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Book Reviews

Longue Durée

Portobelo y el San Lorenzo del Chagres: Perspectivas imperiales, siglos XVI–XIX.


By alfredo castillero calvo. 2 vols. Panama City: Editorial Novo Art, 2016.
Photographs. Plates. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. 668 pp. Cloth.

Historians generally understand that during the colonial period Panama served as the
principal crossroads for trade, both legal and illegal, between the Spanish Atlantic world
and the Pacific coast of South America. After 1597, Portobelo was Spain’s terminus on
the Caribbean side of the commercial system, supplied until 1717 by the Galeones
emanating from Seville and after 1717 from Cádiz. It connected overland to Panama City
on the Pacific Ocean. Over the years, massive amounts of Peruvian silver crossed the
isthmus to finance the fairs celebrated in Portobelo or for remission directly to the royal
treasury in Spain. However, the historiography on this vital Panamanian seaport has been
scant, despite its importance to the Spanish empire and world economic system. Alfredo
Castillero Calvo’s admirable, exhaustive two-volume work fills the void.
Castillero Calvo is the ideal person for the task. Dean of Panamanian historians, he
ranks among the best in Spanish America. Over the years, he has done enormous service
by elucidating the Panamanian place in the Spanish imperial system and in the world
economy. And locally, through addressing multiple aspects of Panama’s past, he has done
much to define the country’s national identity. The present work greatly advances our
understanding of both.
Portobelo y el San Lorenzo del Chagres is divided into two volumes of nine chapters
each. The first volume explains why Portobelo, with its superior harbor, superseded the
original Caribbean terminus at Nombre de Dios in 1597. The early history of Portobelo
follows, including a contemporary description of the city and its natural surroundings in
1606–7. Next Castillero Calvo analyzes Portobelo’s internal enemies, both maroon
communities and the Cuna Indians. The remaining four chapters address the formal
defenses, their evolution, the Bourbon military reforms, and the installment and main-
tenance of complex, costly fixed fortifications. The last include both the emplacements at
Portobelo and its nearby satellite, San Lorenzo, at the mouth of the strategic Chagres
River, the principal transportation water route well into the isthmus. Apart from
defending the harbor, Portobelo’s fortifications shielded the road to Panama City.

Hispanic American Historical Review 98:4


Ó 2018 by Duke University Press
708 HAHR / November

Volume 2 addresses military costs and finance, war, the commercial fairs, trans-
isthmian transport, and urban life and, finally, provides a fascinating glimpse into justice
actually at work. Given that Portobelo was a primary target for foreign invaders, the
section on war spans three chapters, the last covering episodes from the independence
period. Castillero Calvo exhibits a keen eye for the built environment. Surprisingly
detailed is his treatment of Portobelo’s architecture, encompassing both domestic and
governmental structures.
This massive study adds much depth to our understanding about the many facets
of Portobelo’s experience. While its contributions are too numerous to recount indi-
vidually, several perspectives are of special interest. Regarding the fairs, Castillero Calvo
calls our attention to an almost monotonous continuity. Except for the move to a dif-
ferent terminus in 1597, their principal features changed very little over two centuries.
The prescribed route and timing of the Galeones stayed essentially the same, as did the
regulations and principal levies. And while the outgoing merchandise evolved from olive
oil, wines, and flour to include more textiles, the returning commodity remained prin-
cipally precious metals. Visible changes came after 1664 with fewer fairs and smaller
convoys, betraying the decline of the system. Very little original thinking appeared
anywhere except at the very beginning. Although the Galeones were not officially
abolished until 1754, the last fair was held in 1731.
Castillero Calvo explains much about the role of the local population in the trans-
isthmian commerce, not only as renters and suppliers for the fairs but especially in local
transportation, whether through services with mule trains or the colorful bongos and
chatas employed on the river. These same services worked for the shadowy but pervasive
contraband trade. Surprising is the impressive number of local businessmen who were
prominent participants in the commerce that went into the fairs and who emerged as a
highly visible elite in Panamanian society. Once the fairs disappeared, Portobelo largely
depended on defense expenditures for outside income.
Castillero Calvo shows that everyday life was hard, even by Old Regime standards.
Unhealthy living conditions, aggravated by dietary deficiencies and, especially, disease,
kept all but the acclimated and the soldiery away except during fair time, when the place
came alive. But after 1637, fairs occurred only every 5.7 years and then were limited to
merely 15 to 40 days to avert the lurking curse of yellow fever. The small military
garrison, supported by situados from Peru, and smugglers were usually the only steady
sources of income. The elites lived in healthier, richer, and safer Panama City.
Finally, Castillero Calvo recounts the little-known Panamanian rebuff of Vice
Admiral Edward Vernon and his large seaborne force in 1742, three years after he had
successfully invaded and sacked Portobelo. This time the defenders were ready. Pana-
manians rallied in impressive numbers to defend strategic points along the Chagres and
to block the overland route to the Pacific. Although the victory lacked the bloodshed and
drama of Cartagena de Indias’ historic triumph over British forces a year earlier—not a
shot was fired—Portobelo’s highly visible deterrent led Vernon, after holding the port
for 17 days, to abandon his plan to cut a path to the South Seas and Peru.
Book Reviews / Longue Durée 709

Throughout, Castillero Calvo places his material in an enlightening, larger Spanish


American context. Both volumes are luxuriously bedecked with plates and maps. While
the bibliographic support is impressive, most of the information derived from original
research, largely in the Archivo General de Indias and other Spanish repositories.
Unfortunately, the ravages of the tropical climate long ago destroyed the local Pana-
manian archives, but the Archivo General de la Nación in Bogotá partially compensated
for the loss. Castillero Calvo should be congratulated for his substantial contribution.

allan j. kuethe, Texas Tech University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160369

Visual Culture ofthe Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives.


Edited by andrew finegold and ellen hoobler. Afterword by
esther pasztory. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. Photographs.
Plates. Maps. Illustrations. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index.
xiv, 295 pp. Cloth, $39.95.

