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After the Spanish conquest, the Nahuas of colonial Mexico learned the Roman alphabet and used it to transcribe oral performances of traditional histories of their peoples. These texts were called xiuhpohaulli in Nahuatl and are usually referred to as “annals” now. They were produced by indigenous people and for indigenous people, without regard to European interests, and they therefore provide the closest view of pre-Columbian historiography we are ever likely to find. Over the course of the colonial era, the annals changed with the times, but for over one hundred years their flexibility allowed for incorporating the new without obliterating the old. Usually these texts have been assumed to be anonymous, but Camilla Townsend has deduced authorship in the case of most of the key texts, and in so doing, has been able to place them securely in their proper contexts, thus rendering them more legible to modern readers. Each chapter begins with a selection from a key text, then considers who wrote it and why, before finally embarking on an exploration of its meanings.

Mexico of five centuries ago was witness to one of the most momentous encounters between human societies, when a group of Spaniards led by Hernando Cortés joined forces with tens of thousands of Mesoamerican allies to topple the mighty Aztec Empire. It served as a template for the forging of much of Latin America and began the globalized world we inhabit today. This violent encounter and the new colonial order it created, a New Spain, was millennia in the making, with independent cultural developments on both sides of the Atlantic and their fateful entanglement during the pivotal Aztec-Spanish war of 1519–1521. Collision of Worlds examines the deep history of this encounter with an archaeological lens—one that considers depth in the richly layered cultures of Mexico and Spain, like the depths that archaeologists reveal through excavation to chart early layers of human history. It offers a unique perspective on the encounter through its temporal depth and focus on the physical world of places and things, their similarities and differences in trans-Atlantic perspective, and their interweaving in an encounter characterized by conquest and colonialism, but also active agency and resilience on the part of Native peoples.

On the morning of September 29, 1920, a young poet died in Santiago’s asylum, where he had recently been moved after nearly two months in police custody. Why and how did José Domingo Gómez Rojas end up in a prison, an asylum, and a cemetery? This book is an effort to answer that question. It is not a biography of José Domingo Gómez Rojas, although he figures prominently in its pages. It is, rather, a book about the context within which his arrest, imprisonment, and death unfolded and about the experiences of a number of the men he counted as friends and comrades. Covering a four-month period of 1920 in Santiago, it is a book about anarchists and aristocrats, students and teachers, poets and prosecutors, and cops and Wobblies. While narrative in form, the book has a number of analytical threads. It pays close attention to university students and the radicalization and “disidentification” they experienced over the course of the 1910s as well as the close relationships they forged with working people at the time. The book also stresses the importance of anarcho-communism in Chile in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The narrative is structured around the lives and labors of agitators and organizers who spent most, if not all, of their lives in Santiago and thus emphasizes the importance of place to radical politics. This is, in sum, a story of individuals and the collective struggles they waged, futures they imagined, and worlds they occupied.

In the later eighteenth century the West Indian sugar islands were a source of conspicuous wealth for some individuals and an important addition to the resources of Great Britain. They were generally reckoned to be the most valuable of Britain’s imperial possessions, a view which Burke fully endorsed. This book examines his long involvement with the West Indies, at a personal level through the ambitions of his brother and some of his closest friends, as a politician and what contemporaries called ‘a man of business’ in the management of a great national asset and in trying to win the support of powerful West Indian interests for his political connection. He became a participant in debates about the ethics of enslavement and the slave trade. Burke deplored both slavery and the trade, but he recognized that the plantation economy of the West Indies depended on them and that therefore they played a crucial role in Britain’s immensely valuable Atlantic commerce. The policies that he advocated for the further development of the West Indian and African trades inevitably involved more enslaved Africans in the British Empire and on occasions he was drawn into implicitly endorsing the slave trade. Except for a few years from 1788 to 1791, Burke was not prepared to countenance immediate abolition of the trade, but he did devise a comprehensive plan for reforming both it and the institution of slavery, that in the very long term would make both redundant.

