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Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 0, No. 0, pp. 0–0, 2014
1
2
3 Book Reviews
4
5
6
7
8 Wernke, Steven A. (2013) Negotiated Settlements. Andean Communities and Land-
9 scapes under Inka and Spanish Colonialism, University Press of Florida (Gainesville,
10 FL), xix + 371 pp. $79.95 hbk.
11
12 In this book, Steven A. Wernke undertakes an ambitious investigation of the
13 palimpsest-like succession of uses of the same space (different locations in the Colca
14 Valley, Southern highland Perú) by different societies in different historical moments – a
15 time span of about 500 years, including the pre-Inca, Inca and Colonial periods. To
16 do so, he has chosen to navigate the waters of at least two disciplines – ethnohistory
17 and archaeology – as well as using the technological tool of GIS maps. The project
18 aims to reconstruct a series of human practices on the land that resulted in landscapes
19 which are the consequence of struggles and negotiations between the invaders, whether
20 Inca or Spanish, and the locals to impose their respective settlement-pattern models. It
21 puts special emphasis on the notion of improvisation, allowing Wernke to read both
22 the ethnographic and the archaeological records as reflections of a series of daily life
23 struggles between invaders and locals over social order models.
24 In Chapter 2, Wernke elaborates on the concepts of community and landscape and
25 their interface. In Chapter 3 he analyses the lands and peoples of the area; in Chapter 4
26 he studies the Inca and pre-Inca occupations of the valley. The organisation of the soci-
27 eties from the Late Intermediate Period (LIP) shows no traces of a centralised political
28 organisation (pp. 81, 85, 155). The documentary sources talk about the imposition of a
29 more centralised form of administration (p. 154) during Inca times, but the archaeolog-
30 ical evidence shows, instead, few cases of Inca architecture, no administration centres
31 and very few storehouses. Instead, it shows: (a) a form of presence that was not direct
32 but locally coordinated (p. 103), (b) that very few LIP sites were abandoned during Inca
33 occupation, with the majority growing during that period (p. 118) and (c) that there was
34 no radical break with previous settlement patterns (p. 119).
35 Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the Spanish model of colonisation, the reducciones, which
36 dismantled the Andean model, replacing it with the concentration of indigenous peoples
37 in villages. In contrast to the Inca social order (centrifugal and adaptable to the local
38 forms of community and landscape), the Spanish order was reductive and centripetal (p.
39 298), believing in the importance of the built environment for modification of both the
40 beliefs and the behavioural patterns of the colonised (pp. 159, 161, 210, 214–215). It is
41 a pity that Wernke does not mention Rama’s The Lettered City here, for his analysis of
42 how the Spaniards tried to impose their social order and worldview would have benefited
43 enormously from its discussion.
44 In Chapter 5 he offers one of his most interesting contributions to the understanding
45 of how changes in the built environment could have transformed not only the percep-
46 tion of, but also the practices and circulation in and through, space. The spatial network
47 approach is a method that seeks to go beyond impressionistic, phenomenological inter-
48 pretations (Christopher Tilley-style?) of, and movement through, space by quantitatively
49
© 2014 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2014 Society for Latin American Studies.
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 1
Book Reviews
1 modelling the movement and circulation of people, based on the movement of subjects
2 from the domestic structures to the plazas of the Malata reducción (p. 200). The inter-
3 esting results of this kind of study show that the networks and paths predominating in
4 the Inca and Spanish periods were in tension or opposition to one another (p. 203).
5 In Chapter 7, the author offers one of the most important contributions of his book:
6 the reconstruction of the Ayllu land-use and residential patterns through what he calls a
7 ‘reverse site-catchment’ approach, which ‘retrodicts prehistoric residence patterns from
8 historically documented land-use data by comparing the land-tenure patterns of local
9 Ayllus with the settlement locations registered in the archaeological survey’ (p. 252).
10 In sum, this is a serious innovative attempt to offer a nuanced and thorough picture
11 of the succession of diverse land-uses in the history of the region. Throughout it, Wernke
12 discusses the importance of several notions to understand what could be called colonial
13 situations. However, the way that he uses the notion of ‘colonisation’ is not felicitous.
14 Firstly, he does not address any of the major theoretical works on colonial matters:
15 he considers no authors from Postcolonial theory, nor from De-colonial theory – two
16 camps that are an important part of the debate. Secondly, the use of the term ‘colonised’
17 to refer to the Spaniards (p. 15) and their institutions (p. 294) is, quite frankly, unaccept-
18 able and rather naïf. It is not necessary to grotesquely distort historical reality if what
19 one wants is to attribute more agency to the colonised. To achieve that goal, it suffices
20 to produce solid research like that presented throughout the chapters that comprise this
21 excellent piece of scholarship.
22
23 Gustavo Verdesio
24 University of Michigan
25
26
27
28 Cervantes, Fernando and Redden, Andrew (eds) (2013) Angels, Demons and the New
29 World, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, NY), xi + 318 pp. £60.00 hbk.
30
31 The editors and authors of this book purport to establish a mystical, symbolic, cos-
32 mological baseline to the confluence of (especially) Old World Spanish and New
33 World indigenous cultures, from the Conquest to early colonial times. The very
34 brief Introduction proclaims that ‘European notions about angels and demons were
35 exported to the New World, where they underwent quite remarkable adaptations
36 and permutations in the face of indigenous responses’ (p. 2). The editors and authors
37 take this powerful observation as their touchstone for data exposition and analysis.
38 The focus in the Americas is primarily on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
39 but, in the Old World, history is presented back beyond the eighth century. Specific
40 areas featured are the Nahua (Nahuatl) region of New Spain, New Granada and the
41 Central Andes.
42 The book documents the persistence of information on devils and demons, arguing
43 that far less has been written about angels. Since, in European Christianity, God created
44 only angels, demons arose from angels’ falling or rebelling. In their fall, demons came to
45 earth and the underworld, whereas angels normally only visit the earth and its people.
46 By the mid-eighteenth century in Latin America, the angel image had, mostly, morphed
47 into that of saint or virgin, both of whom manifest similar qualities. All authors dig
48 deeply into history, dividing it into three epochs: Patristic (of or pertaining to the fathers
49 of the early Christian church), medieval and early modern. We learn that, unlike Europe
© 2014 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2014 Society for Latin American Studies
2 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 0, No. 0
Book Reviews
1 (which saw the reformation movement and enlightenment), a medieval worldview and
2 cosmology, especially as borne by the Spanish, permeated Spanish America during the
3 Conquest and early colonial periods.
4 The book is divided into three sections: ‘From the Old World to the New’,
5 ‘Indigenous Responses’ and ‘The World of the Baroque’, each consisting of three
6 chapters. In the first section, Andrew Kent elaborates on medieval superstition,
7 medical humanism and preternatural philosophy. The latter subsumes the problem-
8 atic of spirit influence among humans, which is neither supernatural nor natural.
9 Significant here, as in the rest of this book, is the statement: ‘such research [into
10 natural wonders and indigenous religion] did not involve imposition of European
11 conceptions onto an American tabula rasa, but rather a reciprocal exchange in which
12 New World flora and indigenous knowledge influenced the categories of natural
13 philosophy’ (p. 39).
14 Next comes the piece by Kenneth Mills, which zooms down onto the Devil and
15 demonic forces, explaining clearly that, as they are products of God’s work, we must
16 understand how they are present within us and all around us, and how they were espe-
17 cially apparent in the Americas.
18 Chapter 3 (by Cervantes) moves the focus from demons to angels, taking us
19 to the sixteenth-century Mendicant orders, manifested especially by Franciscans,
20 Dominicans and Augustinians, who, unlike the Jesuits who came later, strove to
21 understand indigenous religion as it might be transformed into Christianity in the
22 Americas. He calls the Mendicant optimism ‘tragically short-lived’, as prevailing
23 views of indigenous people quickly came to characterise them as diabolic. The first
24
two chapters of Part II, by Louise Burkhart and Caterina Pizzigoni respectively,
25
deal with the indigenous Nahua region of New Spain, where, especially through the
26
Mendicant Orders’ introduction of theatre, indigenous numinous thought could be
27
juxtaposed to Christian belief and practice, leading for a time to an ‘indigenisation of
28
Christianity’ (p. 101).
29
Chapter 6, by Andrew Redden, which closes this section, takes us to New Granada
30
and the entry of the Jesuits, who seem to be the antithesis of the Mendicants in their
31
equation of everything urban (focusing on Santafé de Bototá) as angelic, civilised and
32
Christian, in opposition to the rural areas of the Muisca indigenous people, seen as
33
permeated by satanic and barbaric forces. As Mendicants (in this case Dominicans)
34
were rural, they too were regarded by the Jesuits as diabolical. The theme of the dia-
35
bolic indigenous peoples opens the final section, with Chapter 6 (by Ramón Mujica
36
Pinilla) about ‘Angels and Devils in the Conquest of Peru’. Here we learn how ris-
37
38 ing consciousness of the extraordinary cruelty of Spaniards toward indigenous people
39 created a backlash and paradigm reversal, whereby the colonists were seen as demons
40 and the indigenous people as angelic. The final two chapters, by Jaime Cuadriello and
41 David Brading respectively, explore the above themes and much more, in greater and
42 greater historical depth and detail, making a major contribution to comparative reli-
43 gion and to the understanding of how views representing the angelic/demonic polar-
44 ity can switch sides when the Catholic Church and its adherents are contrasted with
45 indigenous people. Unfortunately, indigenous agency is nearly absent in these erudite
46 expositions.
47
48 Norman E. Whitten Jr.
49 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 0, No. 0 3
Book Reviews
1 Komisaruk, Catherine (2013) Labor and Love in Guatemala: The Eve of Independence,
2 Stanford University Press (Palo Alto, CA), xi + 338 pp. $55.04 hbk.
3
4 Labor and Love in Guatemala brings a fresh perspective to the decline of forced labour-
5 ers and the rise of hispanised wageworkers in late colonial Spanish America. The broad
6 contours of this story are familiar; however, questions remain about how individuals,
7 families and native and Spanish governments navigated, resisted and promoted this
8 broad economic and social transformation within local contexts. Komisaruk addresses
9 these questions with meticulous archival research, a compelling exploration of ordinary
10 lives and a gendered analysis of the key ‘mechanisms of social change’ (p. 1) – work,
11 migration, sex and marriage.
12 Most labour studies assume that the disintegration of native tributary labour sys-
13 tems was a masculine phenomenon; male tribute labourers escaped their villages and
14 became male wage labourers, native men became hispanised ladinos. But families often
15 migrated together, as male wageworkers relied upon wives and children to provide
16 the essential labours of food preparation and laundry. Inevitably many women were
17 also left behind to face accumulating tribute debts and the threat of economic des-
18 titution. Komisaruk evocatively paints a picture of how these pressures affected indi-
19 viduals – abandoned mothers were pressed into service as wet nurses and young girls
20 sent away to work as servants in Guatemala’s capital. Gendered and familial strategies
21 encouraged the disintegration of African slavery as well. While male slaves went to court
22 demanding wage compensation, less work and better treatment, female slave litigants
23 usually employed distinctly gendered strategies, such as demanding compensation for
24 the costs of raising slave children or for damages caused by sexual exploitation. Gen-
25 dered litigation strategies ultimately blurred the boundaries between coerced and forced
26 labour, as did sexual, social and kinship networks developed between slave and free
27 society.
28 The unravelling of forced labour systems fed a growing community of free labourers
29 in late colonial Guatemala City. Gendered migration patterns and the urban economy
30 made Guatemala’s capital a veritable ‘city of women’ by the eve of independence, with
31 women outnumbering men by a startling 80 percent. Many Spanish American cities
32 counted female majorities; however, the disparity in the Guatemalan capital was far more
33 dramatic. Komisaruk might have highlighted the uniqueness of the Guatemalan situa-
34 tion and offered some discussion of how local factors fed this phenomenon. Most female
35 migrants to the city worked as servants and Komisaruk’s careful reading of notary and
36 judicial records illuminates how individual girls and women navigated the intimate and
37 often abusive realities of domestic service. Women of Indian, African and mixed ancestry
38 also dominated the markets as meat sellers, alcohol brewers, tavern keepers and bakery
39 owners. These female labourers were the ‘vanguard troops’ transforming Guatemala’s
40 Spanish urban centre into a ‘racially mixed, culturally hispanised, and mostly female
41 city that ran on a cash economy’ (p. 111). Alongside migration and labour, sex and mar-
42 riage also fuelled the growth of Guatemala’s free racially mixed society. Komisaruk finds
43 that reality often defied legal and elite cultural ideals. Single mothers challenging their
44 former lovers in court focused on securing child support, and rarely brought up con-
45 cerns about virginity, honour and marriage promises. Married women often described
46 their husbands as ‘absent’, and censuses confirm that most households lacked a patriar-
47 chal head. Courts generally recognised ‘de facto divorces’ and married women bought
48 and sold properties left behind by husbands, entered contracts and conducted businesses
49 without spousal consent.
Book Reviews
1 Komisaruk’s work broadly challenges assumptions about the significance of political

2 reforms, both before and after Independence. Spanish and Indian governments appear
3 more impotent than instrumental in the face of rapid social and economic change, as
4 gendered labour practices, migration and reproduction consistently defied colonial ideals
5 and laws. Komisaruk ultimately suggests that the real power of the state was found in the
6 courtrooms, where officials responded with surprising ‘evenhandedness’ to litigants who
7 challenged forced labour systems and restrictive gender laws. Native tribute labourers
8 and African slaves, along with employers and colonial courts, thus largely dismantled
9 forced labour well before its formal abolition following Independence. Colonial gender
10 relations were far more pragmatic and flexible than ideals and laws would suggest, and
11 post-Independence legislation often simply formalised colonial practices.
12 Since hispanisation is central to Komisaruk’s analysis, this reviewer would have wel-
13 comed a more precise definition of the term within the context of this study and the
14 broader historiography. Beyond this minor critique, Labor and Love in Guatemala pro-
15 vides a highly accessible and much-needed contribution to the social and gender his-
16 tory of colonial Central America and builds upon recent scholarship exploring native
17 migrants in colonial cities, particularly native women. Throughout this analysis, Komis-
18 aruk carefully examines broad structural changes and the role of state officials and
19 colonial courts alongside daily life, artfully keeping the macro and micro in view to
20 reveal a more complex picture of ideals and realities, change and continuity.
21
22 Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara
23 University of Cincinnati
24
25
26 Smith, Benjamin T., (2012) The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, Society,
27 and Politics in the Mixtec Baja, 1750–1962, University of New Mexico Press (Albu-
28 querque, NM), ix + 448 pp. $34.95 pbk.
29
30 Smith’s monograph traces the Right’s deep popular roots in the Mixtec Baja of Oaxaca
31 back to the Bourbon era, revealing how clergy, mestizo elites and indigenous peasants
32 shaped a common political culture of provincial conservatism. For its adherents, Santa
33 Ana, Porfirio Díaz and the PAN were not on Mexican history’s ‘wrong side’; rather, theirs
34 was the side of God and order. Provincial conservatism was embedded in a moral econ-
35 omy whose cross-class and cross-ethnic ties of asymmetrical reciprocity in turn rested
36 on a unique agrarian structure. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the declining
37 indigenous cacique class sold most of its land to former tenants, who collectively farmed
38 it in agrarian societies, some serving as cofradías, allowing peasants to pool resources
39 to meet religious obligations and sustain the clergy. This interfundia, to coin a phrase,
40 allowed mestizo elites to extract wealth and claim peasant loyalty in a relatively benign
41 fashion, and supported a political system characterised as mestizo-indigenous ‘bipartite’
42 governance (p. 129).