It is difficult to imagine that an art history of ancient America was nascent in the middle
of the last century. Visual Culture ofthe Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives, edited
by Andrew Finegold and Ellen Hoobler, celebrates and honors, upon her retirement, the
teaching, collaboration, and scholarship of Esther Pasztory, professor emerita of art
history at Columbia University and one of the founding scholars of pre-Columbian art
history in the United States. The excellent essays collected here were sparked by Pasztory
in various ways. Contributors are colleagues and former students from the United States,
Latin America, and Europe at all career stages, trained in archaeology, anthropology, and
art history and coming from academia, independent research, and natural history and
art museums. Individually, the chapters contribute to the study of ancient American art
and exemplify the field’s breadth and transformation. Collectively, the essays project the
florescence of pre-Columbian art history, 50 years in.
The volume opens with Cecelia F. Klein’s “Esther and Columbia in 1966: The Early
Years of Pre-Columbian Art History in US Academe.” Klein, emerita professor of art
history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Pasztory’s doctoral colleague at
Columbia, examines the field encountered and engaged by these two pioneering scholars,
providing a scaffolding for the 14 following chapters. This fascinating essay would make
excellent reading in graduate and undergraduate methodology courses. The integration
of historiography seems particularly apt and refreshing in a Festschrift; Pasztory’s
pendant afterword reflects her dynamic thinking for future directions in the field.
With the three titular phrases “visual culture,” “ancient Americas,” and “contem-
porary perspectives,” the editors nimbly orient their project. Visual culture’s ample
purview treats traditional art historical types—architecture, sculpture, and painting—
but embraces utilitarian objects, metalwork, manuscripts, and representations of the
past, fitting for a discipline with roots in anthropology and archaeology. The same
amplitude is suggested with the book’s geographic scope. Though Pasztory is most
710 HAHR / November

readily associated with the arts of central Mexico—particularly Teotihuacan and Aztec
sites—she taught and encouraged research throughout Mesoamerica, the Andes, and
beyond, writing texts to fill gaps, including Pre-Columbian Art (1998), which reflects the
breadth of ancient America covered in this volume.
Geography orders the chapters, but a range of approaches representing contem-
porary perspectives creates cross-references throughout the volume. For example, the
Andes are the departure point for Gary Urton’s “Aesthetics of a Line, Entangled in a
Network: A Tribute to Esther Pasztory’s Vision of Andean Art,” Georgia de Havenon’s
“Humboldt and the Inca Ruin of Cañar,” and Joanne Pillsbury’s “From a Republic of
Letters to an Empire of Images: Archaeological Illustration and the Andes, 1850–1890.”
These authors examine meanings of ancient cultural production from this region at
different points in time and with different orientations. Urton takes the ubiquitous and
seemingly simple component, the line, and draws compelling connections between a
range of cultural objects and spaces. De Havenon’s and Pillsbury’s interdisciplinary
studies situate ancient art within the history of natural science, archaeology, and rep-
resentation, suggesting how artists, archaeologists, and explorers filtered the past.
Two general categories emerge in the volume: a broadly embedded study of objects
in history and the afterlife of objects—their representation, dissemination, and display.
In the historical studies, whether starting with manuscripts (Susan Milbrath’s “Seasonal
Images in the Ancient Art of Central Mexico,” Janice Lynn Robertson’s “Decolonizing
Aztec Picture-Writing,” Lois Martin’s “The Axochiatl Pattern: Aztec Science, Legiti-
macy, and Cross-Dressing”), metalwork (Timothy B. King’s “The Goldsmith Emerges:
Aztec Gold Ornaments in the Provinces”), ceramics (Cynthia Conides’s “Figures in
Action: Contextualizing the Butterfly Personage at Teotihuacan, Mexico”), textiles
(Urton’s essay), functional objects (Andrew Finegold’s “Atlatls and the Metaphysics of
Violence in Central Mexico”), or the built environment ( Jeff Karl Kowalski’s “Myth,
Ritual, History, and the Built Environment: Maya Radial Temples and Ballcourts from
the Preclassic to Postclassic Periods”), the authors employ art historical and anthropo-
logical tools to answer questions about beliefs, use, and practices. Aesthetic organiza-
tional principles, iconography, symbols, and style are combined with natural phenomena
to explore meanings of cultural objects over time.
Picking up the afterlife of objects, Leonardo López Luján’s biography of monu-
ments in “Life after Death in Teotihuacan: The Moon Plaza’s Monoliths in Colonial and
Modern Mexico” and Ellen Hoobler’s “An ‘Artistic Discovery’ of Antiquity: Alfonso
Caso, the Archaeologist as Curator at the New York World’s Fair and MoMA’s Twenty
Centuries of Mexican Art, 1939–1940” argue for meaning and understanding within
national and international display. These essays, along with Kathleen Berrin’s chapter on
the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco exhibition Teotihuacan: City ofthe Gods, indicate
the political stakes in negotiations over display throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Over half the volume’s contributors work in or with museums; their essays
underscore the impact of curatorial work in bringing to the wider public the visual thrall
and intellectual arguments of ancient art. In a related chapter, Jennifer von Schwerin and
Franziska Fecher offer an art historical vision for Honduras beyond Copán, highlighting
Book Reviews / Longue Durée 711

the role of monuments and unexpected smaller objects in national identity while making
clear that more foundational work awaits understudied regions of ancient America.
As is nearly always the case with art history and visual culture books, one wishes
for more color reproductions of the works discussed. However, ample black-and-
white images supplement the 24 color plates, and introductory maps plot the covered
terrain.
This volume will be of great interest to scholars, students, and the general public. It
is a good read. Both content and the methodological and historiographic threads that run
throughout the essays make them ideal for a range of graduate and undergraduate
courses, from museum studies to ancient and modern Latin American art and method-
ology. Visual Culture ofthe Ancient Americas presents a testament to the expansive thought
and generous spirit of this respected colleague and mentor; clearly, Pasztory’s ideas have
prompted scholars to think broadly and have proven important touchstones throughout
her five decades in the field.

linda williams, University of Puget Sound


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160380

Dancing Jacobins: A Venezuelan Genealogy of Latin American Populism.


By rafael sánchez. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Photographs.
Map. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ix, 393 pp. Paper, $35.00.