This book demonstrates that ordinary, often illiterate colonial subjects of the Spanish empire were among the Enlightenment’s most adept practitioners. Broadly situated within postcolonial debates about the Enlightenment and modernity, it employs approaches from comparative social science, intellectual history, and legal history to demonstrate that, at end of the 1700s, colonial Spanish Americans began to sue one another with a zeal unseen on the peninsula. Part I examines how and how many lawsuits were generated in the empire. It analyzes civil litigation rates in six areas of Mexico, Peru, and Spain, including Mexico City, Oaxaca, Lima, Trujillo, Peru, the Montes de Toledo, Spain, and the peninsular high court of Valladolid. With chapters on the process of suing, and on the intellectual transformations and absolutist royal policy reforms on law and its practice, it explores legal culture in diverse capital cities and rural districts. Part II zeroes in on three types of civil cases that increased even more rapidly than the general rise of civil suits. The cases that colonial women, Indian commoners, and slaves initiated against masters, native leaders, and husbands challenged an older model of justice aimed at extralegal outcomes and casuistic jurisprudence. As they produced new ideas about freedom, natural rights, history, and merit in court, these subordinate litigants ultimately created an Enlightened law-centered culture. The conclusion considers why Spain and its colonies have remained marginal to the story of the advent of the modern West.

The book tells the history of modern Argentina as seen from the perspective of political violence and ideology. It focuses on the theory and practice of the fascist idea in Argentine political culture throughout the twentieth century. It analyzes the connections between fascist theory and the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and the military junta’s practices of torture and state violence (1976-1983), its networks of concentration camps and extermination. The destruction of the rule of law and military state terror represent the end road of the twisted historical path of Argentine and Latin American dictatorships. The book emphasizes the genocidal dimensions of the persecution of Argentine Jewish victims. The “Dirty War” was not a real war but an illegal militarization of state repression. This popularized term needs to be explained in terms of the fascist genealogies that the book explores. From a historical perspective, the “Dirty War” did not feature two combatants but rather victims and perpetrators. In fact, the state made “war” against its citizens. This state-sanctioned terror had its roots in fascist ideology, tracing a history from the fascist movements of the interwar war years to the concentration camps. Argentine fascism shaped the country’s political culture. The Argentine road to fascism began in the 1920s and 1930s and from then on continued to acquire many political and ideological reformulations and personifications, from Peronism (1943-1955) to terrorist right-wing organizations in the 1960s (especially Tacuara and the Triple A) to the last military dictatorship (1976-1983).

Climate change is producing profound changes globally. This environmental history analysis offers a much needed but barely examined ground‐level study of human impacts and responses to climate change over time. It analyzes how people around Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range grappled with climate‐induced glacial lake outburst floods and glacier avalanches, which killed approximately 25,000 people since 1941. As survivors grieved, they formed community organizations and demanded state programs to drain dangerous glacial lakes. Yet they rejected hazard zoning in their communities. Peruvian engineers working with miniscule budgets invented innovative strategies to drain dozens of unstable lakes that continue forming in the twenty first century. But hazard mitigation, disaster responses, and climate change adaptation were never just about engineering the Andes to protect vulnerable populations. Local urban and rural populations, engineers, hydroelectric developers, irrigators, tourists, and policymakers all perceived and responded to glacier retreat differently, based on their own view of an ideal Andean world. Disaster prevention projects involved debates about economic development, state authority, race relations, class divisions, cultural values, the evolution of science and technology studies, and shifting views of nature. Over time, the influx of new groups helped transform glaciated mountains into commodities to consume. Locals lost power in the process and today comprise just one among many stakeholders—and perhaps the least powerful. Climate change transformed a region, triggering catastrophes while simultaneously jumpstarting political and economic modernization processes. This book's historical perspective illuminates these trends that would be overlooked in any scientific projections about future climate scenarios.

This book describes a period of several decades during the sixteenth century when conquistadores, Catholic friars, and imperial officials attempted to conquer the Inca Empire and impose Spanish colonial rule. When Francisco Pizarro captured the Inca warlord Atahuallpa at Cajamarca in 1532, European Catholics and Andean peoples interpreted the event using long-held beliefs about how their worlds would end, and what the next era might look like. The Inca world did not end at Cajamarca, despite some popular misunderstandings of the Spanish conquest of Peru. In the years that followed, some Inca lords resisted Spanish rule, but many Andean nobles converted to Christianity and renegotiated their sovereign claims into privileges as Spanish subjects. Catholic empire took a lifetime to establish in the Inca world, and it required the repeated conquest of rebellious conquistadores, the reorganization of native populations, and the economic overhaul of diverse Andean landscapes. These disruptive processes of modern world-building carried forward old ideas about sovereignty, social change, and human progress. Although they are overshadowed by the Western philosophies and technologies that drive our world today, those apocalyptic relics remain with us to the present.

