Latin American culture industries. And students and scholars of not only mass media but almost every other aspect of twentieth-century Latin American history—including state formation and national identity, economics and business, revolution and international relations, art and ideas, class, race, and gender relations, to name a few—will find much to add to their respective historiographies. This underlines a broader point implied by Magical Reels, but one that deserves explicit enunciation: the integral relationship between the historical study of audiovisual culture and “the rest of ” history. Film (and radio and television) is not a short subject preceding “real” history’s feature presentation. Rather it offers a fresh field on which to engage issues that generate far-reaching empirical insights relevant to noncinematic historical analysis.Any historical synthesis—especially one of such prodigious scope—demands analytic compromises. Magical Reels does not undermine its indispensability to readers who seek comparative analysis of cinematic developments within Latin America. King’s linkage of broad political and economic developments to specific national cinematic practices suggests the need for more monographical research about Latin America film culture (broadly defined) that probes interactions between screen and society as well as production and politics. Such micro-level historical studies, ones that intensively investigate archives and thickly contextualize films, will provide building materials for new syntheses. These will relate our present understanding of production trends and auteurs to cinematic history that lies beyond the screen. In the meantime, Magical Reels remains the most useful English-language introduction to Latin American film. The new edition’s after-ward merits the attention of all scholars already familiar with its predecessor. And the entire work remains foundational not only for those interested in Latin American cinema but in the history of twentieth-century Latin America, generally.

Embedded within State Agencies: Business Associations in Yantai

I would like to thank Kevin O'Brien, Hong Yung Lee, David Wank, Ben Goldfrank, Laura Henry, Loren Landau, Kun-Chin Lin and Ben Read for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I also am grateful for the very helpful criticisms and suggestions offered by Jon Unger, Anita Chan and an anonymous reviewer. Of course, any mistakes herein are mine alone. I owe special thanks to the people in Yantai who facilitated my research. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Chicago on 23 March 2001. Research for this article was supported by fellowships from the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China and the National Security Education Program.

An Economic history of twentieth-century Latin America: v.2: Latin America in the 1930s: the role of the periphery in world crisis

An Economic history of twentieth-century Latin America: v.2: Latin America in the 1930s: the role of the periphery in world crisis

An Economic history of twentieth-century Latin America: v.1: The export age: the Latin American economies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

An Economic history of twentieth-century Latin America: v.1: The export age: the Latin American economies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

An Economic history of twentieth-century Latin America: v.3: Industrialization and the state in Latin America: the postwar years

An Economic history of twentieth-century Latin America: v.3: Industrialization and the state in Latin America: the postwar years

Women's movements in international perspective: Latin America and beyond

This wide-ranging collection of essays, written over some twenty years, engages fully the general debates over the politics of gender and appraises women's movements in widely varying societies. Most chapters deal directly with Latin American issues and experiences, including anarchist feminism in nineteenth century Argentina; the politics of gender and those of abortion in Sandinista Nicaragua; the role of the official Cuban women's movement in the 1990s; and an appraisal of the relations between gender and state in twentieth century Latin America. The remaining chapters extend beyond the region to provide comparative analysis and an international context, paying particular attention to women's interests and rights, the law and the role of the state.

Progress, Poverty and Exclusion: An Economic History of Latin America in the 20th Century

Despite the great diversity of experience in the countries that together make up Latin America, there exists, among its students, a great desire to understand the region as a whole. This is especially true when it comes to questions of national and economic development and the social controversies of the twentieth century. Rosemary Thorp’s survey of the economic and social history of Latin America offers a welcome integration of the current state of knowledge of diverse national experiences into a sweeping account of the great forces of economic change over the past century. Necessarily, the author has left many favorite topics untouched; yet the conciseness and breathtaking pace are to the author’s credit, for with broad strokes, Thorp has painted a picture with remarkable insight and selectivity.The author’s profound experience as a scholar of Latin American economic history was supported by a select team of scholar-consultants, commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank, and a massive project to compile and assemble an internally consistent database of economic and social indicators for all Latin American countries. Without diminishing the credit to the author, the auxiliary resources have undoubtedly contributed to the book’s success in integrating the individual histories of twenty diverse nations into a narrative that highlights both their unique and common features. It combines a meticulous comparative analysis of patterns and trends observable in the quantitative database with insightful anecdotes and examples. As for the common struggles in the region against poverty and inequality, Thorp maintains an objective voice and emphasizes demographic and international forces. Countries whose experiences deviate from the general trends are often highlighted in attempt to learn lessons from the exceptions.Particularly outstanding are the narratives of the two major crises of the century—the 1930s and the 1980s. The narrative proceeds from the liberal policies of the beginning of the century and ends with an account of the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s. She concludes that the issues go deeper than the often-heard dispute about the appropriateness of market-based policies. “It turns on the fact that there is no substitute for the long haul of building or rebuilding institutional frameworks” (p. 273). Indeed, “institution building” is a recurrent, if undefined, theme. In context, it seems to refer most often to the growth in activities of formal development institutions, such as the IDB, including state and internationally sponsored organizations, central banks, and so forth. This contrasts sharply with the emphasis in more recent literature on institutions, which focuses on privately determined rules of behavior, legal institutions and property rights. Noticeably absent is any analysis of differences in the design or qualities of institutions or policy implementation. A similar criticism can be made regarding her treatment of the state as a uniform actor to the neglect of enormous differences in the institutions that underpin political representation. While the reader is convinced that institutions matter, no satisfactory explanation is offered as to how they matter. Given the conclusion that questions about institutions point the way forward, she might have given more attention to recent advances in that area.Any work of such magnitude will inevitably leave a gap or two. If unable to treat all themes with equal depth, Thorp has provided a remarkably thorough yet concise outline of the economic developments and their social consequences of the twentieth century in less than 300 pages. Its comprehensiveness and extensive data appendix make it a useful reference tool. As a textbook choice it has no equal, if one seeks a readable survey of the role of economic forces in twentieth-century Latin America that is concise and accessible. An admirable accomplishment, a welcome contribution!