The growing body of literature about populism tends to approach the concept as an
ideology, discourse, movement, political logic, or communicative style. Latin America
has experienced different waves and types of populist leaders from the nineteenth to the
twenty-first century who, despite their differences, share a significant feature: their
charismatic messianic style. The figure of the populist redeemer is one of the key topics
analyzed by Rafael Sánchez in Dancing Jacobins.
Very few, if any, works develop a genealogy of populism in Latin America, especially
from the perspective of monuments and their meaning, a topic mainly addressed by
sociocultural studies seeking to make sense of phenomena that interconnect memory,
power, and change. In this book Sánchez provocatively traces the role played by mon-
uments in the rise of populism. Moreover, by linking monuments with the imaginary of
the “dancing Jacobins,” Sánchez offers a different approach to Venezuela’s Rousseau-
esque historiographical tradition dedicated to patriotically building the nation and
providing human redemption. Sánchez’s book combines sociological, intellectual his-
tory, and anthropological approaches to examine the roots of populism, using Venezuela
and its “dancing Jacobins”—Simón Bolı́var and his successors, mainly Antonio Guzmán
Blanco and Hugo Chávez—as case studies.
Sánchez views the postcolonial era in Venezuela as a moment when the reality of
people and nation has been embodied, reified, and normalized in multiple monuments
(statues, paintings, quotes, texts) of Bolı́var. Sánchez explains that from Guzmán Blanco
to Chávez, the cult of Bolı́var has been a compulsory, naturalized religion even for those
712 HAHR / November

who criticize it. This cult reached a key milestone during chavismo when the country was
renamed the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (p. 3).
The book’s main argument about the “populist art of government” carefully jux-
taposes this imaginary of Bolı́var as an enthusiastic and “agitated” dancer of his time with
the “monumental governmentality” through which Venezuela became a nation (p. 4). To
explain how monuments in Latin America work as tools of power, identity, and legiti-
macy, Sánchez deploys the concept of governmentality, used by Michel Foucault and
some of his followers to study phenomena beyond formal institutions of government,
such as everyday artifacts around which governments expect citizens to live and organize
their lives as a condition of their citizenship. Sánchez’s idea of monumental govern-
mentality has two components. He demonstrates how political representatives “monu-
mentalize” to lead, govern, and legitimate themselves, thus becoming the universal
incarnation of the general will. However, he also suggests that monuments are not
enough; they need to be accompanied by what Sánchez calls “dancing,” a more complex,
intricate concept that involves how political leaders have had to deal with hybridity in
postcolonial Latin America. To command “unstable, highly mobilized constituencies”
composed of multiple singularities, according to Sánchez, leaders must mimetize with
their constituents (p. 5). The concept of dancing captures the imaginaries, fantasies,
legends, myths, and even “unexpected outbursts” through which postcolonial popula-
tions, despite their heterogeneity, could achieve a sense of common identity; it also
embodies the tools whereby representatives have managed to fit in or identify with the
people (p. 7).
Ultimately, Sánchez attempts to demystify the Venezuelan populist art of govern-
ment as a hybrid histrionics through which “bizarre antics” mixed with “pompous
solemnity” are used to govern, control, and gain the love of the masses (p. 8). This is a mix
that evokes hegemonic aims of winning hearts and minds, of gaining intellectual and
moral leadership. Sánchez’s work presents this dualism through two additional ima-
ginaries that he calls the “Fragile Collection” (in which Bolı́var embodies ideals of
freedom) and “Bolı́var Superstar” (in which Bolı́var typifies equality). A clash between
these two imaginaries has afflicted Venezuela throughout its republican life, continuously
making its dwellers hesitate between freedom and equality.
The idea of the Rousseauesque dance is explained further through a second Fou-
cauldian concept, biopower, which describes practices for governing, controlling, or
subjugating societies to achieve totality. This totality has been accomplished in Vene-
zuela through the construction of what Sánchez calls the “memory of caudillism,” which
has reduced the country’s history to glorifying descriptions of continuous clashes
between “power-hungry caudillos” (p. 320). Chávez—the last caudillo—achieved this
totality through the reproduction in posters, T-shirts, buildings, and other urban spaces
of his uncanny, surveilling eyes, a strategic move that merged the late president’s gaze with
the “Gazes of the Liberator” (p. 3). The moral ofthese images is simple: only under the gaze
of Bolı́var and now Chávez do Venezuelans realize themselves as citizens of the republic.
Sánchez’s genealogy of populism, constructed through the ideas of dancing and
monumental governmentality, advances a compelling proposition that might help
Book Reviews / Precontact 713

explain why twenty-first-century Venezuela still retains elements of nineteenth-century


caudillismo. This explanation might not be valid for other Latin American countries that
have managed to build more stable political institutions and where the “dancing Jaco-
bins,” their monuments and antics, have not been the norm or so resilient.

elena block, University of Queensland


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160391

Precontact

Political Strategies in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.


Edited by sarah kurnick and joanne baron. Boulder: University Press
of Colorado, 2016. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Figures. Notes. Bibliography.
Index. xi, 291 pp. Cloth, $60.00.

While Mesoamerica is viewed as a single cultural area, Mesoamericanists have long been
aware of the perils of emphasizing commonalities in the region, thus compromising a
deeper analysis of a diverse and divergent set of cultural practices, ecological adaptations,
and social arrangements. This volume takes on an ambitious challenge, not only by
attempting to address regional diversity through a variety of examples but also by pos-
iting a sustained conversation regarding the emergence, development, and persistence of
centralized authority, along with its contradictions, over several chapters. Moreover, this
work covers a wide range of case studies across an ambitious temporal frame in Meso-
america, from Maya sites to ancient Oaxaca as well as central and western Mesoamerica.
The book’s main objective is to elucidate the various governance strategies that
produced stability in terms of political control across Mesoamerican Formative, Classic,
and Postclassic early and mature states. Such impressive breadth is one of the volume’s
main strengths. Sarah Kurnick provides an apt introduction to the volume’s concerns and
adopts a Weberian stance on the production of authority while also focusing on an
account of supernatural mediation and the negotiation of contradictions in relationships
of authority. Takeshi Inomata takes up Kurnick’s discussion of Max Weber. Inomata
introduces Michel Foucault’s account of power and social relations into the mix, to
improve on what he sees as a “monolithic” view of authority, and deploys this insight to
suggest that rulers in Middle Preclassic Ceibal had limited control over their subjects in
terms of coercion. A chapter by Arthur Joyce, Sarah Barber, Jeffrey Brzezinski, Carlo
Lucido, and Vı́ctor Salazar Chávez addresses the initial drive toward political centrali-
zation in Rı́o Viejo, a Terminal Formative site near Oaxaca’s Pacific coast. The authors
examine the move of the main ceremonial center from a local site to an acropolis that
resonated with some of the region’s local elites, who were in the process of differentiating
themselves from commoners. In the end, this path to centralization is contrasted with the
emergence of Monte Albán in central Oaxaca, where centralization did lead to inte-
gration and political control of neighboring communities.
In a shift to western Mesoamerica, Christopher Beekman examines transitions in
the ceremonial architecture of the Tequila valleys of central Jalisco between the Late
714 HAHR / November

