Latin American & Caribbean Studies – serie

The Spirit of Hidalgo: The Mexican Revolution in Coahuila fills a significant gap in the scholarship of the Mexican revolution by providing a detailed history of the northeastern state of Coahuila from the late Portifirian era to approximately 1920. It evaluates social, political, and economic developments that contributed to revolutionary activity within Coahuila and helped to shape the movements led by Francisco I. Madero and Venustiano Carranza.This book also examines the social bases and characteristics of support for Madero, Carranza, and other revolutionary factions. Pasztor also explores the role played by the extensive Coahuila-Texas border in financing the Mexican revolution. Finally, the immediate outcomes of the revolution are addressed through a study of the reforms introduced during the governorships of Carranza and Gustavo Espinosa Mireles.

Madness in Buenos Aires examines the interactions between psychiatrists, patients, and their families, and the national state in modern Argentina. This book offers a fresh interpretation of the Argentine state's relationship to modernity and social change during the twentieth century, while also examining the often contentious place of psychiatry in modern Argentina.Drawing on a number of previously untapped archival sources, Jonathan Ablard uses the experience of psychiatric patients as a case study of how the Argentine state developed and functioned over the last century and of how Argentines interacted with it. Ablard argues that the capacity of the Argentine state to provide social services and professional opportunities and to control the populace was often constrained to an extent not previously recognized in the scholarly literature.These limitations, including a shortage of hospitals, insufficient budgets, and political and economic instability, shaped the experiences of patients, their families, and doctors and also influenced medical and lay ideas about the nature and significance of mental illness. Furthermore, these experiences, and the institutional framework in which they were imbedded, had a profound impact on how Argentine psychiatrists discussed, not only mental illness, but also a host of related themes, including immigration, poverty, and the role of the state in mitigating social problems.Copublished with Ohio University Press.

Palace intrigues and clientelism drove politics at the viceregal court of colonial Mexico. By carefully reconstructing social networks in the court of Viceroy Duke of Alburquerque (1702-1710), Christoph Rosenmüller reveals that the Duke presided over one of the most corrupt viceregal terms in Mexican history.Alburquerque was appointed by Spain's King Philip V at a time when expanding state power was beginning to meet with opposition in colonial Mexico. The Duke and his retainers, though seemingly working for the crown, actually built close alliances with locals to thwart the reform efforts emanating from Spain. Alburquerque collaborated with contraband traders and opposed the secularization of Indian parishes. He persecuted several local craftsmen and merchants, some of whom died after languishing in jail, accusing them of treason to bolster his own credentials as a loyal official. In the end, however, the dominant clique at the royal court in Madrid sought revenge. Alburquerque was forced to pay an unheard-of indemnity of 700,000 silver pesos to regain the king's favour.Dealing with a topic and period largely ignored by historiography, Rosenmüller exposes the vast patronage power of the viceroy at the historical watershed between the expiring Habsburg dynasty and the incoming Bourbon rulers. His analysis reveals that precursors of the Bourbon reforms and the struggle for Mexican independence were already at play in the early eighteenth century.

From Many, One looks at the educational policies and practices of the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles in post-evolutionary Mexico. Andrae Marak examines attempts of the Calles government to centralize control over education in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands region and to transform its rural and indigenous inhabitants into more ""mainstream"" Mexicans. During his presidency and the period known as the Maximato, Plutarco Elias Calles put in place a series of national educational policies with the goal of constructing an economically prosperous and culturally unified Mexico. Marak's analysis of the federal government's attempt to promote nationalism highlights the ways in which the federal government sought to incorporate and unify Mexico through centralization and assimilation as well as the ways in which it tried to define itself in relation to what was not Mexican, an especially prominent issue along the U.S.-Mexican border. Calles' new educational policies sparked a good deal of backlash among those affected. Marak's study focuses on three main incidents which caused the most contention: the establishment of frontier schools along the border in order to promote nationalism and protect against the onslaught of U.S. cultural and economic imperialism; the takeover of state primary schools by government inspectors in Chihuahua; and the government's indigenous assimilation program, which aimed to integrate numerous culturally distinct groups into a monocultural Mexican nation.