In 1912 the United States sent troops into a Nicaraguan civil war, solidifying a decades-long era of military occupations in Latin America driven by the desire to rewrite the political rules of the hemisphere. For the first time, Alan McPherson takes us inside the resistance to the three longest occupations—in Nicaragua (1912–1933), Haiti (1915–1934), and the Dominican Republic (1916–1924). He asks why the invaded resisted and why the troops eventually left. Confronting the assumption that lofty nationalism primarily motivated resisters, McPherson finds more concrete—yet also more passionate—reasons: hatred for the brutality of the marines, fear of losing land, outrage at cultural impositions, and thirst for political power. Against the accepted view that Washington withdrew from Latin American occupations out of sudden moral enlightenment, McPherson stresses the role of the invaded in forcing the Yankees to leave, especially day-to-day resistance and the transnational network. For occupier and occupied, political culture mattered more than military or economic motives: US marines were determined to transform political values, and occupied peoples fought to conserve them. Based on research in rarely seen documents in three languages and five countries and packed with a fascinating cast of characters, this lively narrative recasts the very nature of occupation as a colossal tragedy, doomed from the outset to fail. It also offers broad lessons for today’s invaders and invaded.

William O. Jenkins (1878–1963) was a Tennessee farm boy who ventured to Mexico in search of fortune and became that country’s wealthiest and most infamous industrialist. Dropping out of Vanderbilt, Jenkins eloped with a southern belle and settled in Mexico in 1901. Driven by a desire to prove himself—first to his wife’s snobbish family, then to elites who disdained him as an American—Jenkins would spend the next six decades building an enormous fortune in textiles, property, sugar, banking, and film. Already a millionaire when the Revolution of 1910 broke out, Jenkins began speculating in property in his adoptive state of Puebla. He had a brush with a firing squad and later suffered a kidnapping by rebels, an episode that almost triggered a US invasion. After the war he developed Mexico’s most productive sugar plantation, before diversifying as a venture capitalist. During Mexican cinema’s Golden Age in the 1940s and 1950s, Jenkins lorded over the industry with a monopoly of theaters and a major role in production. Reputed as an exploiter of workers, a puppet-master of politicians, and Mexico’s richest industrialist, Jenkins became the gringo that Mexicans most loved to loathe. After the death of his wife, wracked by guilt at having abandoned her, Jenkins became increasingly dedicated to philanthropy, finally creating a charitable foundation to administer his $60 million fortune. Still operating today, the Mary Street Jenkins Foundation helped set up two prestigious universities and set a precedent for US-style foundations in Mexico.

The People Are King traces the transformation of Andean communities under Inca and Spanish rule. The sixteenth-century Spanish resettlement policy known as reducción was pivotal to this transformation. Modeled on the Spanish ideal of república (self-government within planned towns) and shared sovereignty with their monarch, Spaniards in the Viceroyalty of Peru forced Andeans into resettlement towns. Andeans turned the tables on forced resettlement by making the towns their own and the center of their social, political, and religious lives. Andeans made a coherent life for themselves in a complex process of ethnogenesis that blended preconquest ways of life (the ayllu) with the imposed institutions of town life and Christian religious practices. Within these towns, Andeans claimed the right to self-government, and increasingly regarded their native lords, the caciques, as tyrants. A series of microhistorical accounts in these repúblicas reveals that Andeans believed that commoner people, collectively called the común, could rule themselves. With both Andean and Spanish antecedents, this political philosophy of radical democracy was key to the Great Rebellion of the late eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on well-known leaders such as Tupac Amaru, this book demonstrates through commoner rebels’ holographic letters that it was commoner Andean people who made the late eighteenth-century a revolutionary moment by asserting their rights to self-government. In the final chapter the book follows the commoner-lead towns of the Andes from the era of independence into the present day of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

One of the most potent insurgencies in twentieth-century Latin American history emerged in El Salvador in the 1970s. This book examines the trajectories of urban and peasant intellectuals who articulated the movement’s ideology and politics in the context of the Cold War in Latin America. Between 1960 and 1980, these intellectuals embodied an ethos of resistance that blended multiple political, religious, and cultural traditions. They drew on cultures of resistance deeply rooted in the country’s history as well as poetry and religion to spark urban and rural mobilizations against oligarchic-military rule that preceded the civil war in El Salvador. The book provides a ground-up history of the polarization and mobilization that brought El Salvador to the eve of civil war. Combining social analysis with close attention to political consciousness, it examines the evolution of political and religious mentalities and ideas about historical change among both urban and peasant intellectuals who articulated the insurgency’s ideology and politics. Poets and Prophets of the Resistance utilizes archival sources in El Salvador and the United States, especially public and private archives that document Catholic Church history, university politics, intellectuals, literary groups, social movements, insurgencies, and repression. It also relies on original interviews with men and women who took part in Salvadoran politics and cultural life in the 1950s through 1970s. The book suggests that the trajectories of intellectuals and revolutionary movements, even in geographically small countries like El Salvador, can reshape the history of the Cold War in Latin America.