Formative and the Early Classic period. Beekman first introduces the arrangement and
use of shaft tombs by members of elite lineages and then discusses the significance of the
tombs’ emplacement and design under guachimontones (circle-shaped modular struc-
tures). He then proposes potential parallels between the symbolic practices embodied by
these structures and the cosmological theories of contemporary Náyari, while touching
on the tension between elite lineages, community members, and newcomers in terms of
ritual usage of built spaces. In a chapter devoted to Classic Maya patron deities, Joanne
Baron explores important distinctions among “general” deities, patron deities, and
ancestors, noting some important examples of the adoption of new patron deities—such
as Waxaklajun Ubaah Kaan, “The Eighteen Images of the Snake.” She goes on to review
the introduction of the patron deity Ikiiy at La Corona in the Petén region and describes
the interdigitation of the worship of ruling lineage ancestors, who secured the well-being
of elites, with that of patron gods, who protected the entire community.
Going further into state organization dynamics, Tatsuya Murakami investigates the
emergence of administrative buildings in Teotihuacan and the role played by interme-
diary elites in urban renewal projects. He concludes that standardized apartment com-
pounds reflected reciprocal relations between subjects and elites as well as bureaucratic
negotiations while excluding lower-status individuals. Bryce Davenport and Charles
Golden examine landscape and power through an analysis of the linkages between rulers
and bounded landscape. Drawing examples from the Classic-period Maya kingdoms of
Yaxchilan and Piedras Negras and from the representation of toponyms and bounded
regions in Postclassic and colonial Mixtec communities, Davenport and Golden
emphasize that the links between rulers and territory complemented, rather than clashed
with, commoner practices. Returning to western Mesoamerica, Helen Pollard provides a
useful and authoritative review of the Purépecha empire’s state structure, political
positions, economic basis, and centralization tendencies and then turns to an important
legitimation strategy employed by some ruling elites: the alternation between empha-
sizing Chichimec heritage and Purépecha origins (in fact, a strategy also reflected by the
use of Chichimec honorific titles by Nahua elites). In order to bring together common
threads that run through these chapters, a final reflection by Simon Martin provides a
concise intellectual history of theoretical approaches that support hypotheses regarding
political rule derived from archaeological data, insisting on the emergence of multiple
vantage points that have informed archaeologists engaged in postprocessual approaches.
In the end, while its case studies tend to focus on the production and endurance of
authority rather than on contradictions and collapses, this volume stands out both for its
insistence on theoretical acuity and for its fluid discussion of archaeological data. It will
attract audiences beyond the Mesoamerican and archaeological realms, such as scholars
and students of the political history of ancient American societies, ethnohistory, art
history, and cultural anthropology.

david tavárez, Vassar College


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160402
Book Reviews / Fifteenth–Seventeenth Centuries 715

Fifteenth–Seventeenth Centuries

The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic.
By pablo f. gómez. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xix, 291 pp. Paper, $29.95.

Reading Pablo F. Gómez’s The Experiential Caribbean is a bit like stepping into a parallel
universe, one where the “long seventeenth century” (circa 1580 to 1720) gave rise to
medical empiricism not just in Gideon Harvey’s and Thomas Sydenham’s London,
Marcello Malpighi’s and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli’s Pisa, Nicolas Malebranche’s Paris, or
René Descartes’s Amsterdam but in places like Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Portobelo,
and Caracas. The names of the paragons of empiricism in this parallel universe are not
enshrined in the annals of science. Instead, Gómez laboriously extracted these names
from the records of Cartagena’s tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition. Yet black healers and
knowledge workers such as Bernardo Macaya, Antonio Congo, Diego López, Paula de
Eguiluz, Domingo de La Ascensión, Mateo Arará, and many others (who may never have
come to the attention of the Holy Office) belong, or so Gómez cogently argues, squarely
in a history of medical empiricism.
Much is at stake in such a project of inclusion. It is not just that the history of
medicine has to shed what Wyatt MacGaffey (in 1981) called its “epistemological eth-
nocentrism” and its tendency to retroject post-nineteenth-century clinical naturalism
into worlds where it had gained no purchase yet. Such a project also carries the remit of
facing up to what Gómez, in a striking turn of phrase, calls “the foreignness of early
modern flesh”—that is, the way in which bodies, their ailments, and therapeutic inter-
ventions were not just conceptualized but experienced in ways that evade contemporary
biomedical rationalization (p. 13). Even in official medical praxis of the time, based as it
was in Christianized versions of Hippocratic and Galenic pathology, what we find is a
seething and boiling of humors in complex interaction with environmental variables that
were experienced as such through a sensorium and diagnostic regimes keenly attuned to
disequilibriums in the body’s hydraulics. In line with Margaret Lock’s concept of “local
biologies” as the contingent, dialectial coproduction of the social and the physiological in
the subjectively experienced socialized body, we might already regard the Galenic body as
strange enough to marvel at how it may have felt to inhabit such a body. But Gómez takes
all this a considerable step further.
This is because the catchment area of the institution central to the archive that he
draws on was not just regional, including the Hispanic Caribbean and parts of Central
America and northern South America; it was also astonishingly culturally heterogeneous
and cosmopolitan. Few of the more than 100 black healers hauled before Cartagena’s
tribunal (whose cases Gómez examines) had been born where they were tried. Most of
their biographies span two, if not three, continents; many were multilingual in one or
more African or European language; and all of them were keenly aware of the “cauldron
of cultures,” as Gómez puts it, in which they operated: a genuinely new world in which no
single cultural tradition (let alone the orthodox European medical knowledge of the
716 HAHR / November

