Contributions in Latin American Studies – serie

Until recently, historians have defined the Commonwealth Caribbean territories by their relationship with Britian and have attributed little importance to American relations with these territories. Fraser provides a reinterpretation of U.S. policy toward the West Indies since 1940. He establishes links between Afro-West Indian groups and African Americans who successfully influenced both American and British policy in the West Indies. Thus, he explores a little-understood and little-studied aspect of American policy toward Britain's disengagement from empire after 1945 and the way decolonization in the Caribbean helped to shape the pattern and strategy of the Anglo-American relationship from Roosevelt to Kennedy. The book will force a rethinking of American policy toward the West Indies since 1940, the impact of race on American foreign policy, and the historiography of inter-American relations.

Lentner analyzes four basic components in the formation of states: the capacity to govern, security and freedom of action, economic development strategy, and citizenship and political participation. He focuses on five Central American countries--Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. His conceptual guidelines apply to the worldwide strivings today for autonomy, unity, economic development, and democracy. His extensive research into original and little-known secondary sources from the independence of these states to the present both in the United States and Central America make this an unusually rich text for graduate students and scholars dealing with Latin American studies, Inter-American affairs, and U.S. foreign policy.

This book is a study of the political development of the many factions that surfaced in Mexico from the achievement of independence in 1821 to General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna's last government in 1853-55. Paying particular attention to the writings of the main thinkers of the period and the ways in which they inspired or were betrayed by their respective factions, this volume concentrates on the evolution of the different factions (traditionalists, moderates, radicals, and santanistas), who sustained their beliefs at one point or another. It follows a chronological approach and puts significant emphasis to the way the hopes of the 1820s degenerated into the despair of the 1840s, and how these in turn affected the evolution of the different factions' political proposals.Political proposals and ideologies were important in independent Mexico; it was an age of proposals. Various constitutional projects were proposed, discussed, attempted, or dismissed. This study offers a comprehensive analysis of how the generalized liberal principles of early republican Mexico became fractured into numerous conflicting political proposals and movements. In response to the ever-changing political landscape of the new nation, the emergent Mexican political class was prevented from achieving the ever-evasive constitutional order, unity, progress, and stability all dreamed of experiencing when General Agustin de Iturbide marched into Mexico City on September 27, 1821. Appendices with a glossary, chronologies, and description of major personalities are included.

This is a study of one of the leading politicians of Independent Mexico, Jose Maria Tornel y Mendivil, whose loyalty to Santa Anna and whose skills as a writer led him to play a crucial role in enabling the caudillo's repeated rise to power during this period. This first biography of Tornel in English provides a new insight into the political thought of the santanistas and the ways in which Santa Anna was able to return to power time and again in spite of the fact that he was deemed responsible for such major national disasters as the Texas campaign of 1836 and the 1847 defeat against the United States. A close analysis of Tornel's own political evolution, from advocating a radical federalist agenda in the 1820s to defending reactionary dictatorship in the 1850s, illustrates the extent to which the santanistas' policies changed as the hopeful, early 1820s degenerated into the despair of the late 1840s.As the leading ideologue of the santanistas, a study of his politics, paying close attention to the way they evolved in response to the different crises Mexico underwent, highlights, for the first time, the extent to which Santa Anna and his followers upheld a particular political agenda which was essentially populist, militaristic, antipolitics, and nationalistic, and varied depending on the prevailing circumstances and the different historical contexts in which it surfaced. A study of Tornel's activities as Santa Anna's main informer in the capital, his leading propagandist, and as a key player in the orchestration of revolts such as the 1834 Plan of Cuernavaca, serves to show the extent to which Santa Anna's success relied on Tornel's services. Coincidentally or not, without Tornel, Santa Anna was not able to return to power after his fall in 1855.