Why has violence been a predominant topic in contemporary Argentine film and literature? What conclusions can be drawn from the dissemination of violent images and narratives that depict violence in Argentina? In Argentina, the problem of violence is rooted in the country's long experience with authoritarian rule as well as in more recent trends such as the weakening of the state and the rule of law brought about by neoliberal reforms. The eleven essays that make up Violence in Argentine Literature and Film (1989-2005) seek to interpret and analyze the extent to which violence communicates structural inequalities or lines of fissure in contemporary Argentina resulting from the transformations that the state, the economy, and society in general have experienced during the past two decades.Applying a variety of critical approaches, the contributors explore violence in Argentine cultural productions as it relates to four broad themes: the body as site of physical violence, the legacies of Argentina's authoritarian past, the collapse of the myth of the Argentine nation, and the current battles over how to define particular ""social and geographical places"" in the context of an increasingly violent society.

During the past twenty years, Latin American cinema has experienced an enormous upsurge, prompting film critics and scholars to hail the onset of a new era. What this signals, more than thriving financial or production infrastructures, is a renovated cinematic vision connected more closely to everyday experience and social and cultural concerns. The films analyzed in this new collection reflect and examine contemporary lives in their diversity and singularity, through their focus on identity politics, sexuality, the body, the family, and/or community.Drawing especially on Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of ""inoperative community"" and Enrique Dussel's critique of ""modernity"", the essays here weave together a progression that stresses the breakdown of the nation-state in Latin America and the search for new communal settings. The nation-state's breakdown is linked to modernity's homogenizing project and its concomitant hierarchies that, in seeking to impose order and progress, have alienated those who do not conform to conventional norms. In response, Nancy offers the concept of ""inoperative community"", which questions current forms of ""operative"" communities that do not allow for individuation and implies instead the recognition of plurality and singularity and replacement of hierarchies by horizontal and transversal connections.Essays in the first part of the volume, ""Crisis of the Nation-State and Desire for Community"", question the nation-state and its related institutions from different perspectives and theories, while the second part, ""Sexuality, Rape and Representation"", focuses on configurations of plurality and singularity in terms of sexuality and gender. The third part of the book, ""Visions of the Transnational"", moves toward the recognition of a global sense of interconnectedness that transcends local and national borders.Featuring more diversified methodological perspectives and covering a wider scope of cinematic traditions than most recent anthologies on Latin American cinema, these eleven essays represent a rich new contribution to film studies as well as cultural and gender studies.

With a burgeoning academic interest in Latin American science fiction and cyberfiction and in representations of science and technology in Latin American literature and cinema, this book adds new understanding to the growing body of interdisciplinary work on the relationship between literature and science in postmodern culture.Joanna Page examines how contemporary fiction and literary theory in Argentina consistently employ theories and models from mathematics and science to probe the nature of innovation and evolution in literature. Theories of incompleteness, uncertainty, and chaos are often mobilized in European and North American literary and philosophical texts as metaphors for the inadequacy of our epistemological tools to probe the world's complexity. However, in recent Argentine fiction, these generalizations are put to very different uses: to map out the potential for artistic creativity and regeneration in times of crisis. Page focuses on texts by contemporary Argentine writers Ricardo Piglia, Guillermo Martinez and Marcelo Cohen, which draw on theories of formal systems, chaos, emergence, and complexity to counter proclamations of the end of philosophy or the exhaustion of literature in the postmodern era.This book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how newness and creativity have been theorized, tracing often unexpected relationships between thinkers such as Nietzsche, Deleuze, and the Russian Formalists. It is also the first time that a major study in English has been published on the work of Martinez, Piglia, or Cohen.