time) could provide sufficient traction to convincingly deal with the ailments that
inhabitants of subtropical and tropical disease environments (as we would put it) faced at
the time (p. 12). And this is not to say anything about the—to use a deeply compromised
term—supernatural dangers arising from a society riven with deep inequalities and
antagonisms expressed and experienced in the form of falling victim to spells, poisoning,
and sorcerous assaults!
As Gómez argues, such traction had to be created on the spot by black healers
who—in truly experimental and highly competitive ways—probed how to integrate
elements of diverse diagnostic and therapeutic traditions with personal innovations so as
to resonate with their clients’ sensoriums, informed as the latter were by similarly het-
erogeneous conceptions of bodily states, causal agents, and experiential effects. And for a
time, these healers succeeded in generating a world in which bodily discomfort, its causes
and its means of alleviation, could be experienced and understood through various
phenomenological modes: palpably, visibly, audibly, olfactorily, viscerally. Here, Gómez
profitably follows Annemarie Mol in suspending any but performative notions of
ontology: no less than in Mol’s late twentieth-century Dutch teaching hospital or
Galenic medicine’s uroscopy, purging, and bleeding, black diagnosticians and healers of
the seventeenth-century Caribbean did not work their craft on bodies that had a prior
independent reality. Instead, their ministrations brought such bodies into being. This is
a bold move for a historian of medicine, and Gómez may face criticism from more
conventionally oriented colleagues in his field. But it is the step to take if we want to
counteract what E. P. Thompson famously called the enormous condescension of pos-
terity when it comes to historical worlds of pain and healing such as those that took shape
in the seventeenth-century Caribbean.

stephan palmié, University of Chicago


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160413

The Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Master Anthony Knivet:


An English Pirate in Sixteenth-Century Brazil. Edited by vivien kogut lessa de sá.
New Approaches to the Americas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Illustrations. Maps. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi, 230 pp. Paper,
$21.99.

In 1591, young Anthony Knivet sailed west from London with the fleet of English
privateer Thomas Cavendish bound for the Pacific to capture Spanish ships. En route,
they sacked Santos and raided sugar plantations along coastal Brazil. Forced back by
brutal weather in the Strait of Magellan, Cavendish, reduced to a single vessel, aban-
doned 20 sick sailors, Knivet among them, on the island of São Sebastião. Found there by
the Portuguese, Knivet, a lone survivor and a curiosity, became a servant to the governor
in Rio de Janeiro. He subsequently labored in the coastal cane fields and sugar mills and
then became an Indian slave trader and a gold prospector in the interior. Knivet also lived
among native groups, including the Tamoio. His observations provide valuable insight
Book Reviews / Fifteenth–Seventeenth Centuries 717

into Portuguese colonial society and the incipient African slave trade. Back in London,
after an adventurous decade in Brazil, he wrote his chronicle, first published by Samuel
Purchas in 1625. Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá’s new critical edition of this account is the first
published in a separate annotated volume. Prints from the 1706–7 Dutch edition and
maps embellish the text.
Kogut Lessa de Sá’s introduction situates the memoir within the historical context
and defines its place alongside contemporary chronicles. Her informative notes draw on
original research in British archives and on previous editions, especially Sheila Moura
Hue’s 2007 Portuguese edition (which Kogut Lessa de Sá translated) and Francisco de
Assis Carvalho Franco’s notes for an earlier 1947 Portuguese translation. All previous
editions are listed in an annotated bibliography. Kogut Lessa de Sá’s close textual analysis
of the narrative follows in the appendixes, along with an essay in which she pieces
together clues about Knivet’s identity—not a “poore ship boy,” as he described himself to
the governor of Brazil, but kin to an English lord with connections to Queen Elizabeth’s
and King James’s courts (p. 161).
Adventures and misadventures, involving shipwrecks, overland expeditions, wars,
and wild animals, alternate in Knivet’s narrative. A man of quickly shifting fortunes,
Knivet had kept for himself a treasure chest of Spanish silver that he had found in the
sacked Jesuit college in Santos. But things turned badly when, in the frigid Strait of
Magellan, he pulled off his stockings and his “toes came with them,” his “feete . . . as
blacke as soote” (p. 52). Marooned on the beach with the other sick men as Cavendish
sailed away to oblivion, Knivet passed out and awoke to find all his companions dead,
having “eaten a kind of Pease, that did grow by the Sea side which did poyson them”
(p. 56). The Portuguese at one point condemned him to death for being a runaway and
a “Lutheran,” but Knivet managed to hobble off to live among the Indians, preferring
“the Heathen mercy of savage Man-eaters” to “the bloudie crueltie ofChristian Portugals”
(pp. 69, 73). He cleverly escaped other tight spots by speaking Portuguese or by posing as
a Frenchman.
Knivet’s story usefully complements better-known sixteenth-century accounts
of early Brazil by the German Hans Staden, the Frenchmen Jean de Léry and André
Thevet, the Portuguese laymen Pero Magalhães de Gândavo and Gabriel Soares de
Sousa, and the Jesuit Fernão Cardim, among others. Typical of the chronicle genre, an
ethnographic description of native peoples and an itinerary for coastal navigation are
appended to Knivet’s account. His ingenuous outlook and extensive travels, including the
modern-day Brazilian states of Santa Catarina, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais,
Espı́rito Santo, Bahia, Pernambuco, and Rio Grande do Norte, make Knivet’s observa-
tions especially noteworthy.
Less thoroughly ethnographic than the French accounts, Knivet’s story stands out
for his firsthand experience of life among Portuguese settlers, Christian Indians, and
their mixed offspring (mamelucos) as well as enslaved Africans and independent natives.
His is a less cohesive narrative than those by Staden or Léry, with inconsistencies, sudden
textual shifts, and inexplicable omissions. Indeed, as Kogut Lessa de Sá notes, Knivet
never explained how he eventually returned to England. Yet his story is worth the read,
718 HAHR / November

laced as it is with a certain naı̈veté. He seems genuinely surprised by the astonishing twists
offate that he experienced, as were his Portuguese captors whom he described as laughing
at his misfortunes, apparently in good humor. Readers should enjoy the archaic English
phrasing and capricious spelling, which help re-create a sixteenth-century ambience.
Even as historians gain greater access to primary sources through digitized archives,
the need for carefully edited and well-annotated editions persists. For most readers, Kogut
Lessa de Sá’s meticulous notes will be essential to understanding Knivet’s tale, enhancing its
appeal to scholars of early colonial Brazil, Ibero-America, and the Atlantic world as well
as general readers, who will find the themes of risk, violence, and chance intriguing.

barbara a. sommer, Gettysburg College


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160424

Martı́n Cortés: Pasos recuperados (1532–1562).


