Insurgent Beauty: Indigenous Art in Urban Panama examines artistic and political developments from 1968 to the present, exploring how Native American artists leveraged Panama’s populist military reforms from 1968 to 1989, and the subsequent neoliberal transition, to assert their presence in society. Breaking new ground, the book situates Indigenous art in previously overlooked contexts.Historically, scholars of Latin American Indigenous artistic expression have focused on ...

How did a country whose past is intertwined with African slavery ignore its cultural legacies through much of history? And how did Blackness recently break through this amnesia so that nearly a third of Panamanians now self-identify as Afro-descendants? Wolf Tracks explores these and other related questions through the lens of Panamanian street culture.Popular art is a masculine and working-class genre, pioneered by self-taught, commercial painters, whose high-toned design...

Popular art is a masculine and working-class genre, associated with Panama's black population. Its practitioners are self-taught, commercial painters, whose high-toned designs, vibrant portraits, and landscapes appear in cantinas, barbershops, and restaurants. The red devil buses are popular art's most visible manifestation. The old school buses are imported from the United States and provide public transportation in Colón and Panama City. Their owners hire the artists to attract customers...

In November 1916, a young Afro-Brazilian musician named Donga registered sheet music for the song "Pelo telefone" ("On the Telephone") at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. This apparently simple act—claiming ownership of a musical composition—set in motion a series of events that would shake Brazil's cultural landscape. Before the debut of "Pelo telephone," samba was a somewhat obscure term, but by the late 1920s, the wildly popular song had helped to make it synonymous with Brazilia...

In the tumultuous first decade of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and other leaders saturated the media with altruistic images of themselves in a campaign to win the hearts of Cuba’s six million citizens. In Visions of Power in Cuba, Lillian Guerra argues that these visual representations explained rapidly occurring events and encouraged radical change and mutual self-sacrifice.Mass rallies and labor mobilizations of unprecedented scale produced tangible evidence of what...

You’re no idiot, of course. You know there are more people from Latin America living in the United States than ever before. And you’re aware that Latinos come from several countries, including Cuba, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.But you don’t have to south of the border to explore the rich Latino heritage. The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Latino History and Culture offers an exhaustive exploration of all things Hispanic. In this Complete Idiot’s Guide®, you get...

Samba is Brazil’s “national rhythm,” the foremost symbol of its culture and nationhood. To the outsider, samba and the famous pre-Lenten carnival of which it is the centerpiece seem to showcase the country’s African heritage. Within Brazil, however, samba symbolizes the racial and cultural mixture that, since the 1930s, most Brazilians have come to believe defines their unique national identity.But how did Brazil become “the Kingdom of Samba” only a few decades after abolishing slav...

With this masterful work, Louis A. Perez Jr. transforms the way we view Cuba and its relationship with the United States. On Becoming Cuban is a sweeping cultural history of the sustained encounter between the peoples of the two countries and of the ways that this encounter helped shape Cubans' identity, nationality, and sense of modernity from the early 1850s until the revolution of 1959.Using an enormous range of Cuban and U.S. sources--from archival records and oral int...

In Culture Wars in Brazil Daryle Williams analyzes the contentious politicking over the administration, meaning, and look of Brazilian culture that marked the first regime of president-dictator Getúlio Vargas (1883–1954). Examining a series of interconnected battles waged among bureaucrats, artists, intellectuals, critics, and everyday citizens over the state’s power to regulate and consecrate the field of cultural production, Williams argues that the high-stakes struggles over cu...

In this cultural history of Cuba during the United States' brief but influential occupation from 1898 to 1902 — a key transitional period following the Spanish-American War — Marial Iglesias Utset sheds light on the complex set of pressures that guided the formation and production of a burgeoning Cuban nationalism.Drawing on archival and published sources, Iglesias illustrates the process by which Cubans maintained and created their own culturally relevant national symbols in the f...

Why does Argentina’s national anthem describe its citizens as sons of the Inca? Why did patriots in nineteenth-century Chile name a battleship after the Aztec emperor Montezuma? Answers to both questions lie in the tangled knot of ideas that constituted the creole imagination in nineteenth-century Spanish America. Rebecca Earle examines the place of preconquest peoples such as the Aztecs and the Incas within the sense of identity—both personal and national—expressed by Spanish American eli...

In The Color of Modernity, Barbara Weinstein focuses on race, gender, and regionalism in the formation of national identities in Brazil; this focus allows her to explore how uneven patterns of economic development are consolidated and understood. Organized around two principal episodes—the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution and 1954’s IV Centenário, the quadricentennial of São Paulo’s founding—this book shows how both elites and popular sectors in São Paulo embraced a regional iden...