43 If postcolonial socioeconomic systems provided provincial conservatism’s conti-
44 nuities, post-Independence national political upheavals drove its evolution. During
45 Mexico’s mid-nineteenth century civil wars and foreign invasions, it became partisan,
46 supporting centralists, Conservatives and the Second Empire against radical federalist
47 invaders. It also became more nationalistic, especially after patriarch Antonio de León
48 died defending Mexico City against Protestant US invaders. The Porfiriato was some-
49 thing of a golden age, as local elites’ parochialism and lagging regional development
Book Reviews
1 permitted peasants to maintain most of their land and autonomy. As a result, villagers
2 rejected Zapatista would-be liberators and the Secretaría de Educación Pública’s secular
3 missionaries during the revolutionary era.
4 Smith’s empirically rich, theoretically engaged analysis has much to offer to students
5 of Latin American Catholicism. Above all, he demonstrates how political culture and
6 economic factors (like voluntary tithing and labour service) strengthened local religious
7 practice and maintained sacralised spaces. The interdependence of deeply rooted local
8 material and symbolic systems allowed the relatively numerous clergy in the Mixtec Baja
9 to weather the Bourbon reforms and the Church’s post-Independence institutional decay.
10 The Church’s Porfirian ‘sub rosa’ renaissance in the region occurred because ultramon-
11 tane re-Christianisation accommodated rather than suppressed deeply rooted indigenous
12 Catholicism, with its holy caves, hillside crosses and the occasional flagellant procession.
13 By the end of the nineteenth century, many seminarians hailed from humble, bicultural
14 families. This dynamic fusion of clerical and popular Catholicism enabled the Mixtec
15 Baja to claim its own diocese in 1903. It also predisposed the region to reject state
16 agrarianism, federal schooling and the ruling revolutionary party.
17 This work shifts the debate over nineteenth-century Mexican peasant politics in an
18 important and productive new direction. Influential work on Guerrero and parts of
19 Puebla and Morelos has argued that indigenous villagers adopted and reworked lib-
20 eralism, helping forge the new nation. Alongside Terry Rugeley’s monumental Rebellion
21 Now and Forever, Smith’s monograph strongly suggests that, for most peasants, liberal-
22 ism was more often an antigen that provoked resistance than a catalyst that stimulated
23 participation in national politics. This allows Smith to cast twentieth-century conser-
24 vatism in a bold new light, foregrounding subalterns as opposed to elites. Peasant reli-
25 giosity that frustrated revolutionary state-making resulted from agrarian structure, the
26 nineteenth-century Catholic revival and historical experience, as opposed to instigation
27 by clergy and right-wing notables. For Catholic peasants in the Mixtec Baja, Zapata was
28 a bandit, like Reform-era caudillo Juan Álvarez, and socialist education was anathema.
29 Similarly, they were loath to give up their somewhat egalitarian agrarian societies for
30 state-run ejidos dominated by bullying ranchers.
31 By focusing on this understudied region of Oaxaca, Smith challenges two established
32 models of Mexico’s political and religious geography: the nineteenth-century spatial
33 opposition between a conservative Mexico City-Puebla core and a peripheral Liberal
34 crescent, and the postrevolutionary polarity pitting the Monsiváis’ centre-west ‘Rosary
35 Belt’ against the impious frontera and coasts. The Mixtec Baja was a strong Catholic
36 enclave that defies geographical assumptions about both eras of Church-state conflict.
37 Smith also blurs the old contraposition of white/mestizo religious orthodoxy and indige-
38 nous syncretism. In fact, by the turn of the century, the strong indigenous presence in
39 religious practice was a source of unity between clergy and largely Mixtec parishioners.
40 For instance, during the Revolution’s armed phase, priests altered the liturgy to assuage
41 popular anxiety spawned by widespread scarcity and fear.
42 Smith’s highly accessible book is written with his usual verve and attention to com-
43 parative dimensions. Few regional histories combine such chronological sweep with
44 thematic range: Smith analyses Christology and transhumant ranching with equal
45 aplomb. This book richly deserves to be read not just by colonial and modern
46 Mexicanists, but also by students of the Right and the Church across Latin America.
47
48 Ben Fallaw
49 Colby College
Book Reviews
1 Kroger, Joseph and Granziera, Patrizia (2012) Aztec Goddesses and Christian Madon-
2 nas: Images of the Divine Feminine in Mexico, Ashgate (Farnham), x + 327 pp. £75.59
3 hbk, £29.07 pbk.
4
5 The ‘divine feminine’ as a subject of interest allows for the understanding of the manner
6 in which Mesoamerican goddesses and Catholic virgins were perceived in distinct cul-
7 tures and time periods and also the symbols that were utilised to represent them. While it
8 is a study that has received wide attention in scholarship, there is still much to learn of the
9 roles that sacred images played in ancient indigenous societies. In Aztec Goddesses and
10 Christian Madonnas, Joseph Kroger and Patrizia Granziera explore this subject through
11 the iconography present in sculptures, codices, historical texts and sixteenth century
12 manuscripts.
13 The first chapter explores the symbolism of the goddesses and their relationship to
14 the sacred landscape, as well as the Aztec’s worldview that was central to the creation of
15 deities and the architecture that surrounded them (Broda, 1991). In pre-Hispanic times,
16 goddesses were attributed to both the life-giving qualities of the earth and her destructive
17 qualities. This finds parallels in Christian theology, as the Virgin Mary eliminated sin
18 by stepping on the serpent and also became a symbol of love and motherly protection
19 (Poole, 1995, Location 6).
20 Mary’s roles are examined in Chapter 2, as is the iconographical development of
21 Marian images. However, it is not until the culminating chapter (Chapter 5) that her
22 imagery is thoroughly analysed. The authors begin by describing the Christian gospels
23 in which Mary appears, continue with discussion of Mary’s images through different
24 Christian traditions and conclude with the origins of Marian iconography. The book’s
25 fundamental goals are set out within these pages, for it is here (and in the preceding
26 chapter) where the history and importance of the divine feminine are disclosed.
27 After presenting evidence in the preceding chapters of the goddesses’ and virgins’
28 prominence, they examine religious syncretism in Mesoamerica, fostered by the Catholic
29 Church in an effort to convert the native population. Clearly, the abstract appearance
30 and ‘monstrous’ character of the Aztec sculptures did not create a positive impression on
31 the conquistadors; while the Spanish army set out to destroy these ‘frightening’ monu-
32 ments, the Franciscan friars who were sent to New Spain to evangelise the Nahua peoples
33 understood the value that images had in Aztec society (p. 120), and used these to their
34 advantage in the conversion process. Paramount in this amalgamation of cultures was
35 the Virgin of Guadalupe who ‘appeared’ at the exact location where the Aztec’s earth
36 goddess, Tonantzin, had been worshipped.
37 The concluding chapters (Chapters 4 and 5) offer insights once again on the two cults,
38 providing vivid detail of their iconography and of the regions where they were – and
39 continue to be – venerated. Given the amount of information presented in these sections,
40 it is easy to overlook the shortcomings of the book. One of the main problems which
41 I encountered throughout was the lack of transition between paragraphs. For example,
42 when the authors are discussing Mary’s association with nature, they mention how ‘The
43 crown of roses that was traditionally offered to Mary became a symbol of the rosary’,
44 and interrupt this thought with a statement indicating how flowers were symbolic for
45 the indigenous people (p. 147). The next paragraph re-examines the importance of the
46 rosary, and on a subsequent page they return to the significance of flower symbolism in
47 Aztec art (p. 151).
48 In my opinion, the book would have been more effective if the authors had provided
49 less description – based mainly on the sixteenth-century chronicles of the Spanish
Book Reviews
1 friars Bernardino de Sahagún and Diego Durán – and more theoretical analysis. In
2 particular, I would like to know how Kroger and Granziera view the idea of the ‘divine
3 feminine’, given the ambiguity of gender in Aztec religion and other Mesoamerican
4 cultures. Despite a few minor setbacks, however, the book is an excellent source
5 for anyone who is interested in the history and symbolism of the Aztec goddesses
6 and the Christian images that replaced them after the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
7 I am confident that this ambitious work will stimulate other scholars, or even the
8 authors themselves, to produce new investigations on these sacred figures that helped
9 to shape Mesoamerica’s religious landscape, and in the case of the Virgin Mary, to
10 transform it.
11
12 Maria Isabel Ramos
13 Institute for Teaching and Research in Ethnology, Zacatecas
14
15
16 References
17
18 Broda, J. (1991) ‘The Sacred Landscape of Aztec Calendar Festivals: Myth, Nature, and
19 Society’ in D. Carrasco (ed.) To Change Place. University of Colorado Press: Colorado,
74–120. AQ1
20
Poole, S. (1995) Our Lady of Guadalupe. The University of Arizona Press: Tucson.
21
22
23
24 Lewis, Laura A. (2012) Chocolate and Corn Flour. History, Race, and Place in the
25 Making of ‘Black’ Mexico, Duke University Press (Durham, NC and London), xvi + 372
26 pp. £74.00 hbk, £17.99 pbk.
27
28 In Chocolate and Corn Flour, Laura A. Lewis ciritiques anthropologists and activists
29 who have imposed on the Mexican Costa Chica community of San Nicolás an identity
30 as the ‘cradle of Afromexican culture’ (p. 4). Lewis thus intervenes in a larger dialogue
31 about what happens when would-be advocates construct a community’s racial identity
32 without engaging in a meaningful dialogue. San Nicoladenses use the term la cultura to
33 talk about culture workers who call them Afromexican and Afromestizo. Lewis argues
34 that la cultura’s racial construction of San Nicoladenses harms them by diverting atten-
35 tion from their real needs and ignoring the social relationships they value. Specifically,
36 Lewis addresses the actions of culture workers who continue to endorse Gonzalo Aguirre
37 Beltrán’s 1958 interpretation of neighbouring Cuajinicuilapa as a Black town in his clas-
38 sic Cuijla, imposing a US theory of ‘African survivals’ that paradoxically objectifies and
39 silences those to whom they purport to give voice.
40 Lewis builds her brilliant ethnographic argument on ten years of fieldwork. She pro-
41 vides rich, nuanced and convincing thick descriptions, supported by frequent and often
42 lengthy quotes from multiple and distinctive San Nicoladense voices. She accompanies
43 these with a seemingly forthcoming description of her own subjective immersion into
44 the village and her personal relationships with its residents. Lewis criticises outsiders
45 who have imposed the terms Afromestizo and Afromexican, which San Nicoladenses
46 reject; induced them to build showcase redondos (huts) (which Aguirre Beltrán iden-
47 tified as African survivals, but which might rather be Mixtec adoptions); exploited
48 their musicians at regional Meetings of Black Villages; and attempted to engage them
49 in political activism that highlights a racial identity they do not claim, ignoring the
Book Reviews
1 social needs they prioritise. San Nicoladenses, for their part, identify primarily as
2 morenos, expressing a relationship to both African and indigenous roots, but above
3 all to place – San Nicolás – and to Mexicanness and responding to a national mestizo
4 discourse that excludes blackness.
5 Two chapters are key to Lewis’s engagement with ethnographic historiography and
6 contemporary Mexican politics of multiculturalism. In ‘Africa in Mexico: An Intellectual
7 History’, Lewis draws on archival research to illuminate the little-studied intellectual
8 relationship between Aguirre Beltrán and his mentor Melville Herskovits, specifically
9 as it influenced Aguirre Beltrán’s research and interpretation of Cuajinicuilapa and
10 the region as Afromexican. Lewis provides convincing counter-interpretations of the
11 phenomena that Aguirre Beltrán identifies as African survivals and critiques his incon-
12 sistencies and lacunae. She shows that, while Italian anthropologist Gutierre Tibón
13 produced a contrary interpretation soon after the publication of Cuijla, Tibón was
14 ignored.
15 In Chapter 5, ‘Culture Work: So Much Money’, Lewis develops ‘something of a
16 metaethnography, one of interactions among culture workers, including social move-
17 ment leaders, regular community members, and [herself]’ (p. 156). Lewis attended sev-
18 eral of the ‘Meetings of Black Villages’ and discusses the participation of the non-profit
19 México Negro organisation, which she sees as co-opted by the state’s objectified version
20 of multiculturalism. Lewis documents the San Nicoladenses’ lack of involvement in the
21 meetings, arguing that they do not feel represented by those who try to engage them.
22 She notes their growing cynicism about La cultura, whose representatives profess to act
23 on their behalf, but do not listen to them and engage in an insensitive exploitation of
24 their culture.
25 In the book’s remaining six chapters, Lewis lays out a history of people and place;
26 she analyses the meanings of morenoness and gender in San Nicolás, significant local
27 stories and transnational migration. She applies her skills as an ethnohistorian to rele-
28 vant archives to tease out the morenos’ relationship to the economic history of the Costa
29 Chica as a land and place central to moreno identity. She develops an exceptional anal-
30 ysis of three local narratives recounted by many San Nicoladenses that give meaning to
31 their identity and social relationships with both whites and Indians: these are stories of
32 shipwrecks, which in some accounts tell of maroon arrivals, and legends of the town’s
33 patron saint Nicolás Tolentino, whose image resides in the Indian village of Zitlala and
34 with whose inhabitants San Nicoladenses feel a special kinship, as well as the Indepen-
35 dence Day ritual drama La América in which morenos dress as Indians and perform a
36 conquest victory over Spaniards. Lewis also examines meanings of gender, the conflictive
37 impact of modernity on the village, and the centrality of house and home in the context
38 of migration back and forth to Winston Salem, NC.
39 Chocolate and Corn Flour is of compelling interest to all students of race and the
40 African Diaspora in Latin America.
41
42 Kathryn J. McKnight
43 University of New Mexico
44
45 References
46
47 Aguirre Beltrán, G. (1958) Cuijla: esbozo etnográfico de un pueblo negro. FCE: México. AQ2
48 Tibón, G. (1961) Pinotepa nacional: mixtecos, negros y triquescp México: UNAM. AQ3
49
Book Reviews
1 Burkholder, Mark A. (2013) Spaniards in the Colonial Empire. Creoles vs. Peninsulars?
2 Wiley-Blackwell (Malaysia), xviii + 198 pp. $89.95 hbk, $19.95 pbk.
3
4 This book approaches an aspect of fundamental importance for the history of the Iberian
5 Atlantic: the relationship between people of Spanish descent born in the Americas (Cre-
6 oles) and newly arrived Spaniards from the mother country (Peninsulars). The author’s
7 analysis of this relationship provides a well-documented narrative of Atlantic discourse
8 regarding the treatment (both juridical and social) of these communities. In addition,
9 from the very beginning, Burkholder assesses the important role played by female Cre-
10 oles in the shaping of Iberian transatlantic communities (p. 1), providing insights for a
11 gendered history of Spanish America.
12 The chronological focus of the volume includes the early colonial period, up to the
13 independence period of the 1820s. Although the majority of examples are from areas
14 pertaining to the Spanish Atlantic, with the vice-regal cities of Mexico and Lima in
15 prominent positions (e.g. pp. 41–43 and pp. 95–97), the author shows awareness of
16 the Portuguese Atlantic too (e.g. p. 92). This broad chronological focus depends on
17 the fact that the series in which Creoles vs Peninsulars? is published aims to introduce
18 ‘students to a significant theme or topic in Latin American history’ (editor’s preface, p.
