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This book reconstructs the world of eighteenth-century Amazonia to argue that indigenous mobility did not undermine settlement or community. In doing so, it revises long-standing views of native Amazonians as perpetual wanderers, lacking attachment to place and likely to flee at the slightest provocation. Instead, native Amazonians used traditional as well as new, colonial forms of spatial mobility to build enduring communities under the constraints of Portuguese colonialism. Canoeing and trekking through the interior to collect forest products or to contact independent native groups, Indians expanded their social networks, found economic opportunities, and brought new people and resources back to the colonial villages. When they were not participating in these state-sponsored expeditions, many Indians migrated between colonial settlements, seeking to be incorporated as productive members of their chosen communities. Drawing on largely untapped village-level sources, the book shows that mobile people remained attached to their home communities and committed to the preservation of their lands and assets. This argument still matters today, and not just to scholars, as rural communities in the Brazilian Amazon find themselves threatened by powerful outsiders who argue that their mobility invalidates their claims to territory.

From 1980 to 1992, Maoist Shining Path rebels, Peruvian state forces, and Andean peasants waged a bitter civil war that left some 69,000 people dead. Using archival research and oral interviews, this book is a long-term historical examination of the Shining Path's political, economic, and social antecedents in Ayacucho, the department where the Shining Path initiated its war. This study uncovers rural Ayacucho's vibrant, but largely unstudied twentieth-century political history and contends that the Shining Path was the last and most extreme of a series of radical political movements that indigenous peasants pursued. The Shining Path's violence against rural indigenous populations exposed the tight hold of anti-Indian prejudice inside Peru, as rebels reproduced the same hatreds they aimed to defeat. But, this was nothing new. The book reveals that minute divides inside rural indigenous communities repeatedly led to violent conflict across the twentieth century.

This book presents a social history of the National Steel Company (CSN), Brazil's foremost state-owned company and largest industrial enterprise in the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on the role the steelworkers played in Brazil's social and economic development under the country's import substitution policies from the early 1940s to the 1964 military coup. Counter to prevalent interpretations of industrial labor in Latin America, where workers figure above all as victims of capitalist exploitation, the book shows that CSN workers held strategic power and used it to reshape the company's labor regime, extracting impressive wage gains and benefits. The book argues that these workers, and their peers in similarly strategic industries, had the power to undermine the state capitalist development model prevalent in the large economies of postwar Latin America.

This book invites the modern reader to follow the histories of colonial Mexican nuns inside the cloisters where they pursued a religious vocation or sought shelter from the world. It provides a complete overview of conventual life, including the early signs of vocation, the decision to enter a convent, profession, spiritual guidelines and devotional practices, governance, ceremonials, relations with male authorities and confessors, living arrangements, servants, sickness, and death rituals. Individual chapters deal with issues such as sexuality and the challenges to chastity in the cloisters, and the little-known subject of the nuns' own writings as expressions of their spirituality. The foundation of convents for indigenous women receives special attention, because such religious communities existed nowhere else in the Spanish empire.

Between 1889 and 1919, Weetman Pearson became one of the world's most important engineering contractors, a pioneer in the international oil industry, and one of Britain's wealthiest men. At the center of his global business empire were his interests in Mexico. While Pearson's extraordinary success in Mexico took place within the context of unprecedented levels of British trade with and investment in Latin America, the book argues that Pearson should be understood less as an agent of British imperialism than as an agent of Porfirian state building and modernization. Pearson was able to secure contracts for some of nineteenth-century Mexico's most important public works projects in large part because of his reliability, his empathy with the developmentalist project of Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, and his assiduous cultivation of a clientelist network within the Mexican political elite. His success thus provides an opportunity to reappraise the role played by overseas interests in the national development of Mexico.

This book tracks New Spain's mendicant orders past their so-called golden age of missions into the ensuing centuries and demonstrates that they had equally crucial roles in what the book terms the “spiritual consolidation” of cities. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, cities became home to the majority of friars and to the orders' wealthiest houses, and mendicants became deeply embedded in urban social and cultural life. Friars ministered to urban residents of all races and social standings and engaged in traditional mendicant activities, serving as preachers, confessors, spiritual directors, alms collectors, educators, scholars, and sponsors of charitable works. Each order brought to this work a distinct identity that informed people's beliefs and shaped variations in the practice of Catholicism. Contrary to prevailing views, mendicant orders flourished during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and even the eighteenth-century reforms that ended this era were not as devastating as has been assumed. Even in the face of new institutional challenges, the demand for their services continued through the end of the colonial period, demonstrating the continued vitality of baroque piety.