This book examines technology, modern identity, and history-making in Peru by telling the story of the surprising success of Peruvian pilots and how their achievements generated great optimism that this new technology could lift the country out of its self-perceived backwardness. Though poor infrastructure, economic woes, a dearth of technical expertise, and a ghastly number of pilot deaths slowed the project after the first flights over Lima in 1911, the image of intrepid Peruvian pilots inspired a new sense of national possibility. Airplanes seemed to embody not just technological progress but enlightened rationality, capitalist enterprise, and nation-state aggrandizement. By 1928, three commercial lines were transporting passengers, mail, and merchandise from Lima to other parts of the country and South America. The expansion of Peruvian aviation illuminates how a Eurocentric modernizing vision has served as a powerful organizing force in regions with ambivalent relationships to the West. This technology simultaneously naturalized modernity and generated dissatisfaction with inferior or inauthentic results. More broadly, the fitful development of Peru’s aviation venture underscores the important role that technology plays in larger, complex historical processes. Even as politicians, businessmen, military officials, journalists, and ruling oligarchs felt a special kinship with Peru’s aviation project, diverse socioeconomic groups engaged aviation to challenge power asymmetries and historical silences rooted in Peru’s postcolonial past. Most observers at the time considered airplanes a universal technology that performed the same function in Europe, the United States, and Peru. In reality, how Peruvians mobilized and understood airplanes reflected culturally specific values and historical concerns.

This book examines the gendered and class-conscious political activism of Mexican-origin people in Texas from 1900 to 1950. In particular, it questions the inter-generational agency of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who subscribed to particular race-ethnic, class, and gender ideologies as they encountered barriers and obstacles in a society that often treated Mexicans as a nonwhite minority. Middle-class transborder activists sought to redeem the Mexican masses from body politic exclusions in part by encouraging them to become identified with the nation-state. Redeeming la raza was as much about saving them from traditional modes of thought and practices that were perceived as hindrances to progress as it was about saving them from race and class-based forms of discrimination that were part and parcel of modernity. At the center of this link between modernity and discriminatory practices based on social constructions lay the economic imperative for the abundant and inexpensive labor power that the modernization process required. Labeling groups of people as inferior helped to rationalize their economic exploitation in a developing modern nation-state that also professed to be a democratic society founded upon principles of political egalitarianism. This book presents cases of transborder activism that demonstrate how the politics of respectability and the politics of radicalism operated, often at odds but sometimes in complementary ways.

Martinique and Guadeloupe voted to become overseas departments of France, or DOMs, in 1946, eschewing the trend toward national independence movements during the post-World War II years. For Antilleans, this was the natural culmination of a centuries-long quest for equality with France and a means of overcoming the entrenched political and economic power of the white minority on the islands, the békés. Disappointment with departmentalization set in quickly, however, as the promised equality was slow in coming and Antillean contributions to the war went unrecognized. Champions of departmentalization such as Aimé Césaire argued that the “race-blind” Republic was far from universal and egalitarian. The French government struggled to stem unrest in a growing population in the Antilles through economic development, tourism, and immigration to the metropole where labor was in short supply. Antilleans fought against racial and gender stereotypes imposed on them by European French and sought to both stem the tide of white metropolitan workers arriving in the Antilles and make better lives for their families in France. Although departmentalization has been criticized as a weak alternative to national independence, the vote was overwhelmingly popular among Antilleans at the time, and such disappointment reflects more on the broken promises of assimilation rather than the misguided nature of the vote itself.

Franklin Roosevelt's good neighbour policy, coming in the wake of decades of U.S. intervention in Central America, and following a lengthy U.S. military occupation of Nicaragua, marked a significant shift in U.S. policy towards Latin America. Its basic tenets were non-intervention and non-interference. The period was exceptionally significant for Nicaragua, as it witnessed the creation and consolidation of the Somoza government — one of Latin America's most enduring authoritarian regimes, which endured from 1936 to the Sandinista revolution in 1979. Addressing the political, diplomatic, military, commercial, financial, and intelligence components of U.S. policy, this book analyses the background to the U.S. military withdrawal from Nicaragua in the early 1930s. It assesses the motivations for Washington's policy of disengagement from international affairs, and the creation of the Nicaraguan National Guard, as well as debating U.S. accountability for what the Guard became under Somoza. The book challenges the conventional theory that Somoza's regime was a creature of Washington. It was U.S. non-intervention, not interference, the book argues, that enhanced the prospects of tyranny.