19 ix). Without doubt, Burkholder has fulfilled this aim extremely well. His book has the
20 value of engaging with a challenging topic long identified by scholars as crucial to fully
21 understanding the historical dynamic of colonial worlds (see for example Brading, 1991;
22 Bauer and Mazzotti, 2009).
23 Chapters 1–3 focus on the first centuries of European expansion in the Americas,
24 along three main lines of research: early modern Spain and first settlers, including women
25 (pp. 12–16); regular and secular religious institutions, women included (pp. 43–47); and
26 Spaniards in public offices, in which chapter the author remarks that ‘although women
27 sometimes affected male appointments, [ … ] the following discussion of native sons in
28 office necessarily focuses principally on men’ (p. 58). As for the terminology adopted to
29 refer to different peoples according to their place of birth, the author explicitly prefers
30 ‘native sons’ and ‘native daughters’ to the term ‘creole’ (p. xii). However, this is not
31 consistently implemented; therefore, the changing methods utilised to describe ‘Atlantic
32 peoples’ cause some confusion. For example, on pp. 67–68, Burkholder describes Cre-
33 oles as ‘native sons’, ‘beneméritos’ and ‘hijos patrimoniales’.
34 Chapter 4 analyses the so-called long seventeenth century, 1630–1750, emphasising
35 how Creoles initially achieved prominent positions in both temporal and religious insti-
36 tutions, a situation that changed towards the end of that period (see Creole complaints
37 voiced in the ‘Representation’ by Juan Antonio de Ahumada of 1725, pp. 97–100).
38 Despite the title’s implication, the author’s main focus is on the latter part of this ‘cen-
39 tury’, with the majority of examples taken from the mid-seventeenth century onwards
40 (e.g. pp. 87–88). Nevertheless, this section offers a very interesting gendered approach to
41 Spanish-American history, with extensive sub-sections on native daughter prominence
42 (pp. 85–90). Chapters 5–7 cover the remaining period under scrutiny, although the
43 author’s effort to condense information on events from both sides of the Atlantic is
44 not completely convincing. Chapter 5 looks at the long-term effects of the metropolitan
45 efforts to regain control of Spanish-American communities through reforms such as the
46 repartimeinto system (p. 111) or the management of indigenous parishes (p. 112). This
47 section includes comments on ‘American degeneracy’, as presented by authors such as
48 the French Count de Buffon and the Scottish William Robertson (pp. 115–117). Chapter
49 6 continues the analysis of conflictive relationships between Creoles and Peninsulars in
Book Reviews
1 religious institutions and, once more, includes female Creoles (pp. 133–134). Chapter
2 7 examines the years of the constitutional debate in the Iberian Peninsula through the
3 eyes of its overseas peripheries (pp. 155–156), with several illuminating examples from
4 Spanish (pp. 160–162) and Portuguese America (pp. 169–171). While the density of the
5 events narrated results in difficulty for the reader (especially the undergraduate) to assim-
6 ilate the information, the continuous references to the Creoles vs. Peninsulars diatribe AQ4
7 works well in keeping the focus on the main topic under discussion.
8 To conclude, Burkholder proposes an effective re-reading of Latin American history
9 through the viewpoint of the Creoles vs. Peninsulars relationship. This volume provides
10 inspiring and challenging readings for both scholars and students, and leaves the reader
11 to decide the final answer to the title’s question. Creoles vs. Spaniards? is an important
12 contribution to the field of studies on both Creole–Peninsular relationships and gendered
13 histories of the Atlantic.
14
15 Angela Ballone
16 University of Liverpool
17
18
19 References
20
21 Bauer, R. and Mazzotti, J. A. (2009) Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires,
Texts, Identities. University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill.
22
Brading, D. A. (1991) The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the
23 Liberal State, 1492–1867. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
24
25
26
27 Stack, Trevor (2012) Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship,
28 University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque), xv + 168 pp. $45.00 hbk.
29
30 In Knowing History in Mexico, Trevor Stack investigates the connections between his-
31 tory and citizenship through a detailed look at how people understand, value, produce
32 and tell history in two Mexican towns, Tapalpa and Atacco. People in Tapalpa and
33 Atacco held historians in high regard and valued people who had a knowledge of his-
34 tory; however, they showed little interest in talking about history. Stark points out that
35 while generally there is a huge appetite for popular history today, in another sense there is
36 contempt for the past. The book seeks to understand how these two contrary approaches
37 might coexist. At the heart of this book is a question about the kind of work done by
38 knowledge of history. Why know history? What does this knowledge give you? And
39 why?
40 Stark argues that history is a kind of knowledge that is expected to bring authority to
41 those that master it. Part of this authority rests on the idea of history as a kind of valued
42 truth (because it is of the past) that allows public debate and is a sign of public-spirited
43 individuals – good citizens. It is a knowledge that demands an ability to look (and gather
44 information) beyond the present moment and place, while at the same time it is seen to
45 root people in particular places. The authority of knowledge of history comes from its
46 public nature and its individual acquisition. History is not easy to know and not everyone
47 knows history. This is part of its value.
48 The original focus of Stark’s investigation was to study local histories of the Mex-
49 ican Revolution and the Cristeros Rebellion in Tapalpa. However, because of the way
Book Reviews
1 Tapalpan history is told, Stark had to also include and study the nearby town of Atacco.
2 The two towns stand as counterweights to each other. The narrative of each place is
3 constructed with the other in mind. Conversations about history in both places are
4 set, although unconsciously, within the larger narrative of Mexican national history
5 including ideas of progress and mestizaje. In the process of asking about the Mexican
6 Revolution and the Cristeros Rebellion, Stark had to examine the very constitution of
7 history itself.
8 Some chapters deal with why one oral version of the history of the founding of
9 Tapalpa and of Atacco is so ubiquitous, similar and given by so many different peo-
10 ple, while differing radically from the written version. In other parts of the book Stark
11 spends some time explaining why the oral versions of the histories are valued, the evi-
12 dences used to substantiate them and the consequences for those who want to know
13 history. In these chapters he details why people might be so reluctant to accept revised
14 history. In the process he raises questions about consensus and about the lived relation-
15 ship between oral and written history. Too often anthropologists and historians dealing
16 with oral accounts of the past see consensus as its own kind of truth. But when is it
17 something else? Should there be an agreement between oral and written history? Why
18 does the written history hold a different kind of authority?
19 The book could have engaged more deeply with theories of nationalism and
20 post-colonialism that would have shed additional light on why these particular versions
21 of history were maintained, why history itself might be valued and why history is
22 attached to citizenship and belonging. In addition, I would have liked Stark to discuss
23 the importance of the history of cities, and especially the founding of cities, in the Latin
24 American context as it stands in contrast to other places in the world. Might history
25 and citizenship be very differently related in places where the history of cities is not
26 seen as important, and their founding largely irrelevant? Or where nationalism has less
27 prevalence and power?
28 Knowing History in Mexico nevertheless raises interesting insights into our assump-
29 tions about history, citizenship and place. Does history ameliorate conflicting narratives
30 of citizenship and of who is a good citizen? Which places can have history and, more
31 importantly, which places cannot? What makes history skewed and how does this shape
32 what is told as history? What is the relationship between oral and written history?
33 Between city and national history? How do certain versions of history become con-
34 sensual and why do they last? Throughout the book Stark situates the production and
35 telling of history within the social and political context of the area, where the changing
36 significance of race, class and identity changes the way history is told across centuries.
37
38 Bettina Ng’weno
39 University of California, Davis
40
41
42
43 Pansters, Wil G. (ed.) (2012) Violence, Coercion and State-Making in Twentieth-Century
44 Mexico: The Other Half of the Centaur, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA),
45 xix + 378 pp. £61.95 hbk.
46
47 In this edited volume, Pansters draws attention to the coercive and violent aspects of
48 Mexico’s state-making process in post-revolutionary Mexico, which has received too
49 little attention to date. Although Mexico’s civilian government stands out from those
Book Reviews
1 in military-ruled Latin American countries, their state-making process was not peace-
2 ful. Thus, the drastic increase of drug-related crimes has brought the issue of violence
3 prominently to the fore.
4 In the second part of the book, Shirk sheds light on the borderlands, Mexican/US eco-
5 nomic integration and market liberalisation, all leading to a deepening of socio-economic
6 inequality. Mexico’s proximity to the United States makes poverty and inequality par-
7 ticularly obvious, while also offering illicit opportunities to earn money. Since the year
8 2000, the United States has financially supported military and law enforcement, but has
9 left issues of macro-economic integration and inequality unaddressed. In the border-
10 lands, the military has taken over law enforcement from the police. Davis shows that
11 this approach may fail, because the military may be as corrupt as the police proved to
12 be. Popular discontent with the (mal)functioning of the Mexican police has historical
13 roots; President Cárdenas (1934–1940) tried to appease the disquiet by incorporating
14 the police administration into the military. During subsequent decades, the police and
15 military amassed enormous power through political networks and corruption. Given the
16 military–police nexus, the military may not be able to operate more successfully than
17 the police. As Gillingham shows, the current state’s dependence on the military is not
18 new to post-revolutionary Mexico. In rural areas, local pistoleros sometimes acted as
19 local leaders and the military has been heavily involved in policing to keep public order.
20 From the 1950s, the power of both the military and the pistoleros was reduced, as the
21 police, the penitentiary system and the courts were strengthened. As a result, violence
22 declined until 2006.
23 In Part Three, Knight looks at the current wave of violence in Mexico from a histori-
24 cal perspective. Mexico has known periods of intense violence throughout its history; the
25 current violence is another in a long series of episodes. Serrano notes that drug traffick-
26 ing is not new; however, it has grown in importance since the United States prohibited
27 drugs in 1914 and Baja California became the centre of the drug trade northwards.
28 The local authorities have condoned and regulated production from Mexico’s poppy
29 fields, even though, under US pressure, drugs were prohibited in Mexico in 1931. In the
30 1970s this system began to crack when the US demand for drugs increased and Mexico
31 became the major producer of heroin after the US clampdown on Turkish production.
32 Mexico also became the main transit route for cocaine transported from Colombia.
33 The increasingly powerful drug organisations began to challenge governmental regula-
34 tions. At the same time, Mexico’s democratisation process and increasing economic ties
35 with the United States impeded government officials’ involvement in drug regulation.
36 Initially, governmental regulations had kept violence from criminal organisations under
37 control. When the status quo broke, unprecedented violence was unleashed, which the
38 police have been unable to stop. Thousands of corrupt police officers are fired to stop
39 impunity, but replacing the police with the military has led to Mexico’s militarisation; in
40 most Latin American countries, the democratisation process has led to demilitarisation,
41 but not in Mexico. Aguiar shows that neoliberal policies and US–Mexican integration
42 have changed action taken not only towards drugs, but also towards the sale of other
43 products now defined as illegal, such as unauthorised copies of CDs or DVDs. Govern-
44 mental actions against these practices often lack public legitimacy and fail; after raids,
45 even more and cheaper CDs and DVDs are for sale. The impossibility of the govern-
46 ment’s task adds to the corruptibility of police officers, and thus increases the lack of
47 state legitimacy.
48 In Part Four, Aguila and Bortz reflect on the governmental control over labour unions.
49 This has strengthened labour rights and brought relative peace and growth within the
Book Reviews
1 industrial sector, but unions cannot operate democratically. Powell argues that such
2 clientelist networks have pervaded the state to such an extent that access to social rights is
3 not self-evident but, rather, depends on favours; the end of PRI rule did not change that.
4 This book, with its eleven well-integrated chapters, brings significant insight into
5 various aspects of state-making in Mexico. It convincingly shows that the recent
6 violence does not represent a sudden break with the past, but instead fits within
7 post-revolutionary state-making. This book is not only useful for those studying Mex-
8 ico, but can also be recommended to anyone interested in the background of Mexico’s
9 current violent era, whose origins and consequences go far beyond Mexico.
10
11 Joan van Wijk
12 VU University Amsterdam
13
14
15
16 Nolte, Detlef and Schilling-Vacaflor, Almut (eds) (2012) New Constitutionalism in Latin
17 America: Promises and Practices, Ashgate (Farnham and Burlington, VT), xxiv + 409 pp.
18 £65.00 hbk.
19
20 Beginning with Colombia in 1991, a series of Latin American countries have rewritten
21 their constitutions in an attempt to extend rights to previously excluded popula-
22 tions. The most notable and forward-looking of these new constitutions were those
23 promulgated in Venezuela in 1999, Ecuador in 2008 and Bolivia in 2009. These
24 constitutions moved from an exclusionary liberal focus on individual rights toward a
25 more comprehensive understanding of the importance of collective rights. In addition
26 to the traditional three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial), new
27 constitutions added electoral and popular participation branches. Although some
28 critiqued these new constitutions for not being grounded in reality, supporters con-
29 tended that their poetic aspirations were important in advancing struggles for social
30 justice.
31 The papers in this lengthy tome on the promises and practices of the new constitution-
32 alism in Latin America originate in a 2010 conference organised by the German Institute
33 of Global and Area Studies. Editors Detlef Nolte and Almut Schilling-Vacaflor interpret
34 constitutional change as part of a crisis of institutional legitimacy. In contrast, Astrid
35 Lorenz succinctly defines ‘new constitutionalism’ as a process that enhances ‘civil, polit-
36 ical, economic, social and cultural rights’, as well as altering ‘the relationship between
37 central states and regions, and between the state and its citizens’ (p. 32). This tension
38 between institutional stability and attempts to end historically exclusionary and unequal
39 structures is one that runs throughout the volume.
40 In a chapter that quantifies the rates of constitutional changes, Gabriel Negretto takes
41 patterns from the United States and Europe as normative, to critique the tendencies of
42 politicians in Latin America to remake state structures to meet the needs of current polit-
43 ical considerations. But why should the actions of colonial and neocolonial powers with
44 advanced industrial economies be presented as models for Latin America to emulate? A
45 more useful point of comparison, perhaps, would be African and Asian countries, with
46 histories and economies more similar to those of Latin America. Even Thomas Jeffer-
47 son, as contributors Rogerio Arantes and Claudio Couto point out, advocated that state
48 structures needed to be renewed on an ongoing basis to meet the specific needs of each
49 new generation.
Book Reviews
1 Several of the essays in this collection excel in advancing our understandings of the
2 new and innovative aspects of Latin America’s new constitutionalism. In an essay on
3 ‘critical constitutionalism’, Albert Noguera argues that this new tendency for Latin
4 America to embrace new models rather than continuing to emulate old established pat-
5 terns in the United States and Europe is a positive development. Roberto Gargarella also
6 points to a long tradition of constitutionalism in Latin America, and notes that we have
7 much to learn from this history.
8 The heart of this book is composed of a series of case studies. Many scholars see
9 Colombia’s 1991 constitution as launching a new movement toward an expansion
10 of rights for indigenous peoples, African descendants, gay people, and others. Juan
11 Fernando Jaramillo examines the promises of these developments, and how the coun-
12 try’s ‘para-political’ scandal highlighted their limitations. Rickard Lalander analyses
13 the growth of participatory democracy under Venezuela’s new constitution, and uses
14 this theme to challenge interpretations that moves toward decentralisation had been
15 extinguished under Hugo Chávez’s government.