This volume presents the story of Hernando Cortés' conquest of Mexico, as recounted by a contemporary Spanish historian and edited by Mexico's premier Nahua historian. Francisco López de Gómara's monumental Historia de las Indias y Conquista de México was published in 1552 to instant success. Despite being banned from the Americas by Prince Philip of Spain, La conquista fell into the hands of the seventeenth-century Nahua historian Chimalpahin, who took it upon himself to make a copy of the tome. As he copied, Chimalpahin rewrote large sections of La conquista, adding information about Emperor Moctezuma and other key indigenous people who participated in those first encounters. This book is thus not only the first complete modern English translation of López de Gómara's La conquista, an invaluable source in itself of information about the conquest and native peoples; it also adds Chimalpahin's unique perspective of Nahua culture to what has traditionally been a very Hispanic portrayal of the conquest.

This book offers a critical reinterpretation of male violence, patriarchy, and machismo in rural Latin America. It focuses on the lives of lower-class men and women, known as sertanejo/as, in the hinterlands of the northeastern Brazilian province of Ceará between 1845 and 1889. Challenging the widely accepted depiction of sertanejos as conditioned to violence by nature, culture, and climate, the book argues that their concern with maintaining an honorable manly reputation and the use of violence were historically contingent strategies employed to resolve conflicts over scant resources and to establish power over women and other men. It also traces a shift in the functioning of patriarchy that coincided with changes in the material fortunes of sertanejo families. As economic dislocation, environmental calamity, and family separation led to greater female autonomy and an erosion of patriarchal authority in the home, public—and often violent—enforcement.

This book traces the social, cultural, and political history of the Brazilian empire (1822-89) through the official and popular celebrations on the days of national festivity (national holidays) instituted soon after independence in 1822. The focus is on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s largest city and national capital. As Latin America’s only long-lasting monarchy, Brazil’s civic ritual drew on many old-regime forms, but married them to modern elements such as the 1824 constitution. Based on newspaper coverage, travelers’ accounts, and descriptions of these national holidays, this book analyzes the changing debate about the political institutions (independent empire, monarchy, and constitution) celebrated year after year. Rather than invoking an abstract nationalism, these celebrations were the occasion for extensive debate about the empire’s political institutions: the constitution on 25 March, independence on 7 September, and the monarchy on the emperors’ birthdays. This book is, furthermore, a social and cultural history of these civic rituals, which frequently mobilized large proportions of Rio de Janeiro’s population. The often extensive popular festivals on national holidays reveals that political participation extended more broadly into the urban population than historians have assumed. This book also examines the theater galas held on these days, as well as the emperors’ ceremonial entries into Rio de Janeiro after their travels and the inaugurations of the two monuments that celebrated independence. Each of these civic rituals was the occasion for extensive debate about the nature of the empire’s political institutions.

Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery examines how distance was conceptualized in an empire that at its height spanned four continents, stretching from Europe to the Philippines. Distance mediated most aspects of how the Spanish empire functioned, but we know little about how it was envisioned and understood. This book argues that documents, particularly official documents, were crucial to overcoming long distances. Focusing on Guatemala, a part of the empire that has long been considered “peripheral,” the book examines how the creation, movement, and storage of documents reflect particular conceptions of distance. The travelers and officials who wrote documents, the mailmen who carried documents hundreds of leagues across the isthmus, and the scribes who stored documents in local archives shed light on how both spatial and temporal distance were understood and overcome. Various segments of the population viewed space and distance in different ways: the official view of space, which cast long distances as “dangerous” and areas off the route as “Indian,” was not shared by all. Conceptions of distance in Guatemala changed in the late eighteenth century, as Spanish Bourbon reforms created a more rapid, integrated communication system and the weight of document production and storage was re-distributed. As a result of these changes, local places that had been considered “distant” within Guatemala were perceived to be “closer,” and new locations – notably Mexico and Spain – that had once been closely linked to Guatemala came to be considered “distant.”