This book chronicles the subaltern political history of peasant guerrilla movements that emerged in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero during the late 1960s. The National Revolutionary Civic Association (ACNR) and the Party of the Poor (PDLP), led by schoolteachers Genaro Vázquez and Lucio Cabañas, respectively, organized popularly backed revolutionary armed struggles that sought the overthrow of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Both guerrilla organizations materialized from a decades-long history of massacres and everyday forms of terror committed by local-regional political bosses and the Mexican federal government against citizen social movements that demanded the redemption of constitutional rights. The book reveals that these revolutionary movements developed after years of exhausting legal, constitutional pathways of redress (focused on issues of economic justice and electoral rights) and surviving several state-directed massacres throughout the 1960s. As such, the peasant guerrillas represented only the final phase of a social process with roots in the unfulfilled promises of the 1910 Mexican revolution and the dual program of capitalist modernization and political authoritarianism adopted by the PRI after 1940.

The book tells the story of Rufino, or Abuncare, a Yoruba Muslim from the kingdom of Oyo, who came to Brazil as a slave in c. 1823 and lived in the Atlantic cities of Salvador, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, Recife (all in Brazil), and Freetown in Sierra Leone. In Salvador, he lived his first eight years as a slave; then he was taken to Porto Alegre by his young master and sold there. He bought his freedom in 1835 with money he made as a hire-out slave and then moved to Rio de Janeiro. Here Rufino started to work as a cook on a slave ship bound to Luanda. In late 1841, after a few slave trading voyages between Africa and Recife, his ship was captured by the British and sent to Freetown, where he took Qur’ānic and Arabic classes in the local Yoruba community. Still an employee of the slave trade, he would later return to Sierra Leone complete his studies. Back to Recife, he made a living as a diviner, serving all sorts of clients, whites and blacks, free and slaves. He also became a leader in the local Afro-Muslim community. In 1853, Rufino was arrested in Recife due to rumors of an imminent African slave revolt. Rufino left several traces of his personal experience as a slave and a freeman in Africa, Brazil, and aboard a slave ship. The book revolves around his life, which is used as a lead to discuss the slave trade, slavery, and the resilience of ethnic and religious identities as seen through the experience of an individual.

Language and translation governed the creation of Mexican Christianity during the first centuries of colonial rule. Spanish missionaries collaborated with indigenous intellectuals to communicate the gospel in dozens of local languages that had previously lacked grammars, dictionaries, or alphabetic script. The major challenge to translators, more serious than the absence of written aids or the great diversity of languages and their phonetic and syntactical complexity, was the vast cultural difference between the two worlds. The lexical gaps that frustrated the search for equivalence in conveying fundamental Christian doctrines derived from cultural gaps that separated European experiences and concepts from those of the Indians. This study focuses on the Otomangue languages of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, especially Zapotec, and relates their role in the Dominican evangelizing program to the larger frame of culture contact in postconquest Mesoamerica. Fine-grained analysis of translated texts is used to reveal the rhetorical strategies of missionary discourse and combines with an examination of language contact in different social contexts. A major aim is to spotlight the role of the native elites in shaping what emerged as a new form of Christianity. As translators, chief catechists, and parish administrators they made evangelization in many respects an indigenous enterprise and the Mexican church it created an indigenous church.

The sixteenth-century changes wrought by expansion of Spanish empire into Peru shaped the ways of being a colonial family in Peru. Even as migration, race mixture, and transculturation took place, family members fulfilled obligations to one another by adapting custom to a changing world. Family began to shift when, from the moment of their arrival in 1532, Spaniards were joined with elite indigenous women in political marriage-like alliances. Almost immediately, a generation of mestizos was born that challenged the hierarchies of colonial society. In response, the Spanish Crown began to promote the marriage of these men and the travel of Spanish women to Peru to promote vida maridable, good customs and even serve as surrogate parents. Other reactions came from wives in Spain who, abandoned by husbands, sought assistance to fulfill family duties. For indigenous families, the pressures of colonialism prompted migration to cities. By mid-century, the increase of Spanish migration to Peru changed the social landscape, but did not halt mixed-race marriages. The book posits that late sixteenth-century cities, specifically Lima and Arequipa, were host to indigenous and Spanish families but also to numerous ‘blended’ families borne of a process of mestizaje. In its final chapter, the legacies for the next generation reveal how Spanish fathers sometimes challenged law with custom and sentiment to establish inheritance plans for their children. By tracing family oblig ations connecting Peru and Spain through dowries, bequests, legal powers, and letters, Transatlantic Obligations presents a powerful call to rethink sixteenth-century definitions of family.