By marı́a del carmen martı́nez martı́nez. León, Spain: Ediciones
El Forastero / Universidad de León / UNAM-España, 2017. Notes. Bibliography.
Index. 231 pp. Paper, e15.00.

The author of this book promises to examine the relatively unstudied life of Martı́n
Cortés (1533–89), the second of two sons by that name born to one of Mexico’s most
famous Spanish colonizers, Hernando Cortés (1485–1547). Her laborious contribution
to this topic will benefit sixteenth-century historians and Hispanists because she brings
to light important archival sources that together with secondary sources compose a
portrait of the second marqués del Valle de Oaxaca, who unlike his father was born in the
Viceroyalty of New Spain (in Cuernavaca, Morelos) and was of the first generation of
New Spanish creoles. And unlike his older brother Martı́n, the younger Martı́n had his
right to succeed his father legitimated by his Spanish parents’ marriage.
One of the challenges acknowledged by the author in the book’s introduction is the
difficulty ofestablishing to which Martı́n sixteenth-century sources referred. An example
that comes to mind is a series of autos prepared in 1557 and conserved in the Archivo
General de la Nación in Mexico (Instituciones Coloniales, Hospital de Jesús 53, vol. 300,
exp. 117), in which both brothers provide testimony; the scribe often fails to distinguish
one from the other. The author mitigates this problem by either qualifying to which
Martı́n she refers with the terms criollo and mestizo or by acknowledging that it is not
possible to understand which brother was being described by the notary or author. The
resulting identity fluidity highlights the book’s objective to better understand the life of
the second marqués del Valle de Oaxaca through critical reading practices. Differ-
entiating between the two Martı́ns also allows scholars to glimpse the life and experiences
of Hernando Cortés’s first son, born to the Nahua woman Malintzin (La Malinche).
Beyond the introduction, the book’s organization leaves this reader wanting more
explicit linkages between some chapter titles and their contents. The first chapter fol-
lowing the introduction, “A Castilla: Los viajes de los dos Martı́n Cortés,” attempts to
sketch the early lives of the two Martı́ns, but there is no meditation on their travel
experiences, the nature of travel in this period, or how they were received in Spain as
Book Reviews / Fifteenth–Seventeenth Centuries 719

Spanish-speaking youths who had not been born in Spain. In this sense, the excellent
archival research performed by the author would have been even better deployed within
a contextualized study focused on both brothers’ experiences and those with whom they
interacted rather than only where and when these two men pop up in historical docu-
ments. Sometimes it feels as if the book stalls in the late 1540s, with several chapters
returning to that period in which Hernando Cortés dies, some of his children marry or
remarry, and the eldest assumes his role as marqués del Valle de Oaxaca, which gives rise
to a sense of repetition. The author’s sources are, nonetheless, adequately and consis-
tently documented, and she should be praised for the care that she invested in her
bibliographic apparatus.
One area that remains understudied and that now needs to be addressed as a result
of this book is the role of the Cortés women. It seems difficult to justify, in 2018,
continuing to perform scholarship that excludes women, their presence, their voices,
and, in particular, the way that they exercised authority in the early modern period.
This exclusion resonates in a book devoted to a man made powerful in the eyes of
contemporaries because of who his dad was. One way that this book does address women
is through a fascinating examination of the marquesa’s material life in the tenth chapter;
among her effects were curious objects that included two rattlesnake heads (p. 165).
Unfortunately, there is no analysis of these possessions, their cultural significance, or
their likely source oforigin. Hernando Cortés’s female offspring likewise should be given
greater attention today. We must ask ourselves what their experiences were, how they
were empowered by the marquessate and the other advantages afforded by their situation
in life, and how they helped to shape the colonial project on either side of the Atlantic. We
should be choosing to seek out their experiences, objectives, and voices rather than
presuming and perforce allowing those of men to dictate the historical record, even in a
biography of Martı́n Cortés: the women as well as the men in his life will provide
important perspective on who the man was.
Scholarship on women aside, this book does nonetheless feature the activities of a
creole man in a period in which European experiences and voices tend to predominate
and later catch scholarly eyes. The author also tries to provide background on the
marqués’s mestizo brother, which together with the focus on a creole helps destabilize the
relatively Western, if still masculinist, treatment of the early modern Spanish Atlantic.
For this the author should be congratulated.

lauren beck, Mount Allison University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160435

Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico.


By daniel nemser. Border Hispanisms. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.
Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. viii, 221 pp. Paper, $29.95.

In the late 1890s, Spanish authorities in Cuba relocated over half a million civilians,
placing them in the first modern concentration camps. This model of control through
720 HAHR / November

concentration would be copied by British and American authorities in their colonial


