Latin American History

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  Voices of Resistance: Testimonies of Cuban and Chilean Women

  Latin American women were among those who led the suffrage movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their opposition to military dictatorships has galvanized more recent political movements throughout the region. But because of the continuous attempts to silence them, activists have struggled to make their voices heard. At the heart of Voices of Resistance are the testimonies of thirteen women who fought for human rights and social justice in their communities. Some played significant roles in the Cuban Revolution of 1959, while others organized grassroots resistance to the seventeen-year Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Though the women share ...Read More

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  Monterrey Is Ours! The Mexican War Letters of Lieutenant Dana, 1845-1847

  "Here we are on the banks of the Nueces in the grand camp of the army of occupation.” So wrote Lt. Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh Dana when in 1845, not many months before the outbreak of the Mexican War, he joined the white-tented encampment of General Zachary Taylor in Texas. And so he continued writing during the uncertain life of camp and campaign for the better part of the next two years. In these letters to his wife, published here for the first time, Dana provides a detailed, firsthand view of the United States’ war with Mexico—fighting off the Mexicans from ...Read More

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  Working-Class Mobilization and Political Control: Venezuela and Mexico

  Historically, Latin American political regimes have sought to postpone far-reaching economic reforms and improvements in living standards in order to facilitate the accumulation of private capital. These goals have led to exclusion of the lower classes from the political process altogether or to efforts to control their political mobilization. The ability of governments to maintain such control has often been attributed to the lack of political sophistication by the working class or to the distribution of benefits through patron-client networks designed to preserve the hegemony of ruling parties.

  Using new survey data from 500 industrial workers in Mexico and Venezuela, ...Read More

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  The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru

  Long recognized as a classic account of the early Spanish efforts to convert the Indians of Peru, Father De Arriaga’s book, originally published in 1621, has become comparatively rare even in its Spanish editions. This translation now makes available for the first time in English a unique record of the customs and religious practices that prevailed after the Spanish conquest.

  In his book, which was designed as a manual for the rooting out of paganism, De Arriaga sets down plainly and methodically what he found among the Indians—their objects of worship, their priests and sorcerers, their festivals and sacrifices, and ...Read More

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  Martín López: Conquistador Citizen of Mexico

  In this study of the life of a Spaniard who came to Mexico as a conquistador and remained as a civilian citizen of New Spain, C. Harvey Gardiner gives his readers a fresh view of the warfare between Spaniard and Indian and of the less dramatic processes of colonization which established European culture in America.

  Conquest and colonization, usually treated separately in the histories of the period, are here shown as phases in the life of a man who was not conspicuous among the conquerors, but was representative of the Spaniards of his generation who came to the new world ...Read More