16 Curiously, however, no single chapter is dedicated exclusively to the important case
17 studies of either Ecuador or Bolivia. At the same time, entire chapters are devoted to
18 the examples of Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Chile, which seem to be somewhat
19 removed from the central theme of new constitutionalism. Instead, a series of chapters
20 compares aspects of constitutional processes in Ecuador and Bolivia. Jonas Wolff pro-
21 vides a rather basic comparison of the two constitutions, Almut Schilling-Vacaflor and
22 René Kuppe examine the promises and shortcomings of plurinationalism in the two
23 countries, and finally Anna Barrera analyses indigenous justice systems.
24 It would seem that these final two chapters on indigenous rights should provide a
25 point of departure for a compelling analysis and understanding of new constitutional-
26 ism in Latin America, rather than a terminus. In a sense, the organisation of the volume is
27 upside down and backwards, with the book ending where it should rightfully begin. Fur-
28 thermore, the book minimises or ignores key themes raised by these new constitutions,
29 including marriage equality and reproductive rights.
30 The result is a lengthy yet incomplete volume that suffers from a lack of geographical
31 and thematic balance. Although presented as an interdisciplinary analysis, the central
32 conceptual framing of the volume is rooted in traditional political science approaches
33 that do not always raise the most interesting or useful questions. These shortcomings
34 are unfortunate in a volume that otherwise has important contributions to make to a
35 deeper understanding of new constitutionalisms in Latin America.
36
37 Marc Becker
38 Truman State University
39
40
41
42 Madrid, Raul M. (2012) The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Latin America, Cambridge Uni- AQ5
43 versity Press (New York, NY), xiii + 256 pp. £60.00 pbk.
44
45 The success of ethno-politics in Latin America has generated a prolific literature
46 discussing the power of indigenous contestation. Yet not all indigenous regions have
47 ethnic parties, nor do all parties fare equally. This book is the first to focus on the
48 question of why some ethnic parties succeed while others fail. Raúl Madrid explores
49 ethnic parties’ electoral performance in Latin America; his comparative analysis defends
Book Reviews
1 the thesis that electoral success depends on a combination of ethnic and populist
2 appeals.
3 Madrid’s argument is twofold. First, the ethnically inclusive strategies of certain par-
4 ties pay off because Latin American societies are characterised by an ethnic continuum
5 rather than polarisation. Madrid recognises the importance of large indigenous pop-
6 ulations in providing crucial mass support to ethnic parties; yet he emphasises Latin
7 America’s mestizaje to explain why successful parties are inter-ethnic. Mestizaje fre-
8 quently blurs ethnic boundaries to the point where people may simultaneously identify
9 with opposite sides of the ethnic divide. Ethnically inclusive parties, he posits, attract vot-
10 ers across the ethnic spectrum. Second, Madrid argues that an inclusive ethnic appeal
11 is electorally successful when combined with populist appeals. He defines populism as
12 the use of personalistic and anti-establishment campaigns to woo ‘lower-class’ voters.
13 The MAS gained power, he argues, because it simultaneously pursued identity-based ties
14 with an ethnically diffuse population and populist strategies to reach out to white and
15 mestizo voters.
16 The book examines the performance of indigenous parties in seven Latin American
17 countries. Two stand-alone chapters provide in-depth analyses of the successful stories
18 of the MAS in Bolivia and Pachakutik in Ecuador. A third chapter tackles Peru’s strong
19 ethnopopulism in the absence of indigenous parties. A fourth chapter provides a broad
20 perspective on the electoral failure of ethnic parties in Guatemala, Venezuela, Nicaragua
21 and Colombia. The last chapter evaluates the significant impact of indigenous parties on
22 democracy in the Andes.
23 Madrid’s empirically rich study combines extensive quantitative research, based on
24 census and electoral data, with strategic use of interviews and secondary literature. A
25 wealth of information about the electoral history of indigenous parties is presented
26 with a concision and fluidity that will satisfy specialists and appeal to non-experts. Fur-
27 thermore, Madrid underscores the central place of indigenous politics in mainstream
28 comparative politics while also advancing a unique perspective on the relevance of the-
29 ories of mestizaje to the analysis of ethnic parties.
30 Yet the book’s insightful thesis walks a fine line. Firstly, Bolivia is the only major
31 success story. Some will find it a stretch to theorise based on this sample. Secondly, con-
32 textual differences among countries are acknowledged but may strike some readers as
33 underplayed to the benefit of the author’s argument. History and international alliances,
34 for instance, matter. While the social trauma of the Shining Path may account for the
35 weakness of ethnic parties in Peru, the resilience of the MAS in Bolivia may be partly
36 attributed to the international support granted by Venezuela. Thirdly, it is not clear how
37 well Madrid’s argument survives the passage of time. His take on ethnic and populist
38 appeals fails to explain adequately Ecuador’s 2013 presidential election, where Pachaku-
39 tik hit an electoral low, despite securing inter-ethnic alliances with various parties on the
40 left and articulating anti-establishment discourses to attract lower-class voters.
41 Additionally, Madrid’s analysis may take too narrow a view of electoral performance.
42 Is performance achieved only through the election of ethnic parties? In Ecuador, the
43 electoral power of Pachakutik has declined over the past decade, yet other parties have
44 successfully appropriated its strategies. President Rafael Correa explicitly uses the mix
45 of ethnic and populist appeal developed by Pachakutik to win presidential elections,
46 with anti-neoliberal and anti-establishment rhetoric, ethnic symbols and discourse on
47 the rights of nature. His inauguration included a ceremony in the indigenous village
48 of Zumbahua, surrounded by presidents Evo Morales, Latin America’s first indigenous
49 president, and Hugo Chávez, the leading Bolivarian critic of neoliberalism. Correa wears
Book Reviews
1 ethnic shirts for official meetings and uses indigenous concepts such as Sumak Kausay
2 as policy pillars of his administration. More importantly, the governing party has suc-
3 cessfully appropriated indigenous candidates as their own. If Pachakutik has declined,
4 its politics and candidates have gone mainstream. The question, then, is whether the use
5 of ethnic appeals and the rise of indigenous candidates in non-ethnic parties represent
6 an electoral success or a failure of ethnic politics.
7 Madrid’s book merits high praise. His research achieves much more than simply
8 explaining the impact of ethnic politics on the quality of Latin American democracies.
9 It identifies ethnic politics as a strategic site from which theories of democracy should
10 be rethought. This important book challenges political scientists to take ethnic politics
11 seriously in their endeavours to broaden understandings of electoral performance.
12
13 Manuela Picq
14 Universidad San Francisco de Quito
15
16
17
18 Bunck, Julie and Fowler, Michael (2012) Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation: Drug Traf-
19 ficking and the Law in Central America, Pennsylvania State University Press (University
20 Park, PA) xii + 431 pp. $80.96 hbk, $31.46 pbk.
21
22 In recent years, drug trafficking in Central America has been one of the emerging security
23 issues for academic circles and policy makers. This raises three critical questions: What
24 are the prominent aspects of drug trafficking in this region? What are the weak points of
25 the current anti-trafficking measures? What are the implications for anti-drug measures
26 in the future? In Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation: Drug Trafficking and the Law in
27 Central America, Julie Bunck and Michael Fowler provide thought-provoking answers
28 to these questions. The authors are professors at the University of Louisville, who have
29 devoted many years to studying drug trafficking in Central America, definitely making
30 their arguments in this volume all the more convincing.
31 This book is divided into six chapters (plus an Introduction and Conclusion). Chapter
32 1 gives an overview of the landscape of drug trafficking in Central America. Chapters
33 2–6 successively analyse the dynamics of drug trafficking in the five ‘bridge states’.
34 Unlike many published works on drug trafficking in Central America, Colombia and
35 Mexico, Bunck and Fowler compile a great deal of information from both scattered and
36 open sources, and focus on the five ‘bridge states’ (i.e. Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala,
37 Honduras and Panama) in Central America, which ‘lie on favored paths carved out
38 between centers of production and key consumer markets’ (p. 1) and allow the transit
39 of drugs from South America to North America and Europe. This book systemati-
40 cally analyses the dynamics of drug trafficking in these ‘bridge countries’, including the
41 transnational crime groups involved, trafficking methods and routes, as well as the fac-
42 tors favouring drug trafficking.
43 Bunck and Fowler question several arguments shared by some academics and pol-
44 icy makers. Firstly, they find that weak institutions (e.g. an insufficient legal regime
45 or law enforcement) cannot effectively explain drug trafficking in the ‘bridge states’.
46 In the view of the authors, the factors favouring drug trafficking should include geo-
47 graphical location and socio-economic environment, which vary with the local contexts.
48 Secondly, as the authors argue, the transit of drugs in the ‘bridge states’ will not be sub-
49 stantially reduced in the foreseeable future, because the existing anti-drug trafficking
Book Reviews
1 regimes (e.g. disruption of drug trafficking and elimination of certain transnational crime
2 groups) have brought limited results. Thirdly, the authors point out that the attempted
3 elimination of the bridge-favouring factors would be ‘costly, time-consuming, or uncer-
4 tain’, even ‘impossible’ (p. 13). Indeed, the transnational crime groups involved in drug
5 trafficking have ‘proved able to adapt to their environment’ (p. 227), through meth-
6 ods such as using lesser organisations and outsourcing transportation. Moreover, these
7 groups are skillful at making use of bribes, killing and threats in order to undermine the
8 anti-drug trafficking regimes. With regard to the tensions between drug trafficking and
9 counter-measures in the five ‘bridge states’, as the authors analyse, there are at least two
10 possibilities: on one hand, the transnational crime groups could probably be persuaded
11 to transfer their business to the neighbouring countries; on the other, the drug trade
12 could stimulate reforms in the ‘bridge states’.
13 This book does succeed in examining the drug trafficking and countermeasures in the
14 ‘bridge states’ of Central America. At the same time, however, it leaves two open ques-
15 tions to be discussed in further work. Firstly, is there any other important variable? In
16 my opinion, this might not exclude the possibility of private security companies’ involve-
17 ment in anti-drug trafficking in the bridge states, which would make the situation more
18 complex. At the same time, child soldiering in the ‘bridge states’ should be taken into
19 account, as it would be helpful in making the existing anti-drug trafficking measures
20 more comprehensive. Secondly, methamphetamine’s impact on the ‘bridge states’ should
21 be addressed as an essential variable, since it is made from commercially available chem-
22 icals (e.g. elements abstracted from cold and flu remedies). In contrast to the traditional
23 cultivation and production of drugs (e.g. coca), the easier availability of raw materials
24 means that methamphetamine trafficking will move beyond the ‘bridge states’. In other
25 words, transnational drug trafficking will, to some extent, be displaced by local pro-
26 duction of methamphetamine. As a result, the distinctions between ‘bridge states’ and
27 producer states will become more blurred.
28 In short, this well-researched book makes a praiseworthy contribution to the litera-
ture on drug trafficking in Central America. It will appeal to academics, policy-makers
29
and students, as well as researchers and activists who are interested in international secu-
30
rity (especially drug trafficking) and Latin American studies. This book should certainly
31
be added to the collections of university libraries and other academic libraries.
32
33
34 Kai Chen
35 Zhejiang University
36
37
38 Pino-Ojeda, Walescka (2011) Noche y Niebla: neoliberalismo, memoria y trauma en el
AQ6
39 Chile postautoritario, Editorial Cuarto Propio (Santiago), + 284 pp. £9.46 pbk.
40
41 The title of Pino-Ojeda’s study of Chilean society after Pinochet’s dictatorship echoes
42 the homonymous film in which the French director Alain Resnais powerfully docu-
43 mented the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps. The haunting final scene of that
44 1955 documentary cautions that denial and deflection of responsibility do not lead to
45 healing of societal trauma. ‘We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us and a deaf ear
46 to humanity’s never-ending cry’, states the terrifyingly monotonous voice of Resnais’s
47 narrator ten years after the Nuremberg trials, when the question ‘Who is responsible?’
48 remained unanswered. Pino-Ojeda’s examination of Chilean society seems to cast the
49 same doubt 21 years after Pinochet. While her study lacks the emotional and artistic
Book Reviews
1 power of Resnais’s questioning of the post-authoritarian legacy, the book gives a fair
2 summary of a variety of narratives, critical and theoretical, Chilean and international,
3 that emerged after Pinochet’s dictatorship in an attempt to construct the societal mem-
4 ory associated with the legacies of violence. It is a multidisciplinary work that patiently
5 combs through a vast number of political, sociological and psychological studies that
6 intend to tell the story of trials and tribulations of incomplete mourning.
7 How a fractured society remembers and constitutes itself and, furthermore, how
8 memories are authorised seem to be the prime questions requiring an answer. The author
9 takes Aylwin’s compromise between justice and prudence (‘justice be done to the extent
10 possible’) as the faulty foundation for a societal consensus. She contends that, while
11 both the Rettig and Velech reports were of utmost importance for constitutiing the offi-
12 cial memory of the dictatorship years, Chileans still face the challenge of transposing
13 those memories from official to societal. The way in which the stories of the past are
14 told determines the kind of future that Chilean society can envision; so far, standing in
15 the way of a bright, shiny democracy is a thick layer of fog which only now, on the
16 threshold of the third millennium, is starting to clear.
17 The volume consists of a very brief introduction, three chapters and a bibliography.
18 The publisher, well known for some extraordinary titles, has done an efficient job in
19 bringing the book out only one month after the completion of the manuscript! Unfor-
20 tunately, it does not have an index, which is quite an omission given the sometimes
21 overwhelming number of references to theoretical and critical works of other schol-
22 ars. Every few pages Pino-Ojeda introduces and summarises an argument by a different
23 scholar, a technique that, while informative of the state of ideas in the field, does not
24 allow her to foreground her own argument efficiently. Furthermore, this volume can be
25 best appreciated by those who are already well versed in the details of Chilean history,
26 particularly the Allende government, Pinochet’s dictatorship and the years leading to the
27 current right-wing presidency of Sebastián Piñera. It will be hard for a historically and
28 geographically distant reader, not familiar with the particularities of Chilean history, to
29 follow her argument. A case in point is her mention of Luz Arce, victim and collabora-
30 tor, who is only critically referenced and used as an example in passing, without even
31 minimal explanation of her unfortunate and tragic history.
32 The first chapter takes into account the current discussions of the Third Way as a
33 position going beyond the traditional division of the political spectrum between Right
34 and Left, different both from liberal capitalism and democratic socialism, technically
35 favouring market growth while not neglecting social justice, as postulated and argued
36 by Giddens. Pino-Ojeda discusses this model in relation to the Chilean transition, crit-
37 ical of the view that economic liberalism eventually leads to political liberalism. Ulti-
38 mately, considering that the Right now holds power in Chile, the question is why the
39 Concertación-led government did not make democracy stronger through a real and sus-
40 tained effort to recover the rights that civil society had guaranteed before Pinochet’s
41 military coup?
42 The second chapter discusses the issues of collective memory, economic neoliber-
43 alism and globalisation through arguments by Garretón, Appadurai (whose name is
44 misspelled throughout), Todorov, Ricoeur, Richard, Moulian, Moreiras, Oyarzún, Halb-
45 wachs, Beck and Arendt, among many others. The final chapter looks into the alleged
46 successes of the Chilean path to social justice, as drawn upon Aylwin’s attempt at recon-
47 ciliation and the Concertación’s unwillingness to tackle the most contentious legacies
48 of the dictatorship. In that sense, it is about the ethics of those ultimately dubious
49 successes. The book ends with a discussion of the culture of fear, the monopolisation
Book Reviews
1 of violence by the state and the ways in which Chilean society faces global neoliberal
2 ethics. Pino-Ojeda’s well-researched study adds a useful dimension to the understanding
3 of societal trauma in post-authoritarian Chile.
