LATIN AMERICA’S AGRARIAN NOVELS CHRONICLED THE BIRTH OF A NEW WORLDBetween 1910 and 1970, Latin America experienced a rapid and radical transformation. Rural societies became urban, and peasants found themselves forced into precarious wage labor. The Latin American novel became the key witness to this upheaval, revealing capitalism’s violent remaking of country and city alike.In Agrarian Questions, Ericka Beckman shows how these novels illuminate a...

Between 1870 and 1930, Latin American countries were incorporated into global capitalist networks like never before, mainly as exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. During this Export Age, entire regions were given over to the cultivation of export commodities such as coffee and bananas, capital and labor were relocated to new production centers, and barriers to foreign investment were removed. Capital Fictions investigates the key role played by literatu...

Why are Mexicans so successful in individual sports, but deficient in team play? Why do Mexicans dislike living in skyscrapers? Why do Mexicans love to see themselves as victims, but also love victims? And why, though the Mexican people traditionally avoid conflict, is there so much violence in a country where many leaders have died by assassination?In this shrewd and fascinating book, the renowned scholar and former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda sheds much light on the puzzling...

Combining anthropological methods and theories with political philosophy, Sian Lazar analyzes everyday practices and experiences of citizenship in a satellite city to the Bolivian capital of La Paz: El Alto, where more than three-quarters of the population identify as indigenous Aymara. For several years, El Alto has been at the heart of resistance to neoliberal market reforms, such as the export of natural resources and the privatization of public water systems. In October 2003, protests ...

Earth Beings is the fruit of Marisol de la Cadena's decade-long conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, runakuna or Quechua people. Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and nonindigenous worlds, and the partial connections between them, de la Cadena presents how the Turpos' indigenous ways of knowing and being include and exceed modern and nonmodern practices. Her discussion of indigenous political strategies—a realm that need not ab...

The regime of Juan Perón is one of the most studied topics of Argentina's contemporary history. This new book—an English translation of a highly popular, critically acclaimed Spanish language edition—provides a new perspective on the intriguing Argentinian leader. Mariano Plotkin's cultural approach makes Perón's popularity understandable because it goes beyond Perón's charismatic appeal and analyzes the Perónist mechanisms used to generate political consent and mass mobilization. Mañana e...

Salt in the Sand is a compelling historical ethnography of the interplay between memory and state violence in the formation of the Chilean nation-state. The historian and anthropologist Lessie Jo Frazier focuses on northern Chile, which figures prominently in the nation’s history as a site of military glory during the period of national conquest, of labor strikes and massacres in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, and of state detention and violence during World War ...

During the two years just before the 1998 arrest in London of General Augusto Pinochet, the historian Steve J. Stern had been in Chile collecting oral histories of life under Pinochet as part of an investigation into the form and meaning of memories of state-sponsored atrocities. In this compelling work, Stern shares the recollections of individual Chileans and draws on their stories to provide a framework for understanding memory struggles in history.“A thoughtful, nuanced study o...

Intimate Enemies is the first book to explore conflicts in Chiapas from the perspective of the landed elites, crucial but almost entirely unexamined actors in the state’s violent history. Scholarly discussion of agrarian politics has typically cast landed elites as “bad guys” with predetermined interests and obvious motives. Aaron Bobrow-Strain takes the landowners of Chiapas seriously, asking why coffee planters and cattle ranchers with a long and storied history of violent respo...

An essential analysis of the ways consumerism and globalization intersect with political power.In Consumers and Citizens, Néstor García Canclini, the best-known and most innovative cultural studies scholar in Latin America, maps the critical effects of urban sprawl and global media and commodity markets on citizens-and shows at the same time that the complex results mean not only a shrinkage of certain traditional rights (particularly those of the welfare ...

This book is a narrative study of four main discourses of national identity in Spain, with a special focus on Catalonia as disseminated in the Spanish press in the period between 1993-1996. The narrative analysis of the discourses of national identity is contained within two sections. The first deals with Spanish press coverage of the 1994 USA Football World Cup. The second section studies the process of negotiation towards a political pact between Partido Popular and Convergència I Unió a...

Analyzing a wide body of cultural texts, including literature, film, and other visual arts, Gender, Empire, and Postcolony: Luso-Afro-Brazilian Intersections is a diverse collection of essays on gender in Portuguese colonialism and Lusophone postcolonialism.