holdings before becoming infamous as a central feature of Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic
policies. Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race argues that the spatial concentration of
colonial subjects did not have its origin in the nineteenth century but rather in the
sixteenth century. From its inception, Spanish colonialism enacted policies of concen-
tration on its indigenous subjects to further its aims of material exploitation and religious
conversion. Using the lens of concentration with a robust theoretical paradigm rooted in
Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, Nemser traces how several colonial projects used
concentration to forge “infrastructures of race” that defined Spain’s indigenous subjects.
Nemser’s work traces the development of these infrastructures of race through an
introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue. In his introduction, Nemser argues that a
close reading of colonial sources reveals that the process of racialization in colonial
Mexico was predicated on the development of two forms of infrastructure. A material
form based in roads, towns, jurisdictions, and boundaries facilitated the concentration of
particular people in specific, discrete places. At the same time an ideological infra-
structure developed in which nascent racial notions “enable[d] the ongoing functioning
of specific machineries of extraction and accumulation” (p. 5). Each chapter examines a
slightly different colonial project that contributed to and expanded the process and
conceptualization of concentration that shaped colonial racial constructions.
The first chapter examines the policy of congregation (congregación) enacted by
Spaniards to relocate indigenous communities in order to make them more accessible to
Spanish economic and religious enterprises. Nemser argues that this policy “constituted
both an organizing principle and a material practice of Spanish imperial reason, linked
across space and time” (p. 29). Importantly, he asserts that the spatial concentration of
indigenous subjects facilitated the racialization of the Indian subject.
Building from the first chapter, the second chapter examines the Colegio de San
Juan de Letrán, a school intended for the collection and education of early mestizo boys.
In this chapter, Nemser argues that the school attempted to use a process of enclosure
(recogimiento) to shape and mold such children to be agents of the imperial project.
Although this project failed to produce such an end, the school served as an infrastructure
(both material and ideological) that produced a racialized understanding of mestizos
through the “spatial politics of colonial rule” (p. 68).
Chapter 3 jumps forward in time to the late seventeenth century and the policy of
urban segregation enacted in the wake of the Mexico City riot (tumulto or motı́n) of 1692.
Here Nemser examines how colonial authorities enacted a policy of segregation that
would isolate an exclusively Spanish urban core from a plebeian periphery. Although this
policy responded to a failure of earlier forms of concentration, it continued to mobilize
racial concentration as a means of enacting governance.
The final chapter examines the eighteenth-century fascination with collecting
diverse flora and fauna from the far-flung regions of empire. Nemser uses the rise of
botanical gardens and the new language developed for taxonomic descriptions of living
creatures to illustrate a shift toward a more scientific notion of concentration. In doing
so, the new science of the eighteenth century helped to transform the discourse of race
Book Reviews / Fifteenth–Seventeenth Centuries 721

into the scientific form so common in the nineteenth century. The epilogue highlights
that these infrastructures of race can be seen as historically and formally linked to Karl
Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation, a theme that Nemser emphasizes in each chapter.
Overall, Nemser’s work offers a theoretically complex and multifaceted argument
that shows how the material and the ideological worked in conjunction to form colonial
notions of race, especially those defining indigenous subjects. Scholars may be disap-
pointed by the lack of attention paid to subjects of African descent. Although many
of the infrastructures of race described by Nemser operated on Africans and their
descendants, a critical discussion of those subjects and the racial constructions mapped
onto them does not appear in this work. Many of the juridical statutes that established
the concentration of indigenous subjects cited the need to separate indios from negros,
mulatos, and zambaigos. Similarly, the notable rise of individuals of mixed ancestry,
including those of African-indigenous ancestry, represented a significant failure of these
infrastructures of race. An analysis of such issues could highlight important tensions
between the ideological and the material as well as illustrate how Spanish infrastruc-
tures of race failed to prevent interracial connections and affiliations, whether affective,
domestic, economic, or social. This shortcoming does not negate Nemser’s rich and
well-argued work; instead it offers new directions for further exploring colonial infra-
structures of race.

robert c. schwaller, University of Kansas


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160446

Substance and Seduction: Ingested Commodities in Early Modern Mesoamerica.


Edited by stacey schwartzkopf and kathyrn e. sampeck. William
and Bettye Nowlin Series in Art, History, and Culture of the Western Hemisphere.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Photographs. Maps. Figures. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. xvii, 220 pp. Paper, $27.95.

This edited volume, written by historical anthropologists, archaeologists, and not a few
historians, makes a wonderful addition to the growing literature on commodities, food,
and drugs in Latin American history. In some sense, these topics are all children of Sidney
W. Mintz’s field-making Sweetness and Power: The Place ofSugar in Modern History (1985).
While historians, a lot of them “recovering” economic historians, tend to focus on what
Mintz regards as the “outside meanings” that shape goods and consumption habits—
political economies, commodity chains, larger, even imperial, power structures—the
scholars in this volume are developing the harder-to-capture “inside meanings” ofgoods.
Yet these essays go beyond vague longings for culture, identities, or hybrid material life.
They shift the conversation from political economy to ideas about “ingestible commod-
ities,” cultural enchantments and seductions, the interior or corporeal boundaries of
colonialism, commodity succession, “thingyness,” and a myriad of sensory dimensions of
colonialism and commodity culture. The menu of goods under study—sugar, aguar-
diente, pulque (maguey beer), peyote, chocolate, tobacco—may seem familiar enough to
specialists, but the discoveries here are strikingly new and nuanced.
722 HAHR / November

The book starts off with a crisp but evocative foreword by Marcy Norton, a pioneer
of this thinking in Atlantic perspective, followed by editors Kathyrn E. Sampeck
and Stacey Schwartzkopf’s introduction, punningly titled “Consuming Desires in
Mesoamerica.” It nicely lays out the innovative conceptual lenses (thingyness, seduction,
ingestibles) for looking at these commodities as well as more familiar if essential fasci-
nations with questions of knowledge, economy, symbolism, and gender.
Martin Nesvig, one of the historians here, begins with a chapter on “hallucinogens
and cultural memory,” about colonial use of peyote buttons, mushrooms, and morning
glory seed, pre-Columbian ritual substances suppressed as devilish by the Spanish crown.
The chapter is lucid in two ways. First, Nesvig is able to periodize, from opaque and
tattered sources, the usage of hallucinogens in colonial New Spain. Moreover, it seems
that the use of these substances, long assumed by historians to be just forbidden or
underground indigenous ritual goods, was spreading, by the seventeenth century, to
groups of marginal creoles.
Schwartzkopf’s solo chapter, “Alcohol and Commodity Succession in Colonial
Guatemala,” traces the pathways taken by native mead, Spanish wine, chicha beer, and
sugar-based aguardiente among Mayan users from Postclassic times to the eighteenth
century. Illustrating the use of ingestible commodities, he also reveals how each followed
in the shadow of successive meanings of related goods. I wondered if this march was
mostly a classic intensification of alcoholic goods.
Chapter 3, by Sampeck and Jonathan Thayn, is aptly subtitled “A Cartography of
Chocolate Colonialism.” Just when we thought there was nothing more to say about
cacao, one of the most studied of Mesoamerica’s colonial commodities, Sampeck and
Thayn find it. The diversity of chocolate “tastes” was not simply rooted in its variety
of precolonial regions, cultures, and recipes. The authors’ remarkable and able use of
geographic information systems analysis closely tracks the global provenance and flows
of new spices and flavorings in the evolving hybrid of chocolate. Less convincing is the
framing recourse to sociologist Erving Goffman.
Joel Palka’s chapter about the Lacandon Maya nicotine trade is a revelation, with a
nod to classic anthropological exchange. Even isolated groups like the Lacandon, low-
land tropical refugees from the Spanish state, used their unique native tobaccos to create
a notable niche in colonial commerce and consumption. The chapter exudes a sensory
feel for Lacandon smokes and their ethnographic present. As are many chapters in the
book, it is also beautifully illustrated, as befits study of material culture.
Joan Bristol, another historian, contributes on “pulque discourse in New Spain.”
Long-dead colonial discourses conceal a paradoxical tie to pulque’s present commodi-
tized revival as a cosmic-race indigenous good. Colonial authorities actually lauded the
purer qualities of pulque over other adulterated forms of alcohol or mixed mestizo-style
consumption. A well-argued chapter, in the end I was not that surprised given New
Spain’s segregated caste system: pulque, like maize, could be good if within the republic
of Indians.
Chapter 6, by Guido Pezzarossi, concerns “sugar, alcohol, and biopolitics in
colonial Guatemala.” Somewhat at odds with the agency acting up elsewhere in the book,
Book Reviews / Fifteenth–Seventeenth Centuries 723