4
5 Ksenija Bilbija
6 University of Wisconsin-Madison
7
8
9 Ciccariello-Maher, George (2013) We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the
10 Venezuelan Revolution, Duke University Press (Durham, NC and London), xiii + 320
11 pp. £72.00 hbk, £17.99 pbk.
12
13 The author uses a very specific meaning of the word ‘people’ in this volume. Following
14 Enrique Dussel, he interprets ‘people’ as those excluded from the mainstream political
15 system who fight to change it; they epitomise rupture and struggle (p. 8). The book is
16 divided into chapters analysing different sectors of society, such as students and peasants
17 (campesinos), and their experience of struggle. His motivation is the idea of ‘horizon-
18 talism’, or the refusal to acknowledge ‘the state’ and to create alternatives through dual
19 power from below, i.e. from ‘the people’.
20 The chapters are interspersed with two Interludes covering the Caracazo and the 2002
21 coup. He is rightly extremely critical of the 1958–1998 Punto Fijo-pacted democracy,
22 so his story of popular struggle begins in 1958 and the election of Rómulo Betancourt
23 to the presidency.
24 There are certain shortcomings to this approach. His definition of ‘the people’ is itself
25 exclusive and removes several societal groups from the analysis. There is some reference
26 to the landholding class in the chapter about campesinos, without any real attempt to
27 understand or justify their beliefs and strategies. It is the same with the urban rich and
28 non-chavistas. The political class is defined simply by greed and self-interest and there
29 is no great insight into the armed forces. The real working class (as compared to the
30 ‘underclass’, street traders or unemployed) get short shrift, as happens consistently in
31 political analyses of many societies, including our own. There are some passages which
32 are difficult to follow, as if written by someone writing in English but thinking in Spanish.
33 On the other hand, there is a lot to be happy with in this book. It is well researched
34 and referenced (and edited). It differs from many volumes on this topic, as it includes
35 many oral testimonies from people involved in the events under discussion, especially
36 ex-guerrillas from the 1960s civil war and members of radical, often armed, civil groups
37 from the contemporary period. It is written in a very chatty, informal style – chico but
38 cónchale – that makes it more personal and direct, less dry and academic. I am surprised
39 to find myself writing that; however, here, it conveys something of the character of the
40 interviewees and one is somehow transported to the smoky, whiskey-infused atmosphere
41 of the venue.
42 The author is clearly bien enchufado. He has entered challenging environments and
43 come away with interesting material. I know from my own research that gathering
44 oral testimonies in Caracas is exhausting; I would not want to do it again. The author
45 deserves praise for taking this route; the book is better for it and we get insights which
46 would otherwise be difficult to come by, especially from afar.
47 The early chapters covering the guerrilla war, its failure and the depravity of the
48 so-called ‘democratic’ governments are the most interesting, and the interviews fleshed
49 out by insight. The author’s contempt for the 1958–1998 ‘democracy’ is thankfully
Book Reviews
1 palpable; more outspoken condemnation of the period from commentators would

2 help broaden understanding of Venezuelan politics. However, from the first Interlude
3 onwards, the book takes up its theme of playing up popular action and playing down
4 the role of Hugo Chávez in the transformation of Venezuela. This is where I have to
5 disagree.
6 Where the author sees constant popular revolution and struggle, I just see failure. The
7 1958 revolution against Pérez Jiménez was military; the transition government under
8 Admiral Wolfgang Larrázabal, the people’s favourite in Caracas, was defeated electorally
9 by Betancourt; the 1960s guerrilla war was a failure; the Niehous kidnapping was a fail-
10 ure, ending in vicious repression. Electoral efforts to change Venezuela prior to Chávez
11 all failed; the Caracazo was a failure. It was only with the arrival of Chávez that this
12 cycle of failure was halted. I am simply not a great believer in ‘people power’; we have
13 seen many times recently how a machine gun is more effective.
14 The picture painted in this book is one of the people’s failure compounded by division
15 in the ranks of all the sectors of society analysed. Without all the arrogance, carping,
16
complaining and conditionality shown here, they might have achieved something. On
17
the other hand, the momentum has been halted, Chávez is dead and the opposition might
18
very well (but inexplicably) win the next election. Whither people’s power?
19
This is an excellent book and I agree with a lot of it. Others might agree with much
20
more than I do. It is well written and a joy to read. It makes you think, and therefore
21
should be read by anyone with an interest in (Venezuelan) politics and government.
22
23
Michael Derham
24
25 Northumbria University
26
27
28 Burbach, Roger, Fox, Michael and Fuentes, Federico (2013) Latin America’s Turbulent
29 Transitions: The Future of Twenty-First Century Socialism, Zed Books (London and
30
New York, NY), xiv + 196 pp. £16.99 pbk.
31
32
Roger Burbach, Michael Fox and Federico Fuentes have produced a concise volume
33
that provides a useful overview of the attempted move towards ‘twenty-first century
34
socialism’ in Latin America over the past decade. Case studies of political change in
35
Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil anchor the book, which concludes with a brief
36
37 examination of recent changes in Cuba.
38 The first three chapters situate the rise of a new left in Latin America within several
39 global processes. Firstly, the authors argue that the emergence of radical governments
40 can be traced to the ‘militant and highly diverse’ (p. 13) social movements that emerged
41 in opposition to neoliberalism across the continent from the 1990s. Many of these, such
42 as the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), the Zapatis-
43 tas in Mexico and the landless movement in Brazil, eschewed the ‘vanguardist’ model,
44 keeping a critical distance from leftist parties. The authors argue that these heteroge-
45 neous movements constituted a break with traditional leftist projects, instead basing
46 their movements on demands around land rights and ethnicity, a commitment to grass-
47 roots democracy and a suspicion of top-down organising. These trends sowed the seeds,
48 they suggest, for the remodelled forms of socialism that subsequently emerged as elec-
49 toral projects.
Book Reviews
1 A further observation made is that the leftward turn in Latin America is closely related
2 to the gradual demise of global US hegemony. The emergence of China as a second
3 superpower, and of the BRIC economies as new trading partners, has opened opportu-
4 nities for Latin American countries to decrease their reliance on the North American
5 market. As the authors observe (on Brazil), the emergence of regional trading blocs,
6 such as ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) and CELAC (The Community
7 of Latin American and Caribbean States), offers significant alternatives to the highly
8 inequitable trade agreements predominant since the 1970s.
9 Turbulent Transitions also highlights the centrality of what Eduardo Gudynas terms
10 ‘neo-extractivism’ (p. 40) to the political economies of the ‘pink tide’ states. By revers-
11 ing the neoliberal proclivity for privatisation and gaining considerable control over the
12 production and trade of minerals, hydrocarbons and agricultural commodities, the pink
13 tide governments have been able to generate significant capital, channelling it into health,
14 education and social welfare. The authors point out, however, that this model produces
15 serious tensions in the search for a democratic and non-authoritarian socialism; by mak-
16 ing wealth redistribution dependent on the extraction of raw materials by the state, such
17 policies risk reproducing a form of state capitalism that remains dependent on the inter-
18 national market and risk conflict with the needs of local communities.
19 The volume’s different case studies illustrate what the authors describe as ‘a mul-
20 tifaceted dance … [in which] some governments have continued to work closely with
21 movements, while others have ignored, co-opted, manipulated, or even repressed grass-
22 roots sectors’ (p. 43). The chapter on Venezuela details the achievements of Chávez’s
23 government in reducing poverty and its massive investments in health and education, but
24 it also describes conflicts between workers seeking greater democratic control and con-
25 servative elements of the state bureaucracy that seek to restrict their influence. Likewise,
26 the Bolivian chapter extols the political agency of the country’s indigenous populations,
27 but weighs their gains against recent disagreements over state development projects
28 in indigenous territories and perceived centrism within Morales’s party, MAS. Mark
29 Becker’s chapter on Ecuador is the most critical of the case studies, arguing that Cor-
30 rea’s government has actively sought to undermine indigenous groups opposed to the
31 expansion of state mining operations in their territories. Although Correa is a strident
32 anti-imperialist voice, ushering in one of the continent’s most progressive constitutions,
33 his government’s reliance on extractivist industries seriously threatens the indigenous
34 communities that it purports to protect.
35 One criticism that can perhaps be levelled at Turbulent Transitions is that its broad
36 sweep is at times at odds with its compactness. It covers a lot of ground, but also leaves
37 out many current studies that might shed further light on the lived grassroots experience
38 of political change. Although the agency of social movements is frequently lauded, most
39 of the voices we hear are those of either political leaders or high-profile intellectuals.
40 Hence, the authors skirt round the question of whether twenty-first century socialism is
41 really a useful concept beyond its discursive deployment by the pink tide political elite.
42 Overall, this volume can be read as a sympathetic analysis of the histories, actions and
43 intentions of the main proponents of Latin America’s contemporary socialist projects.
44 Although scholars of the region may find its brevity frustrating, it is an excellent starting
45 point for those who wish to understand more about the social and political changes
46 taking place in Latin America.
47
48 Matt Wilde
49 London School of Economics
Book Reviews
1 Conniff, Michael L. (2012) Panama and the United States: The End of the Alliance, 3rd
2 edn, The University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA and London), xi + 260 pp. $24.95
3 pbk, $24.95 ebk.
4
5 Great Powers have for centuries coveted the small isthmus that became Panama in 1903,
6 because of its strategic location as a path between the seas. US interest in Panama com-
7 menced in earnest in the mid-1800s when Washington needed to transport gold from
8 California to the US eastern seaboard, and encouraged the flow of colonisers to the west-
9 ern states. That interest intensified with the building of the Panama Canal, an engineering
10 marvel that multiplied US naval power and expanded US seaborne commerce. Later in
11 the 1900s, Washington’s interests centred on acquiring and maintaining a large number
12 of military bases on the isthmus, serving to implement US strategic policy throughout the
13 hemisphere. All the while, Panama, as a small weak country, had to accept US tutelage,
14 fighting continuously for meagre benefits from the relationship.
15 Michael Conniff’s third edition of Panama and the United States, initially subtitled
16 ‘the forced alliance’ and now branded ‘end of the alliance,’ provides a concise overview
17 of this strained liaison that has finally taken on a less asymmetrical form. Although using
18 mostly secondary sources, Conniff employs interviews with key individuals in his latter
19 chapters. This brief book describes the key events of the diplomatic odyssey between
20 Panama and Washington, from the US treaty with Colombia that allowed Washington
21 to build a trans-isthmian railroad, to the current situation where Panama fully controls
22 the canal and is now building a third set of locks for the passage of ships unable to pass
23 through the original US-built locks. Conniff also considers what many other scholars
24 have omitted: the ‘experiences shared by Panamanians and Americans’ (p. 5) at all social
25 levels.
26 As someone who has also written about this relationship and its effects on Panama
27 and Panamanians, I have a few quibbles with the book. Unfortunately, Conniff does
28 not cite in the text the scholarship that has been published since his last edition (by
29 the publisher’s request), making it impossible for the reader to know where new find-
30 ings have influenced his observations or conclusions. Of more concern, Conniff does
31 not include, in his most recent supplemental bibliographical essay, Díaz Espino’s book
32 (2001) which suggests that Teddy Roosevelt’s haste in formalising a treaty with Colom-
33 bia and then Panama, after the president ‘took Panama’, may have been motivated not
34 only by strategic, imperial considerations (as most scholars assume), but also by private
35 financial motivations. When discussing the negotiations that Washington and Panama
36 began in 1997 to determine whether or not US military bases would remain on the isth-
37 mus after 1999, when all properties were to be reverted to Panama under the 1977
38 Canal Treaties, Conniff seems to suggest that both countries wanted the bases and that
39 the United States was almost eager to leave. Evidence suggests, however, that Washing-
40 ton initiated the negotiations and kept pushing for a sizeable military presence almost
41 up until the Canal turnover ceremony on December 31, 1999. After Panama forced the
42 United States to give back the bases, Washington pressured Colombia to announce Plan
43 Colombia, a poorly veiled US replacement for the loss of bases on the isthmus.
44 Although we can question some of his interpretations, Conniff’s book is an excel-
45 lent, clearly written introduction to the history of US–Panama relations. Although it
46 is a ‘balanced’ book, Conniff clearly and accurately demonstrates that, during most of
47 the forced relationship, the United States dominated and got what it wanted from the
48 isthmus, while Panama, with rare exceptions, ended up with the short end of the stick.
49 With the turnover of the canal, the forced alliance has ended and Panama’s relations
Book Reviews
1 with Washington now resemble the connection the United States has with most small
2 countries in the western hemisphere: still asymmetrical, but with a reduced obsession
3 on the part of the colossus. And, as Conniff shows, rather than falling into political
4 chaos or economic collapse, Panama has developed a working democracy, guided the
5 economy reasonably well and, most importantly, ‘defied predictions that it would mis-
6 manage the canal and be lost without the tutelage of the United States’ (p. 187). The
7 small, beleaguered nation finally got what it always wanted and, despite longstanding
8 doomsday scenarios emanating mostly from Washington, has flourished politically, eco-
9 nomically and as a hub of commerce. This conclusion raises a question that Conniff
10 does not attempt to answer: did the US presence really help Panama in any measurable
11 way, or did it in fact undermine the small country’s economic and political development
12 for almost a century?
13
14 Peter M. Sanchez
15 Loyola University
16
17
18
19
Reference
20 Espino, O. D. (2001) How Wall Street Created a Nation: J.P. Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt and
21 the Panama Canal. Nation Books: New York.
22
23
24
25 Hull, Christopher (2013) British Diplomacy and US Hegemony in Cuba, 1898–1964,
26 Palgrave Macmillan (Houndmills), ix + 291 pp. £60.00 hbk.
27
28 This fine study seeks to assess how well British diplomats fought for national self-interest
29 while British power in Cuba diminished dramatically vis-à-vis that of the United States.
30 It finds that they were generally successful, though not without largely acquiescing in
31 US hegemony.
32 Arguably, the book’s most prominent theme is that, through some of the most politi-
33 cally sensitive crises in the history of US-Caribbean relations, the British maintained their
34 focus on commercial interests, only sacrificing them to avoid larger Anglo-American
35 rifts. After the United States came to control Cuba’s foreign policy in the early twenti-
36 eth century, for instance, the British fought hard for an ‘open door’ in Cuba that would
37 protect their trade, now in sharp competition with that of the United States. The Platt
38 Amendment gave Washington oversight over Cuban treaties, so an Anglo-Cuban trade
39 treaty took years to materialise. Partly because of this focus, Great Britain profited from
40 railways, banking and exports of finished goods such as linens and cottons. World War
41 I, however, sent British trade into the red, where it remained for the rest of the period
42 examined here. World War II also harmed British commerce, as did the May 1945 sepa-
43 ration of Canadian from British interests. However, British trade tended to continue,
44 independent of ideology. London, for instance, sold arms to Fulgencio Batista even
45 when Washington would not, and then sent buses to Castro’s communist government.