Textual Exposures examines how twentieth-century Spanish American literature has registered photography's powers and limitations, and the creative ways in which writers of this region of the Americas have elaborated in fictional form the conventions and assumptions of this medium. While the book is essentially a study of literary criticism, it also aims to show how texts critically reflect upon the media environment in which they were created.The writings analyzed enter a dialogic relation with visual technologies such as the x-ray, cinema, illustrated journalism, and television. The study examines how these technologies, historically and aesthetically linked to the photographic medium, inform the works of some of the most important writers in Latin America.Methodologically, the close readings of the texts centre on the figure of ekphrasis (defined as the verbal representation of a visual representation). The book is concerned with the thematic, symbolic, structural and cultural imprints photography leaves in narrative texts. The author relies on an immanent approach, reading the selected texts according to their own specificities and making the relevant thematic and structural connections between them drawing from a variety of sources in the fields of literary criticism and theory and history of photography.

In 1864 the capture of Brazilian steamer the Marquês de Olinda initiated South America's most significant war. Thousands of Brazilian, Argentine, and Uruguayan soldiers engaged in a protracted siege of Paraguay, leaving the Paraguayan economy and population devastated. The suffering defied imagination and left a tradition of bad feelings, changing politics in South America forever.This is the definitive work on the Triple Alliance War. Thomas L. Whigham examines key personalities and military engagements while exploring the effects of the conflict on individuals, Paraguayan society, and the continent as a whole. The Road to Armageddon is the first book utilize a broad range of primary sources and materials, including testimony from the men and women who witnessed the war first-hand.

In Whose Man in Havana? the author offers an unconventional, often dark, but more often hilarious view of diplomacy in settings as varied as Haiti, London, the Dominican Republic, the Balkans, Palestine, Paraguay, Guyana, and Kyrgyzstan, including covert monitoring of Soviet military operations in Cuba on behalf of the CIA with the blessing of President Kennedy and Prime Minister Pearson.In a career that spans the Canadian foreign service and international organizations, he was fortunate to be in the right place at interesting, if turbulent, times. Throughout the book he has focussed on the lighter side of people and places, but almost everywhere the dark side intrudes. Graham makes plain that the intersection of the two is frequently black comedy.

Journalism in a Small Place explores the changes and challenges in journalism and communication in the Caribbean in the twenty-first century. Tracing the history of media in the English speaking Caribbean, this book provides insight into the development of these industries from their inception under British imperial rule to their current focus on advancing national development in the post-independence period.The influence of US media on media content and cultural tastes, and the lingering effects of colonialism on media are also investigated, drawing on globalization theories of hybridity. Interviews with journalists, editors, and media owners in English speaking Caribbean countries provide firsthand insight into the profession and practice of journalism in the region, highlighting the social and cultural context in which the media industries operate.Additionally, this book describes the current economic success of Caribbean journalism and the factors driving its new trends. It provides an overview of the current state of Caribbean journalism as it reflects on these questions: What is the purpose of journalism in small Caribbean countries? What are the challenges of practicing journalism in the Caribbean in the twenty-first century? What is the future of journalism in the Caribbean?In response, Storr develops a theoretical and practical response to concerns of professional ethics, responsible performance, and the training and education of journalists in the region. In doing so, Journalism in a Small Place elucidates the impact of journalism and communication on the social, political, economic and cultural aspects of Caribbean people's lived experiences, and journalism's power to promote and effect social change.

Latin America is one of the most violent regions in the world. It has suffered waves of repressive authoritarian rule, organized armed insurgency and civil war, violent protest, and ballooning rates of criminal violence. But is violence hard-wired into Latin America? This is a critical reassessment of the ways in which violence in Latin America is addressed and understood. Previous approaches have relied on structural perspectives, attributing the problem of violence to Latin America's colonial past or its conflictual contemporary politics. Bringing together scholars and practitioners, this volume argues that violence is often rooted more in contingent outcomes than in deeply embedded structures. Addressing topics ranging from the root sources of violence in Haiti to kidnapping in Colombia, from the role of property rights in patterns of violence to the challenges of peacebuilding, this book is an essential step towards understanding the causes and contexts of violence-and changing the mechanisms that produce it.