Bringing together historically and ethnographically grounded studies of the social and political life of Brazil and Mexico, this collection of essays revitalizes resistance as an area of study. Resistance studies boomed in the 1980s and then was subject to a wave of critique in the 1990s. Covering the colonial period to the present day, the case studies in this collection suggest that, even if much of that critique was justified, resistance remains a useful analytic rubric. The collection ...

Ernesto “Che” Guevara twice traveled across Latin America in the early 1950s. Based on his accounts of those trips (published in English as The Motorcycle Diaries and Back on the Road), as well as other historical sources, Che’s Travels follows Guevara, country by country, from his native Argentina through Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, and then from Argentina through Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico. Each essay is focused on a single country and writt...

This book reinvigorates the debate on the Mexican Revolution, exploring what this pivotal event meant to women. The contributors offer a fresh look at women's participation in their homes and workplaces and through politics and community activism. They show how women of diverse backgrounds with differing goals were actively involved, first in military roles during the violent early phase of civil war, and later in the state-building process. Drawing on a variety of perspectives, the volume...

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...

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...

In the late nineteenth century, in an age of ascendant racism and imperial expansion, there emerged in Cuba a movement that unified black, mulatto, and white men in an attack on Europe’s oldest empire, with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined as antiracist. This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement.Ada Ferrer examines the participation of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868, when a slaveholder began the...

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...

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...

Speaking of Flowers is an innovative study of student activism during Brazil's military dictatorship (1964–85) and an examination of the very notion of student activism, which changed dramatically in response to the student protests of 1968. Looking into what made students engage in national political affairs as students, rather than through other means, Victoria Langland traces a gradual, uneven shift in how they constructed, defended, and redefined their right to political parti...

She was a friend, lover, and confidante of charismatic Spanish American independence hero Simón Bolívar and, after her death, a nationalist icon in her own right. Yet authors generally have chosen either to romanticize Manuela Sáenz or to discount her altogether. For Glory and Bolivar: The Remarkable of Life of Manuela Sáenz, by contrast, offers a comprehensive and clear-eyed biography of her. Based on unprecedented archival research, it paints a vivid portrait of the Quito-born "...

The island of Hispaniola is split by a border that divides the Dominican Republic and Haiti. This border has been historically contested and largely porous. Dividing Hispaniola is a study of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo's scheme, during the mid-twentieth century, to create and reinforce a buffer zone on this border through the establishment of state institutions and an ideological campaign against what was considered an encroaching black, inferior, and bellicose Haitian stat...

Analyzing the ideology and rhetoric around race in Cuba and south Florida during the early years of the Cuban revolution, Devyn Spence Benson argues that ideas, stereotypes, and discriminatory practices relating to racial difference persisted despite major efforts by the Cuban state to generate social equality. Drawing on Cuban and U.S. archival materials and face-to-face interviews, Benson examines 1960s government programs and campaigns against discrimination, showing how such programs f...