46 Petroleum giant Shell left Cuba when Castro forced it to refine Soviet oil – not because
47 of anti-communism, but because it would no longer make a profit.
48 ‘Our interests in Cuba are purely commercial’, one envoy to Havana wrote in 1921.
49 ‘On the other hand, politically, the country is an annex of the United States’ (p. 5). This
Book Reviews
1 duality forms the second theme: that Great Britain maintained its favourable position
2 in Cuba by carefully avoiding upsetting Washington. Before the War of 1898, Britain
3 had once controlled Cuba (in 1762) and remained a major trade partner. During the
4 war, Britain ignored its preference for aristocratic colonial rule and even family ties (the
5 Queen Regent of Spain was Queen Victoria’s niece) and instead remained officially neu-
6 tral, while it supplied coal to US ships and pressured Egypt not to refuel Spanish ships.
7 British officials even represented Washington in Cuba. During the Grau San Martín gov-
8 ernment, the British followed the US lead and held off recognition even if they thought it
9 a mistake. Washington occasionally repaid the British, for instance by supporting their
10 call for a commercial treaty to ensure British purchases of sugar and thus stabilise Cuba.
11 Among the more interesting contributions of Hull’s volume are British observers’
12 criticisms of US policy in Cuba. They thought it misinformed, paranoid or counterpro-
13 ductive, and many times compared it unfavourably with Britain’s own record, or else
14 expressed not a little schadenfreude when US policy went awry. Even after the US defeat
15 of Spain, the British saw ‘few, if any, lessons for the British to learn from the conduct
16 of this campaign’ (p. 31). A minister noted the ‘amateurishness’ (Hull’s word) of US
17 diplomats in dealing with the political crisis of 1933. A Foreign Office memo called the
18 US FBI operating in Havana ‘a kind of Gestapo under the cloak of the Cuban police’
19 (p. 123). As was the British tendency, these comments almost always remained private.
20 Only a few times, such as in the 1933 crisis or when they refused to join the US shipping
21 boycott against Castro, did the British openly disagree with their allies.
22 The book’s main sources are British diplomatic archives and thus the main actors are
23 almost exclusively British diplomats. To a considerable degree this makes sense, because
24 the topic of the book is diplomacy. It also reveals observations about a diplomat’s life
25 in Cuba, such as the repeated complaints about its exorbitant cost (higher than those
26 of New York or Buenos Aires!). But other important players in Cuba – British busi-
27 ness representatives, spies, members of the British ‘colony’ – make an appearance in the
28 book, it seems, only as they appear in Foreign Office documents. There may be several
29 other sides to this story, though it is likely they would seriously contradict it. AQ7
30 This book fills a gap in historical knowledge about British diplomacy in Cuba in
31 the twentieth century, which until now has only produced a dozen articles, many by
32 Hull himself, and no overall monograph. Hopefully it will spur similar work on other
33 important countries represented in Cuba, such as France and Spain. In all, this is a
34 tremendously valuable case study of the compromises and care that must be part of
35 the diplomacy of a great power while it experiences a slow but steady decline.
36
37 Alan McPherson
38 University of Oklahoma
39
40
41
42 Taussig, Michael (2012) Beauty and the Beast, The University of Chicago Press
43 (Chicago, IL and London), x + 172 pp. $18.00 pbk.
44
45 This is a fascinating book, consisting of a series of bite-sized chapters (nineteen in total)
46 with titles such as ‘Cool’ and ‘the Designer Smile’. The text opens with an ‘Author’s
47 Note’ that points immediately to some of the main themes to be treated at length later,
48 notably the relationship or ‘synergism’ between beauty and violence. Colombia furnishes
49 graphic examples of the interface between violence (state, paramilitary and guerrilla)
Book Reviews
1 and surgically enhanced female beauty. A key term (coined by Georges Batailles in the
2 context of sacrifice) is depense, meaning profitless expenditure, excess or ‘toomuchness’.
3 Taussig focuses on beauty, not as form but as force in shaping society, and on the
4 aesthetic shaping of terror. He sees the role of aesthetics as far wider and more significant
5 (priming the ‘pump of life’ [p. 5]) than hitherto recognised, embracing, for example, the
6 land (agri-culture): agribusiness practised ‘cosmic’ surgery on the Colombian landscape
7 before it was practised on the bodies of Colombian women.
8 Referring to Marshall Sahlins, Taussig points out that it is scarcity that drives con-
9 sumer society – ‘the feeling that one never has enough, combined with the even greater
10 feeling of having to consume more’ (p. 33). Noting the ‘trickle-up’ effect, whereby
11 metropolitan fashion is driven by ghetto teenagers’ opinions of cool (p. 35), he wonders
12 whether the thrill of fashion is itself a fundamental aspect of terror (p. 36).
13 Cosmic surgery is the latest expression of ancient magical practices, such as masking,
14 face painting, body painting, ‘carried out so as to greet the gods or become one’ (p. 44).
15 Taussig’s use of language and imagery suggests a personal investment in stylistic fashion:
16 noting the importance of the face as ‘mother and measure of all images’, he considers
17 the effect of the designer smile as ‘something like a computer virus let loose on God’s
18 software’ (p. 44). He is at his most interesting and original in his metaphorical applica-
19 tions of cosmic surgery to the state, which exists as ‘an exercise in extreme makeover
20 designed to cover up the face of paramilitary control from the lowest to the highest levels
21 of government’ (p. 46).
22 Taussig’s approach emphasises the Deleuzian notion of ‘becoming’ (though Deleuze is
23 never mentioned): there is, he says, only one thing more enchanting than beauty, and that
24 is the ‘capacity to metamorphose into beauty’ (p. 41); elsewhere he notes with surprise
25 how expensive clothing stores display sewing machines in their windows: ‘these idle
26 machines on the verge of extinction have been resuscitated as organic force, akin to a
27 pack of wild animals, displayed not in a zoo but in a shop window’ (p. 94). He is also
28 keen on border crossings: discussing nicknames and aliases, he says that his favourite
29 ‘appellation’ is the nom de guerre, a ‘supercharged hybrid of alias and nickname’ (p.
30 117) suggesting a ‘complex world of doubling identities and masking’ (p. 117). Having
31 a nickname or alias is like having a mask, a cover over the real face, similar to what a
32 facelift provides.
33 Taussig maintains his original take on the topic to the final pages, where he mentions
34 the Faustian aspect of glamour: ‘do not my stories of la lipo and cosmic surgery resonate
35 perfectly with the story of the contract with the devil? [ … ] He is present in the medley
36 of glamor and disfiguration’ (p. 151). He might also have considered the implications for
37 patriarchal power relations, making more explicit the point that what might be seen as
38 a sign of women’s independence is, in reality, the latest manifestation of their servitude.
39 This is a highly readable text that in some instances seems itself to exemplify the
40 principle of hybridity, combining a fair range of references to such writers as Benjamin,
41 Lawrence and Nietzsche and to movements, such as the baroque, with a studied casu-
42 alness of tone and style: ‘You really pay your dues with la lipo’ (p. 53). There is some
43 inevitable repetition, as well as a hint of structural randomness – with comments on
44 fashion, for example, flitting back and forth across the text but, in so doing, reflecting
45 the point made about fashion’s ubiquity (p. 52). It is certainly a text that mirrors the the-
46 atricality and evanescence of its subject. It is supplemented by a variety of photographs,
47 some reproduced from newspapers, such as the feature entitled ‘Mi busto por un reino’
48 in the ‘quality’ El Espectador, indicating the pervasiveness of Colombia’s sexualised
49 society.
Book Reviews
1 Taussig’s style and tone may be ‘cool’, but he communicates several sharp insights
2 and startling connections, providing a perceptive and often original interpretation of
3 the extraordinary pace of social change experienced in Colombia over the past 30 years.
4
5 Lloyd H. Davies
6 Swansea University
7
8
9
10 Canessa, Andrew (2012) Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex, and History in the Small
11 Spaces of Andean Life, Duke University Press (Durham and London), xiv + 325 pp.
12 £71.00 hbk, £17.99 pbk.
13
14 In Intimate Indigeneities, Andrew Canessa explores what it means to be indigenous
15 in quotidian spaces of the Bolivian highlands at a moment of intense global atten-
16 tion to the politics of native peoples. It is a refreshing return to deep contextualisa-
17 tion and long-term ethnography, in contrast to trends of studying indigeneity through
18 multi-sited research on NGOs, national movements and international activism. Canessa
19 uses detailed interviews and participant observation, over two decades in the small com-
20 munity of Wila Kjarka, to unpack the ways local individuals understand ethnic identity
21 in their everyday lives. He derives his analysis of ‘race, sex, and history’ (part of the
22 book’s subtitle) from banal locales like kitchens and park benches, because ‘it is precisely
23 in intimate spaces where social identities, citizenship, and nationhood are produced’ (p.
24 26). The book is divided into eight chapters, plus an introduction and a postscript. In
25 the introduction, Canessa positions his ‘ethnography of the everyday’ as building on
26 the work of scholars like Michael Taussig, Ann Stoler and Elizabeth Povinelli. Chapter
27 1 establishes the social geography of Wila Kjarka, where people distinguish between
28 jaqi (‘indians’) and q’ara (‘non-indians’), not least through phenotype but also through
29 people’s dress, language skills, urban or rural location, and even their ability to carry a
30 heavy load. Indigeneity is highly contingent and ‘thoroughly imbricated with gendered,
31 racial, and linguistic identities’, all of which can fluctuate across time and space (p. 4).
32 Chapters 2 and 3 examine how people in Wila Kjarka imagine their historical sub-
33 jectivity. In an intriguing discrepancy with the archival record, no Wila Kjarkan recalls
34 the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 that overthrew hacendado rule. In analysing how such
35 a nationally prominent event can be displaced within collective memory, Canessa argues
36 that memory adapts events in order to explain and justify the present.
37 Chapters 4–7 move away from historical perspectives to address diverse aspects of
38 contemporary community life. Chapter 4 is the book’s most classically anthropological,
39 providing absorbing explanations of life rituals that serve as ‘rungs on the ladder to
40 personhood’ (p. 139). Chapter 5 shows how fantasies of fear play a role in configuring
41 ethnic identities by exploring the mythical figure of the kharisiri, or fat stealer. Chapter
42 6 addresses the ambiguous outcomes of formal schooling for children in Wila Kjarka
43 while Chapter 7 explores the phenomenon of domestic violence.
44 Perhaps the most compelling chapter is the final one, in which Canessa gives an astute
45 cultural analysis of colonial art, beauty pageants, Barbie dolls and political humour. For
46 example, the author contrasts hand-sewn, dark-skinned dolls piled up in Wila Kjarka
47 kitchens awaiting export to America – commodities of consumer-imagined ‘indigenous
48 authenticity’ – with the blonde Barbie dolls carried around by local girls (p. 252). In this
49 example and others, Chapter 8 reveals the ways in which identities and desires continue
Book Reviews
1 to be structured by the colonial legacy and how notions of progress become embodied
2 in images of whiteness. While this chapter contains some of the book’s most intriguing
3 case studies, its rich themes – including the provocative ‘sexuality of citizenship’ – only
4 begin to be unpacked, as though Canessa has run out of time and space to fully explore
5 all the data he has introduced.
6 A reader seeking a conclusion that pulls the whole book together might be disap-
7 pointed by a postscript that is more about slightly sentimental melancholy than a cogent
8 unification of the book’s disparate elements. Canessa simply provides an update on Wila
9 Kjarka today, warning that the ‘new indigeneity’ has the potential to become a hege-
10 monic identity that threatens to ‘take with it the lifeways of people who are jaqi’ (p. 292).
11 Overall Canessa’s long-term commitment to one field site enables readers to gain
12 a profound sense of how indigenous identity plays out in the private lives of Boli-
13 vian highlanders. As the methodological pendulum in anthropology swings in favour of
14 multi-sited research as a powerful way to challenge the local/global dichotomy, Canessa’s
15 commitment to deep context and classic ethnography provides an important counterbal-
16 ance. The book succeeds in privileging grassroots understandings of native identity out
17 of the glare of international movements, without losing sight of how the local and global
18 inform one another. On the other hand, as one might expect from research over more
19 than two decades, the chapters are widely variable in the topics treated and do not add
20 up to a clear-cut argument.
21 However, this book is a compelling read, suitable for those interested in the variable
22 notions of what it means to be indigenous. Canessa makes good on his methodological
23 principle that ‘the deeper one delves into the intimate spaces of human lives, the greater
24 the scale of the issues that are exposed’ (p. 32).
25
26 Katie Orlemanski
27 Rutgers University
28
29
30
31 Backcock, Thomas F. (2012) Utatlán: The Constituted Community of the K’iche’ Maya AQ8
32 of Q’umarkaj, University Press of Colorado (Boulder, CO), 341 pp.
33
34 This volume is the culmination of fieldwork that was carried out in the 1970s at
35 Greater Utatlán, made up of several communities surrounding the ceremonial centre
36 of Q’umarkaj and the famed home of the Popol Wuj. Although he completed his
37 dissertation in 1980, Babcock freely admits that life got in the way of publishing at
38 the time, and I commend him for returning to it three decades later. This temporal
39 distance offers the advantage of being able to review the initial work within the context
40 of later research and to incorporate the wisdom attained since the initial writing of
41 the dissertation. However, it has the disadvantage in some cases of dated references,
42 methods and technology. Nonetheless, the volume is carefully written, including a
43 thorough background to the study, plainly defined geographical, temporal and linguistic
44 terms and excellent detail in the methodology and research questions. The goal of the
45 volume is to lay out the findings from excavations conducted in the residential zone of
46 Greater Utatlán and to define the ‘constituted community’ as understood by the ancient
47 residents.
48 Chapter 1 emphasises that, although the Spanish and other early visitors described
49 only the site centre and not the residential zone, the Maya saw it as a united community.
Book Reviews
1 Babcock provides a detailed synthesis of the social organisation of the site, attempting
2 to integrate the concepts of the civil and urban community. He looks at the processual
3 and diachronic views of the city, as well as the implications of economic specialisa-
4 tion in urban development, to understand regional development. He reviews various
5 models (chiefdom, state, urbanism, trade and community) as frameworks for under-
6 standing archaeological sites, and asks how archaeologists can understand the site emi-
7 cally 400 years after abandonment. Chapter 2 provides the geological background to
8 explain the physical divisions within the site, and then provides linguistic and ethno-
9 historic support for the origins of the K’iche. Chapter 3 covers methodology, which
10 thoroughly relays the process used by the project to clarify the residential zone, and
11 provides feature and artifact typologies. It also discusses the complications of working
12 in Guatemala during an era of increasing civil unrest. Chapter 4 is an overview of the
13 studies conducted in the communities on the surrounding plateaus, demonstrating evi-
14 dence of small settlements dating from the Preclassic to the Postclassic that engaged in
15 small-scale craft specialization, such as obsidian workshops, ceramics and metallurgy.
