Contributions in Latin American Studies – serie

The Cipriano Castro administration, which ruled Venezuela from 1899 to 1908, was characterized by a series of internal and external political crises which seemed capable of toppling it at any moment. In 1901, a number of foreign countries provided financial backing to Castro's former allies, united under the leadership of Manuel Antonio Matos, who almost brought the government down. In the midst of this civil war, Germany, the United Kingdom and later Italy instituted what came to be known as the peaceful blockade of Venezuela to force the government to honor its foreign debts. The claims and counter-claims stemming from the conflict would eventually force the three foreign countries to sever diplomatic relations in the ensuing years.Far from its portrayal as a nationalist champion, the Castro administration was, in McBeth's findings, more focused on the accumulation of personal wealth than on defense of Venezuelan interests. Castro would pay dearly for his misdeeds, losing power in a 1908 coup to Juan Vicente Gómez and remaining in exile until his death in 1924. The conflict would prove to be a watershed in relations with Latin America, as the United States modified its own foreign policy in response and the European powers became more aware of the limit of their political influence in the region.

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.

This is the first global study of the single most important intellectual and artistic movement in Brazilian cultural history before Modernism. The Indianist movement, under the direct patronage of the Emperor Pedro II, was a major pillar of the Empire's project of state-building, involving historians, poets, playwrights and novelists in the production of a large body of work extending over most of the nineteenth century. Tracing the parallel history of official indigenist policy and Indianist writing, Treece reveals the central role of the Indian in constructing the self-image of state and society under Empire. He aims to historicize the movement, examining it as a literary phenomenon, both with its own invented traditions and myths, and standing at the interfaces between culture and politics, between the Indian as imaginary and real.As this book demonstrates, the Indianist tradition was not merely an example of Romantic exoticism or escapism, recycling infinite variations on a single model of the Noble Savage imported from the European imaginary. Instead, it was a complex, evolving tradition, inextricably enmeshed with the contemporary political debates on the status of the indigenous communities and their future within the post-colonial state. These debates raised much wider questions about the legacy of colonial rule-the persistence of authoritarian models of government, the social and political marginalization of large numbers of free but landless Brazilians, and above all the maintenance of slavery. The Indianist stage offered the Indian alternately as tragic victim and exile, as rebel and outlaw, as alien to the social pact, as mother or protector of the post-colonial Brazilian family, or as self-sacrificing ally and voluntary slave.

A study of the powerful impact that sugar had on U.S.-Dominican relations as the primary vehicle of reciprocal manipulation from 1958 to 1962, Sugar and Power examines the development of the sugar industry in the Dominican Republic. Hall uncovers new evidence that supports the belief that U.S.-Latin American relations during this period were frequently a two-way street, with the United States reacting to Latin American initiatives just as frequently as Latin Americans responded to American initiatives. Both Eisenhower and Kennedy used sugar quota legislation as a foreign policy tool. At the same time, the Trujillo regime played upon Washington's fear of communism in response to the Cuban revolution to obtain an expanded sugar quota.Drawing heavily on U.S. and Dominican government documents, this study argues that the U.S. initiated economic sanctions against Trujillo to gain hemispheric support against Castro's Cuban revolution. Kennedy expanded those sanctions in an attempt to push the Dominican Republic along the path toward democracy. Although Juan Bosch's election at the end of 1962 and the allotment of a generous sugar quota indicated the apparent success of U.S. foreign policy toward the Dominican Republic, the overthrow of Bosch in 1963 indicated that the path toward democracy was longer than American policy makers had anticipated. This case study in the role of economic coercion in U.S.-Latin American relations during the Cold War tries to present a balanced account of both sides of the story.

During the 20th century, two revolutions swept rural Mexico: the Mexican Revolution and the Green Revolution. In both, revolutionaries promised to address the problems of rural poverty and underdevelopment. The Mexican Revolution led to a significant agrarian reform and created the State and elite that governed Mexico since the 1920s. The Green Revolution helped increase Mexican agricultural production substantially, and in 1970 it won a Nobel Peace Prize for Norman Borlaug, who bred dwarf hybrid wheat. Mexican agronomists played significant roles in both revolutions, but neither revolution brought prosperity to peasant farmers.This book examines the history of Mexican agronomy and agronomists to shed new light on the role of science in the Mexican Revolution, the origins of the worldwide Green Revolution, and general issues about the nature of the professions, the impact of professionals' ties to politics and the state, and discourses between members of Mexico's urban middle class and peasantry. Cotter also analyzes the impact of foreign models of science in Mexico, the history of U.S.-Mexican cooperation in the agricultural sciences, and the factors that led Mexico to seek scientific assistance from the United States. In a broad way, he reveals new aspects of the ongoing struggle for the right to define modernity and progress in rural Mexico, and offers new explanations for the failure of many of the State's efforts to assist peasant farmers.

The persistence of a raced-based division of labor has been a compelling reality in all former slave societies in the Americas. One can trace this to nineteenth-century abolition movements across the Americas which did not lead to (and were not intended to result in) a transition from race-based slave labor to race-neutral wage labor for former slaves. Rather, the abolition of slavery led to the emergence of multi-racial societies wherein capital/labor relations were characterized by new forms of extra-market coercion that were explicitly linked to racial categories. Post-slavery Brazilian society is a classic example of this pattern.Working within the context of the origin of the wage labor category in classical political economy, Baronov begins by questioning the central role of wage-labor within capitalist production through an examination of key works by Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, as well as the historical conditions informing their analyses. The study then turns to the specific case of Brazil between 1850-1888, comparing the abolition of slavery in three Brazilian regions: the northeast sugar region, the Paraiba Valley, and Western Sao Paulo. Through this analysis, Baronov provides a critique of the dominant interpretation of abolition (as a transition from slave labor to wage labor) and suggests an alternative interpretation that places a greater emphasis on the role of non-wage labor forms and extra-market factors in the shaping of the post-slavery social order.

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.

A study of the powerful impact that sugar had on U.S.-Dominican relations as the primary vehicle of reciprocal manipulation from 1958 to 1962, Sugar and Power examines the development of the sugar industry in the Dominican Republic. Hall uncovers new evidence that supports the belief that U.S.-Latin American relations during this period were frequently a two-way street, with the United States reacting to Latin American initiatives just as frequently as Latin Americans responded to American initiatives. Both Eisenhower and Kennedy used sugar quota legislation as a foreign policy tool. At the same time, the Trujillo regime played upon Washington's fear of communism in response to the Cuban revolution to obtain an expanded sugar quota.Drawing heavily on U.S. and Dominican government documents, this study argues that the U.S. initiated economic sanctions against Trujillo to gain hemispheric support against Castro's Cuban revolution. Kennedy expanded those sanctions in an attempt to push the Dominican Republic along the path toward democracy. Although Juan Bosch's election at the end of 1962 and the allotment of a generous sugar quota indicated the apparent success of U.S. foreign policy toward the Dominican Republic, the overthrow of Bosch in 1963 indicated that the path toward democracy was longer than American policy makers had anticipated. This case study in the role of economic coercion in U.S.-Latin American relations during the Cold War tries to present a balanced account of both sides of the story.