Murder and masculinity: violent fictions of twentieth-century Latin America

Murder and masculinity: violent fictions of twentieth-century Latin America

John D. French and Daniel James, eds., The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers: From Household and Factory to the Union Hall and Ballot Box. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. vii + 320 pp. $54.95 cloth; $17.95 paper.

This is an invaluable volume, expanding Latin American women's and labor history in important thematic, methodological, and theoretical directions. The authors explore the lives, struggles, and consciousness of urban working women in Brazil, the Southern Cone, Guatemala, and Colombia. By and large, the essays develop a nuanced understanding of the relationship between gender and class in twentieth-century Latin America. They incorporate postmodern approaches to historical analysis as well as the classic concerns of labor history with material conditions, social relations, and working-class political consciousness. The contributors examine the multiple meanings of discourse and popular culture while insisting that it is indeed possible to recapture women's experience in some measure. They generally move beyond the dichotomy of celebrating women's heroism and denouncing sexism, instead showing how solidarity between laboring women and men could be intimately interwoven with male domination. Finally, several of the authors employ oral history in sophisticated ways, demonstrating that how a story is told can be just as important in shaping our understanding of history as the empirical detail it may seem to offer us.

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest

The history of the city in twentieth-century Latin America can be seen as a long contest over the exercise of urban public space. While the nature of this space is often less physical than it is social and situational, the struggle between different elements of the city to manipulate its politics and control its daily life has often been violent, leaving deep imprints in the collective memories of places as culturally and physically diverse as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Havana, Bogotá, and Rio de Janeiro.If approached from the perspective of contested space, the urban milieu offers an intriguing site for the historian interestedin exploring changing relations of power, class conflict, opposing visions of the future, breakdowns of social order, gendered spaces, health and disease, visual culture, spectacle and symbolic codes, and ultimately, the creation of community. Yet until the 1980s, most Latin American historians who were interestedin these themes confined their studies to the countryside. As late as 1975, Jorge Hardoy (1975:44) could write that “the urban history of the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth is virtually unknown, in spite of the extremely rich material left to us by innumerable travelers, scientists, and men of state.” While historians and social scientists working from the 1950s through much of the 1970s delineated the complex relations between peasant villages and national states, the ideologies of rural rebellion, and the sources of identity and community in a countryside transformed by the demands of export capital, cities in twentieth-century Latin America were accorded secondary treatment, sometimes at the level of popular anecdotal narratives.

James D. Henderson, Conservative Thought in Twentieth Century Latin America: The Ideas of Laureano Gómez, Monographs in International Studies. Latin American Series No. 13 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1988), pp. xi + 217, $12.00.

James D. Henderson, Conservative Thought in Twentieth Century Latin America: The Ideas of Laureano Gómez, Monographs in International Studies. Latin American Series No. 13 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1988), pp. xi + 217, $12.00. - Volume 22 Issue 1-2

Conservative Thought in Twentieth-Century Latin America: The Ideas of Laureano Gomez.

Laureano Gómez was president of Colombia in the early 1950s until overthrown by a military coup. He was also, for some fifty years, the leading exponent of Latin American conservatism, a political philosophy with roots in both nineteenth-century politics and religion. Focusing on Gómez, and other prominent conservative politicians, Henderson traces the evolution of Latin American conservatism and demonstrates the scope of its influence throughout the continent. While much has been written about particular Marxist movements and right-wing regimes in contemporary Latin America, little attention has been devoted, in recent years, to the more moderate political institutions and individuals which dominate twentieth-century Latin America. This first account of Latin American conservatism should be of interest to all students of the history and politics of the region.

Changing Criminal Patterns in Buenos Aires, 1890 to 1914

Despite the recent development of a broad literature on urbanization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America, the topics of public order and crime have eluded careful study.1The historiography of Argentine urbanization evokes questions about social control, but we know little more about changing patterns of crime and policing than did contemporary observers. Immigration, labor organization, class struggle, and political violence have all been the subjects of scholarly inquiries that suggest both high levels of disorder and the necessity of official responses.2

Andeanism and Anti-Andeanism in Twentieth-Century Venezuela

A significant but largely overlooked phenomenon in twentieth-century Latin America has been the extended dominance of a single region over an entire nation. To one degree or another this type of regionalism has existed in several countries, including revolutionary Mexico, with the rise of the North and the Sonora Dynasty, and Brazil, with the control of national politics by the São Paulo-Minas Gerais axis from the 1890’s to 1930, followed by the rise of Rio Grande do Sul. In the following pages I will examine this type of regionalism as it occurred in Venezuela, in the form of Táchiran dominance over the government and armed forces for the first forty-five years of this century. My purpose is to explain how the men of one small agricultural state could maintain such long-term mastery over the country, what sort of reaction this “hegemony” produced, what the limits of regional control were, and, finally, when Táchiran rule definitively ended.