16 Chapter 5 describes the testing done at the site of Resguardo, a hillside complex that
17 lies just to the east of Q’umarkaj. Excavations have revealed evidence of an elite resi-
18 dential area nestled within terraces, as well as ritual burials, altars, metallurgy practices,
19 ground stone and obsidian artifacts. Chapter 6 describes the excavations conducted on
20 the Resguardo-Pakaman Ridge, which is the plateau closest to the ceremonial centre of
21 Q’umarkaj; Thse studies have focused on several non-elite house-lots, with evidence of
22 burials, cremations, temescals and even a possible game board. Chapter 7 reviews the
23 findings of an unusual hillside mound surrounded by obsidian debitage and projectile
24 points. The mound contained three construction phases with plaster floors, a high num-
25 ber of polychrome ceramics, figurines, censers and altars. Several burials, including a
26 box-like tomb made of plastered pumice stones containing jade, gold bowls, ear spools
27 and pendants, were also recovered. Chapter 8 focuses on the site of Pakaman, a hill-
28 top complex of residential structures, a plaza and a temple, that may have served as a
29 military garrison. The site contained several burials but few stone artifacts or decorated
30 ceramics, which was surprising given its location adjacent to the temple and a possible
31 royal residence. Chapter 9 examines La Communidad, the last area tested within the
32 residential zone of Greater Utatlán. Excavations there revealed that the area was proba-
33 bly not residential but instead included several defensive features, as well as an obsidian
34 workshop. Chapter 10 wrestles with the question of how to define spatial boundaries
35 for Greater Utatlán by looking at artifact density from tested areas, relating that to the
36 amount of human activity that occurred. Analysis of ceramics across the communities
37 showed that occupation zones adjacent to Q’umarkaj had higher levels of occupation
38 than zones further from the site core. Babcock then summarises the residential patterns,
39 burial patterns and radiocarbon dates of each zone, concluding in the final chapter that,
40 although the architectural features within Greater Utatlán are generally of lower status
41 than those at the ceremonial core, the surrounding areas show great variability in terms
42 of occupation periods and levels of habitation, craft specialisation, defensive functions
43 and ritual activities. In other words, it is a material reflection of the great social com-
44 plexity of this ancient settlement, and an insight into the way in which ancient residents
45 must have viewed it.
46
47 Jennifer Mathews
48 Trinity University
49
Book Reviews
1 Milanesio, Natalia (2013) Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular

2 Consumer Culture, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), ix + 307 pp.
3 $55.00 hbk.
4
5 Based on novel historiographical research, Natalia Milanesio’s Workers Go Shopping in
6 Argentina illuminates the transformative experience in Argentina of mass consumption
7 during the Perón years. Although unionisation, minimum wage requirements and work
8 regulations increased the purchasing power of the working classes during the 1950s,
9 Milanesio argues that advertisers, the press and state officials also helped turn work-
10 ers into consumers by imagining and debating their integration into market society in
11 certain ways. According to Milanesio’s fine-grained account, mass-market participa-
12 tion during this period altered both private and public life, challenging gender relations
13 within households as well as class distinctions in the public sphere. But Milanesio’s capa-
14 cious argument goes further: she sees the rise of popular consumer culture as nothing
15 less than cause and consequence of the structural transformations of mid-twentieth cen-
16 tury Argentina. Working-class consumers became modernising agents of social change,
17 helping to shape a new commercial ethos and transform social relations and collective
18 identities, as well as redefining the role of the state as a mediator between business and
19 clients.
20 Peronism has been studied largely from political and institutional perspectives. Its
21 domestically driven economic model, populist policies, caudillista leadership and con-
22 cern with social justice are all well-known features of the movement. With these fea-
23 tures in view, Milanesio goes on to examine the popularisation of consumption brought
24 about by Peronism, exploring working-class practices of shopping, buying, displaying
25 and desiring, and how these practices changed. Drawing on the socioanthropology of
26 consumption, as well as cultural and gender studies, she investigates the historical mean-
27 ings of material culture, the relationship between subjects and goods and the symbolic
28 changes generated by mass consumption.
29 The book consists of six chapters. The first three examine the structural conditions
30 and political decisions that enabled the emergence of the ‘worker-consumer’. In particu-
31 lar, they examine how this new category was socially crafted by industrialists, advertising
32 experts and government officials, and how the dignifying representation of low-income
33 workers shifted the language of advertising, creating a more democratic public sphere.
34 The last three chapters study the impact of these changes on gender and class imaginaries
35 and identities. Chapter 4 reconstructs the anxious response of the upper middle classes
36 to the unwelcome presence of low-income consumers in the urban spaces of consump-
37 tion, especially in grocery stores, shops and the city centres of Buenos Aires and Rosario.
38 Chapter 5 explores how female consumption contested traditional gender expectations
39 about female agency within the context of marriage, breaking the age-old distinction
40 between male provider and female housekeeper. Finally, Chapter 6 recreates the mem-
41 ory of this exceptional period, examining how working-class shoppers today remember
42 and interpret the material bonanza that Peronism brought them.
43 The book has many virtues. It does a good job of connecting the macro-political/
44 economic processes of mid-twentieth century Argentina with the micro changes in
45 identity, visibility and sociability surrounding the emergence of worker-consumer
46 subjects. Milanesio draws on a great variety of sources: advertising campaigns, popular
47 media and magazines, regulatory changes in consumption and oral histories. Moreover,
48 examples are plentiful and used to good effect. Government propaganda celebrating
49 the high remuneration of Argentine workers (p. 33), magazine editorials instructing
Book Reviews
1 low-income shoppers on what to buy (p. 78) and home appliances advertisements
2 targeting young consumer brides (p. 174) are just some of the many examples that
3 help illustrate how state officials, advertising agents and producers helped manufac-
4 ture the identities and practices of worker-consumers. In similarly adroit fashion,
5 Milanesio shows how middle-class fears of inter-class mingling (p. 141) help us
6 re-think consumption as a site of class conflict over the appropriation of commodities,
7 spaces and their meanings. Memorial testimonies given by living worker-consumers
8 (p. 184) show that fresh access to goods, appliances and urban spaces gave work-
9 ers a new dignity and visibility during this period, helping to transmute modern
10 Argentina.
11 Despite the book’s many virtues, the romanticised memory of the Perón years which
12 it reconstructs leaves little room for critical evaluation of the long-term viability of Pero-
13 nism and its populist policies. In a country marked by cycles of illusion and disenchant-
14 ment, and in the aftermath of the structural crisis of 2001, the ‘good old days’ narrative
15 of 1950s market inclusion sharply contrasts with the informal, precarious position of the
16 working poor in Argentina today. By highlighting the dignifying effects of democratising
17 consumption, Milanesio brightens the material and symbolic improvements wrought by
18 Peronism. But the author pays scant attention to the decline of Argentine capitalism,
19 and the deterioration of state institutions during the Perón years. Despite this omission,
20 the book remains a ‘must-read’ for those interested in Argentine history. This is a capti-
21 vating, well-documented book for any researcher interested in material culture, gender
22 studies or Peronism.
23
24 Tomás Undurraga
25 University of Cambridge
26
27
28
29 Hamilton, Carrie (2012) Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and Memory,
30 The University of California Press (Chapel Hill, NC), xiii + 298 pp. £25.75 hbk.
31
32 To a global non-expert audience, Cuban society can be perplexing. On the one hand,
33 Cubans live under the rigour of revolutionary ideals and the harsh effects of the eco-
34 nomic embargo. On the other, stereotypical views of Cuban society include Cuban’s joie
35 de vivre and enjoyment of their bodies. Hamilton’s book Sexual Revolutions in Cuba:
36 Passion, Politics, and Memory tackles one aspect of this apparent contradiction. Her
37 research aims to broaden understanding of the effects of broad political events – in this
38 case the Cuban Revolution of 1959 – in a key aspect of the private sphere: patterns of
39 sexual morals and behaviours. It does so by analysing the first 50 years of the Revolu-
40 tion through a series of oral history interviews in Cuba, also using secondary sources
41 on sexuality and gender and queer theory. As a contribution to the history of the Cuban
42 revolution, the author aims not only to review the main developments in Cuban his-
43 tory of sexuality, but also to interrogate the relationship between history and memory
44 through sexuality.
45 The book starts with an examination of the literature on the history of sexual-
46 ity and sexual relations in pre-revolutionary Cuba. As in the rest of Latin America,
47 pre-revolutionary Cuban society was centred on families, where ideals of femininity and
48 masculinity were shaped by machismo, generating social relations where motherhood
49 was central to women’s identities and heterosexual relations were the expected norm.
Book Reviews
1 These ideas were based on rigid racial and class differences and a cult of virginity,
2 particularly amongst the white middle classes. The 1959 Revolution’s sexual politics
3 rejected these colonial ideals and also the more overt sexual transactions of the US
4 tourist-driven nightlife of Havana. But in practice, Hamilton argues, because the
5 Revolution prioritised class-based ideologies and the elimination of the exploitation
6 of working-class women and the incorporation of women into the labour force, the
7 extent of the changes and the move towards non-discriminatory ideas around sexuality
8 and gender relations were limited. Hamilton agrees that revolutionary politics made an
9 effort to eradicate prostitution and promote legal marriages and implemented policies
10 to increase access to contraception and abortion while promoting sexual and reproduc-
11 tive health, particularly to protect motherhood. However, although the revolutionary
12 struggle implied transformations in all areas of life, including gender and sexuality,
13 early revolutionary politics did not address sexual power relations and heterosexual
14 male privilege.
15 Hamilton’s book also analyses Cuban ideas of love and passion as linked to the
16 political process of the Revolution. She shows that there is an emotional element in
17 the political commitment of the ‘new man’, where the narrative of the Revolution is
18 framed as a love story, an emotional event that implies a total commitment based on
19 deep passion for the ideals of the Revolution. In particular, and related to Cuban sex-
20 ual practices and patters, Hamilton’s interviewees reflect on the changes in heterosex-
21 ual relationships, specifically on the changing patterns of female heterosexual desires
22 and relations, showing how women exercise agency in their sexuality and relation-
23 ships. In the analysis of homosexuality and homophobia as narrated by the intervie-
24 wees, Hamilton argues that sexual identities amongst homosexual Cuban men must be
25 understood in relation not only to local traditions and material conditions, but also to
26 global influences strengthened by migration processes. She argues that her findings on
27 the internal migrations of men and the differences in rural and urban sexual practices
28 challenge ideas of Cuban exceptionalism regarding sexuality and migration. Also, the
29 author shows how homophobia is and was expressed in Cuba, for example through
30 the confinement of homosexual men in labour camps at the beginning of the revolu-
31 tion and through discrimination against lesbian women who express masculine gender
32 traits.
33 In conclusion, Hamilton stresses that changes in how sexuality is expressed and
34 understood in Cuba are the result less of an official policy driven by the Revolu-
35 tion than of social changes in general after the Revolution. Although revolutionary
36 politics challenged historic pre-revolutionary inequalities based on class, race and
37 gender, and although there have been great advances in tackling exclusion and dis-
38 crimination, traditional hierarchies and prejudices have been resilient. She argues that
39 those policies have been weak because they understand sexuality as separated from
40 other social categories and have failed to address issues of privilege, oppression and
41 discrimination. By analysing the effects of the housing shortage in the sexuality of
42 Cubans in Havana, Hamilton puts sexuality and family relations into the socioeco-
43 nomic context of contemporary Cuba, showing that sexual practices are products not
44 only of political and social changes, but also of the places and spaces where they are
45 manifested.
46
47 Gabriela A. Minte
48 University of London
49
Book Reviews
1 Beigel, Fernanda (ed) (2013) The Politics of Academic Autonomy in Latin America,
2 Ashgate (Farnham), xix + 270 pp. £65.00 hbk.
3
4 The tradition of regional intellectualism and the great intensity of its intellectual and
5 political debate can be considered a crucial characteristic of Latin American history.
6 This was a characteristic which reached its culmination in the period after the 1940s,
7 when Latin American intellectuals started to analyse the insertion of the region into the
8 global political economy.
9 In the book under review here, these developments in academic thinking are pre-
10 sented and analysed in an institutional context. The thirteen chapters of the book are
11 the result of a research project on ‘Academic Dependency in Latin America’ directed
12 by Fernanda Beigel, also the editor of the book. The difference between the name of
13 the project and the book which was its result suggests that some rethinking has taken
14 place between the project’s submission and the book’s publication. The central con-
15 cern of the book is the misconception of those who have assumed that the ‘peripheral’
16 scientific community of Latin America has been devoid of autonomy in the context of
17 powerful exogenous forces. It aims to show that, despite the realities of ‘economic impe-
18
rialism’, Latin American academic and scientific reality has consistently shown its own
19
autonomous development (p. 17).
20
Indeed, Latin America had an animated and strongly institutionalised intellectual
21
infrastructure in the twentieth century. This vitality was shown above all in the larger
22
southern countries, most notably Chile, Argentina and Brazil, and it became especially
23
visible after the 1940s when, in the wake of World War II, academic and political
24
think-tanks emerged everywhere. The best known and most famous of these institu-
25
tions was the Latin American Economic Commission (ECLAC or CEPAL, depending on
26
the language), which was established by the United Nations in 1948. Its creation marked
27
a milestone in Latin American knowledge development.
28
Chile’s place as a ‘peripheral centre’ in the 1950s and 1960s received a boost in 1967
29
with the foundation of FLACSO, also using UNESCO funds, as a regional initiative
30
for the creation of Latin American knowledge centres. This period also witnessed the
31
32 creation of several national scientific councils in other countries, such as in Brazil, Mex-
33 ico and Argentina. A year after the creation of FLACSO, the Latin American Social
34 Science Council, CLACSO was founded as an ‘autonomous’ voice of Latin American
35 academia. This episode also demonstrates the fierce internal competition between the
36 different Latin American academic centres; they tried to use and manipulate the activities
37 of an international actor like UNESCO to improve their own position.
38 In the Cold War context of the 1950s and 1960s, the overwhelming academic power
39 of the United States became apparent. Helped by financial aid from schemes like the
40 Fulbright programme, US funds became a primary source of funding for Latin Amer-
41 ican postgraduate students. Eventually this led, as Juan José Navarro describes, to a
42 postgraduate brain-drain towards the United States, which has not yet ended. The first
43 concrete response to this situation came from CLACSO, which, from the late 1960s,
44 started to work on Latin American graduate programmes in the social sciences.
45 In an interesting chapter, Gonzalo Navarro Sanz demonstrates that it would be wrong
46 to see these developments as exclusively academic issues. Examining the Society of Jesus,
47 he shows how the Jesuits clearly saw a role for themselves in the creation of a class of
48 Latin American intellectuals as early as the 1950s. The Bellarmino Center in Chile, and
49 later the ILADES centre, may have been the most visible expressions of this ambition.
Book Reviews
1 Where the 1950s and 1960s could be seen as the creative phase of Latin American
2 social sciences, the 1970s and 1980s were a period of destruction and repression. The
3 last two chapters of the book document the results, for the social sciences, of the military
4 coups in Chile and Argentina. Critical academics were persecuted or exiled and academic
5 independence came to an end, although some more or less autonomous academic spaces,
6 such as FLACSO’s offices, remained. The book ends here. This last period, of democratic
7 academic resurrection, remains outside its scope.
8 The topic and perspective of this book are certainly very interesting. Some of the
9 chapters also open up new fields which invite future research. However, in general,
10 this book seems to have been somewhat prematurely published. Some of the contri-
11 butions need more work and others are repetitive or overly descriptive. The focus is
12 one-sidedly on Chile and Argentina, and most chapters lack a comparative view. Most
13 importantly, coherence is lacking. The lack of direction already noted in the introduc-
14 tion is reproduced in the rest of the book. I would have preferred an extension of this
15 very ambitious research programme and would look forward to a following book that
16 analyses in depth the paradoxical contrast between autonomy and dependence in Latin
17 American academia.
18
19 Michiel Baud
20 CEDLA
21
22
23 Paton, Diana and Forde, Maarit (eds) (2012) Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of
24 Caribbean Religion and Healing, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), xii + 354 pp.
25 £75.00 hbk, £18.99 pbk.
26
27 Obeah and Other Powers is a history of the politics of faith and healing practices of
28 the Caribbean islands. Edited by Paton and Forde, it also includes studies by a number
29 of scholars in the fields of anthropology, history and ethnography, amongst others. It is
30 divided into three sections comprising a total of eleven chapters, an introduction and an
31 afterword.
32 The book frames Caribbean faith and healing practices as multiple, fluid, and above
33 all, integral to the contemporary realities of its practitioners. Refreshingly, therefore, it is
34 a departure from studies on Black diasporic faiths in the Americas (such as that by René
35 Bourgeois, mentioned in the book) which focus on the African origins of these belief
36 systems. This study undermines this paradigm, asserting, as Mintz and Price have done,
37 that ‘what crossed the Atlantic [during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade] were cognitive
38 orientations or underlying logics that enabled enslaved people to create new institu-
39 tions’, thereby fostering a notion of ‘Africanisms’ as products of New World history (pp.
40 18–19). Related to this is exploration of this multiplicity of faith practices from diverse
41 influences, with island-specific manifestations. For example, the book mentions both
42 Indian Caribbean religious practices on particular islands and East Indian obeah practi-
43 tioners. Similarly, where the inclusion of European religious practices in the Caribbean
44 tended to look at Christianity as singular in previous scholarly research, Obeah and
45 Other Powers explores Christian denominations as separate influential entities. This is
46 particularly true of Richman’s chapter on Vodou in the twentieth century, where Protes-
47 tantism and Catholicism are seen as vying with each other for Haitian followers. Further,
48 description of obeah rites posits that some ‘derived not from African but from medieval
49 European traditions and religious heresies’ (p. 257).
Book Reviews
1 An interesting chapter for researchers is ‘The Trials of Inspector Thomas: Policing

2 and Ethnography in Jamaica’. It discusses colonial Jamaican attitudes to these faith
3 practices and the influence of these attitudes on modern understanding of them. In addi-
4 tion to addressing policing obeah practice in the nineteenth century, itself revelatory of
5 the perceived threat of spiritual workers to hegemony, the chapter shows the connection
6 between documentation of obeah practice through the collation of paraphernalia by
7 some of those who sought to control it, and the consequential ethnographic material
8 that resulted from this. The Jamaica International Exhibition of 1891 to which Thomas
9 contributed material from obeah reflected, like other Great Exhibitions, ‘imperialism
10 and the production of colonised peoples for the consumption of metropolitan audiences’
11 (p. 174).
12 The book makes a connection between migration and obeah. This is referenced in
13 terms of movement within the islands and documentation of obeah in contemporary
14 Caribbean print culture). Not only is this illustrated in Thomas’ documentation of
15 Jamaican spiritual practices through his production of Something About Obeah, but
16 also articles written on obeah prosecutions in the Kingston Gleaner. The reader learns
17 that, however, print media has not been restricted to negative reports on obeah. Putnam
18 discusses the importance of spiritual practice in developing cross-border communica-
19 tion. He writes that ‘Obeah served as a lingua franca that allowed communication across
20 boundaries. People of disparate origin easily understood each other’s ideas about super-
21 natural power.’ (p. 262). This focus on the contribution of obeah to connections between
22 Caribbean nations (increasingly via the media) is one seldom encountered in research.
23 Perhaps the most engaging section of the book for the lay reader is Romberg’s chapter,
24 which is similarly connected to modernity. Here the brujo is likened to a modern-day
25 spiritual entrepreneur, who seeks to ensure the material welfare of his clients. His and
26 their material prosperity are representations of their spiritual blessings. Romberg argues
27 that this tendency in Puerto Rican brujería is a form of ritual piracy: on the one hand
28 it challenges ‘the exclusivity of hegemonic symbols’ and on the other it recognises their
29 power (p. 289). The reader learns that this is not new to brujería because it incorporated,
30 at a much earlier period of its history in Puerto Rican communities, the spirituality and
31 gestures of popular Spanish Catholicism, thereby helping to cement its current survival.
32 This is a fitting final chapter to a book that sets out to locate Caribbean spirituality in
33 modernity.
34 Obeah and Other Powers accomplishes its objectives. In looking at the Atlantic ‘as
35 a space of multi-directional movement and influences’, however, it is limited by the
36 Caribbean focus of the study (p. 22). A follow-up text could focus on discussion of the
37 religious practices of communities of the Americas settled in Africa. The text is suitable
38 for scholars and non-specialists with an interest in the subject.
39
40 Florence Marfo
41 Independent Scholar
42
43
44
45 Sheller, Mimi Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom, Duke
46 University Press (Durham, NC and London), xi + 346 pp. £17.99 pbk.
47
48 Mimi Sheller’s wide-ranging and intellectually exciting study of ideals and experiences of
49 personal and communal freedom among Caribbean citizens centres on what she terms
Book Reviews
1 ‘erotic agency’. Because, in her view, ‘bodies, sexualities, and sexual orientations remain
2 the most contested yet crucial terrains for the elaboration of freedom’, she explores the
3 deployment of the body in the post-slavery Caribbean, particularly Jamaica and Haiti,
4 in terms of its ‘sexual and erotic potential in a context of constrained freedom, social
5 inequality, and state regulation’ (p. 9). In so doing, Sheller employs sources ranging
6 from nineteenth-century French imperial reports to the lyrics of contemporary dancehall
7 artists, and figures both the vodun spirit Ogou Feray and the Jamaican artist Ebony Pat-
8 terson as ‘represent[ative] of contradictory impulses toward both liberation and oppres-
9 sion’ (p. 151).
10 Citizenship from Below consists of nine roughly chronologically organised chapters,
11 examining ideals and practices of gendered and embodied freedom in the Anglophone
12 and Francophone Caribbean over the past two centuries. Chapter 1, ‘History from the
13 Bottom(s) Up’, locates Sheller’s work in historiographical and cultural terms and elabo-
14 rates her concept of ‘erotic agency’ as a tool to better understand citizenship as produced
15 by and reflected in ‘embodied performance and spatial relations’ (p. 21), which offer
16 ‘alternative ways to think about the deep-seated relation between the self, the social, and
17 the sacred’ (p. 47). ‘Quasheba, Mother, Queen’ and ‘Her Majesty’s Sable Subjects’ focus
18 on post-emancipation Jamaica and analyse the ways in which African Jamaican women
19 and men inserted themselves into public culture and public space, the former primarily
20 through discourses of motherhood and religiosity, the latter by positioning themselves
21 as Christian citizens and heads of households. This chapter is particularly insightful,
22 depicting the ways in which newly emancipated African Jamaican men sought to gain
23 power and respect from the white elite by differentiating themselves not only from black
24 women but from subaltern males, such as Muslims, Hindus and indentured migrants.
25 Sheller argues that the virulent homophobia which continues to trouble Jamaica ‘has
26 its roots in these nineteenth-century formations of black Christian masculinity and its
27 association with heteronormative national citizenship’ (p. 97). The Jamaican section
28 of the book concludes with ‘Lost Glimpses of 1865’, centring on a recently rediscov-
29 ered album of photographs from the period of the Morant Bay uprising, which Sheller
30 employs to tease out provocative ideas which complicate the concepts of race, colour
31 and nation that played out in what popular and scholarly opinion has traditionally and
32 over-simplistically viewed as a black rebellion against white imperial rule.
33 The next section examines ‘performances of citizenship’ (p. 12) in Haiti. ‘Sword-
34 Bearing Citizens’ attributes the intensely masculinist discourse of Haitian citizenship
35 to local traditions of participation in slave rebellion, the military and Freemasonry,
36 while devaluing women’s roles in society and economy. ‘You Signed My Name, but
37 Not My Feet’ argues that, despite the power of this ‘virile model of citizenship’ (p. 165),
38 Haitian women could and did participate in ‘popular practices of embodied resistance’
39 (p. 13), notably via their extensive involvement in local networks of commerce, credit
40 and cultivation. Like the preceding two chapters, these two examine the possibilities
41 and limitations of gendered agency, providing an excellent comparative case study of
42 Caribbean men’s and women’s experiences of citizenship in a post-slave society.
43 The book’s final section adopts a more explicitly pan-Caribbean perspective, inter-
44 rogating sources beyond the historical and textual. ‘Arboreal Landscapes of Resistance’
45 adopts an environmental perspective on freedom and citizenship, examining physical
46 landscapes, particularly trees, as they served as loci of contestation in the nineteenth-
47 and twentieth-century Caribbean. ‘Returning the Tourist Gaze’ responds to Caribbean
48 travel writings of the late nineteenth century, drawing upon literary theories of post-
49 coloniality to interrogate gendered performances by visitors to and inhabitants of the
Book Reviews
1 Caribbean. Finally, ‘Erotic Agency and a Queer Caribbean Freedom’ argues that the
2 concept of erotic agency can be a source of resistance to sexual violence, particularly
3 that aimed at women and LGBT people in the modern Caribbean.
4 This is an ambitious book, demanding much of its readers by moving over several
5 centuries, multiple locations, disparate academic genres (from historical geography to
6 discourse analysis to visual culture) and an infinite variety of sources, as reflected in the
7 thirty-page-plus bibliography. Sheller has engaged with aspects of this project for nearly
8 25 years, and there are moments when the monograph reads more like a series of journal
9 articles than a holistically conceived study. This caveat aside, this is a provocative and
10 learned book, mandatory reading for anyone interested in the historical, social, political,
11 or gendered history of the Caribbean over the past two centuries, and readers are unlikely
12 to finish it without having learnt a great deal that is novel, interesting and important.
13
14 Natalie Zacek
15 University of Manchester
16
17
18
19 Rogers, Dennis, Beall, Jo and Kanbar, Ravi (eds.) (2012) Latin American Urban Devel-
20 opment into the 21st Century: Towards a Renewed Perspective on the City, Palgrave
21 Macmillan (Basingstoke), xix + 270 pp. £65.00 hbk.
22
23 The unprecedented growth that characterised cities and towns in Latin America from
24 the 1920s, fuelled by industrialisation, improvements in public health, rapid rural (and
25 urban) population growth and internal migration, promoted negative ideas about urban
26 settlements that have since intensified. During the last two decades of the twentieth cen-
27 tury, the Latin American city was deconstructed by national priorities quite different
28 from the urban-industrial strategies that were developed using high tariff barriers in the
29 1920s and 1930s.
30 Reformed national priorities, largely imposed by the United States via the World
31 Bank in the 1980s, emphasise neoliberalism – the shrinking of the role of the state, the
32 unleashing of the forces of economic globalisation and the abandonment of protectionist
33 Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI), as state development policies were turned
34 inside out. The balance between the informal and formal sectors of the economy shifted
35 dramatically towards petty self-employment, as the withdrawal of ISI protection left
36 cities confronting de-industrialised futures.
37 The emphasis in housing has shifted towards renting, away from squatter upgrad-
38 ing – commonplace in the 1960s and 1970s, but which neither the squatters (who once
39 paid for titles and improved fabric) nor the state (which once provided the services) can
40 now afford. Moreover, during the past twenty years, drug violence among urban gangs
41 has been countered by armed repression by the state; walled suburbs are juxtaposed with
42 excluded slums; marginality has become synonymous with insecurity.
43 Yet, for all its social and spatial fragmentation, the Latin American city is still com-
44 posed of connected, even interactive, social, political and economic elements, and one
45 of the main platforms of this book is to argue that the city must be looked at not piece-
46 meal but as a whole. The case for focusing on cities as wholes is made by Jirón in her
47 contribution on Santiago de Chile, in which she highlights the mobility practices of its
48 urban inhabitants, and argues that movement within cities is a fundamental vector in
49 measuring the quality of life.
Book Reviews
1 Similarly, Goytia, Pasquini and Sanguinetti (for Buenos Aires) and Lora and Powell
2 (for Latin America) propose more holistic approaches to the measurement of the good
3 life in urban contexts, treating the city as common property. As the contribution of
4 Alaiga-Linares on street market regulation in Santiago reveals, such action, not surpris-
5 ingly, generates both winners and losers.
6 Davis’s chapter on urban violence and security in Latin America shows how urban
7 politics are fundamental to dealing with such trade-offs, while that of Gutiérrez et al., on
8 three Colombian cites, reveals how urban politics revolve around juxtaposing utopian
9 and dystopian elements that are quite different from patron–client types of politicking.
10 Earl’s study of illegal occupations by informal housing movements in São Paulo treats
11 social groups who justify their actions in terms of human rights enshrined in the Brazilian
12 constitution.
13 The politics of city life are explored at a more prosaic level by Risr, who describes
14 how indigenous and class-based traditions of political organisation in Bolivia have
15 been re-articulated into a residence-based notion of citizenship. She provides a detailed
16 description of the processes of local territorialisation through which poor urban
17 dwellers have sought to attain their civil rights, and argues that this is more important
18 than focusing on traditional forms of identity politics.
19 All the contributions highlight that, even in the most fractured cities, disparate
20 locales, networks and processes are related to each other. This theme of connectiv-
21 ity is particularly explicit in Rogers’s contribution, which shows that socio-spatial
22 segregation in São Paulo and Buenos Aires is fundamentally linked to its apparent
23 antithesis – participatory democracy. In a similar vein, Navarro’s chapter explores the
24 integration between the illegal drugs market and money-laundering investment in real
25 estate in Bolivian cities.
26 Looking to the future, the editors argue that the first step towards an alternative
27 research ethos is to place the city in and of itself at the centre of debates to take into
28 account of both utopian and dystopian perspectives. They also stress that it is important
29 to introduce more syncretic methodological repertoires, linking neighbourhoods, social
30 networks and economic sectors, by adopting cross-disciplinary perspectives.
31 Beyond these generalities, cities, they argue, need to be explored as systems of order
32 and regulation, thus reviving an urban political economy approach popular in the 1970s.
33 Another important issue they identify is to confront what it means to live in cities, and
34 in particular to address the circulatory movements that are inherent in urban dwelling
35 in Latin America. Finally the editors call for a renewal of thinking about the intersection
36 between geography and politics in Latin American cities – a theme dear to this reviewer’s
37 heart.
38
39 Colin Clarke
40 University of Oxford
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
QUERIES TO BE ANSWERED BY AUTHOR
Queries from the Copyeditor:
AQ1. Please provide the city name of publisher for Reference Broda, 1991.
AQ2. Please check the capitalization of other language title in the References.
AQ3. Tibón, 1961 has not been cited in the text. Please indicate where it should be
cited; or delete from the Reference List.
AQ4. Please check word use - I’m not sure ‘diatribe’ is correct.
AQ5. Please check the author forename.
AQ6. Please provide the complete page number with prelims, if any.
AQ7. Should this be ‘unlikely’?
AQ8. Please provide the price, edition reviewed (‘hbk’ for hardback and ‘pbk’ for
paperback). Also confirm if the inserted location name is fine.

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Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 0, No. 0, pp. 0–0, 2014

1 Komisaruk’s work broadly challenges assumptions about the significance of political

1 palpable; more outspoken condemnation of the period from commentators would

1 Milanesio, Natalia (2013) Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular

1 An interesting chapter for researchers is ‘The Trials of Inspector Thomas: Policing

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