he links Michel Foucault’s well-trodden concept of biopower to documents and archae-


ological artifacts that relate to colonial authorities’ control over local forms of sugar and
alcohol making and trades by indigenous communities. The book’s brief afterword by
Carla D. Martin is suggestive of the “ethnographic,” “emotional” taste and gendered
texture of the writings (pp. 176, 179).
Such fine essays raise many conceptual questions. I, for one, was left wondering
about how the concept of ingestible commodities adds to Mintz’s own parallel category
ofearly modern “drug foods,” essentially the same set of mild intoxicants or, in the case of
sucrose itself, empty-calorie energy boosters. Or why not just consider them as (soft)
drugs or intoxicants, consciousness-altering along with bodily shifting, the vital colonial
American precursors to modern drug cultures? If so, Substance and Seduction makes a
marked contribution to the field that Isaac Campos and I dubbed in this journal (vol. 95,
no. 1) “the new drug history of the Americas.”
In books about chocolate and sugar, it is customary to laud each chapter as a real
treat. Indeed, this book proves how exceptionally well historical archaeologists and
anthropologists write, one stilted exception aside, with evocative detail, beautifully
construed narratives, and lucidly laid arguments. This well-integrated, daresay “seduc-
tive” volume is valuable for state-of-the-field grad seminars and commodity courses, and
perhaps even as a complementary text in colonial Latin American or Atlantic history
surveys.

paul gootenberg, Stony Brook University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160457

Lettered Artists and the Languages of Empire: Painters and the Profession in Early
Colonial Quito. By susan verdi webster. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.
Plates. Figures. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index.
xi, 333 pp. Cloth, $50.00.

Susan Verdi Webster’s deeply erudite Lettered Artists and the Languages of Empire studies
the artistic culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Quito while contributing to a
wide range of current debates in early modern studies. As a model archivally grounded
study of a single artistic center, it demonstrates that a global early modern art history can
be written through a thorough examination of the local. It is in the local that blanketly
imposed universal principles ofgovernance, instruction, and mores were interpreted and
adapted by the very people whose lives they were meant to structure.
The first of the book’s two four-chapter sections, “Contexts,” asks us to think about
the range of literacies—textual, symbolic, pictorial—available to individuals living in the
colonial Andes. It shows that painters, like the letrado caste of bureaucrats and notaries,
were in the unique position of mediating between the colonial system and people’s lived
experiences. Webster’s discussion of a case from 1632 summarizes well one of the book’s
principal arguments: that indigenous individuals could successfully marshal these various
literacies, including ones imparted to them by European educational institutions, in
724 HAHR / November

order to seek privileges and even challenge those very same institutions. Where chapter 1
widely sets the book’s stakes, chapters 2 and 3 focus on the stuff of painting. Webster
discusses not only canvases and panels, pigments and binders, and frames and materials
for gilding but also printed models, books, contracts between painters and patrons, and
venues and events for which paintings were made. In the fourth chapter, Webster studies
Quito’s artistic geographies, examining how painters were organized in a city that,
incongruously for how many artists it gathered, lacked an official guild system until the
mid-eighteenth century. A strength of Webster’s book is demonstrating the effect of pre-
Columbian social organization on these colonial-era developments. For example, the
Incaic division of Quito into dominant and subjugated moieties dictated that indigenous
painters with Inca ancestry were grouped elsewhere in the city than those with regional
names, thereby affecting how they trained and with whom they collaborated.
Chapters 5 and 7 in the book’s second section, “Painters,” are composed of discrete
biographical vignettes of early Quiteño artists. These chapters are balanced by mono-
graphic chapters on the well-known Andrés Sánchez Gallque and the little-studied
Mateo Mexı́a. Rich in details drawn from exhaustive archival research, this section will
most interest specialists in the field, as it addresses a number of debates about chronol-
ogy and attribution. But nonspecialists should not pass over this halfof the book either, as
it represents the first time that many of these debates are introduced to an English-
speaking audience, and in an eminently readable manner at that.
Webster’s study enriches the existing scholarship on the art of colonial Quito, from
early studies by Teresa Gisbert and José de Mesa to more recent work by Ximena
Escudero-Albornoz, Suzanne L. Stratton, and Carmen Fernández-Salvador. It also
engages with research on literacies in the wider Hispanic world, especially by Tom
Cummins and Joanne Rappaport as well as Walter Mignolo, while intersecting with the
work of Aaron Hyman on artistic signing practices and Diana Magaloni Kerpel on color
symbolism. It also converses with early modern scholarship from seemingly further
afield, such as Richard Kagan on education in Renaissance Spain and David Kim on
itinerant Mediterranean painters. In the fascinating chapter on Mexı́a, Webster engages a
historiography that has deemed the painter’s style as anachronistic. The author shows,
instead, the particular appeal of such purportedly outdated solutions to Andean audi-
ences, an elegant argument that resonates with Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s
study of narratives of progress and seeming anachronism in Italian Renaissance painting.
Webster’s book is also of a kind with Patrizia Cavazzini’s excavations of the populous, but
largely invisible, profession of painters in early modern Rome, most of whom survive not
through extant works but as archival traces. Like Cavazzini, Webster asks us to move past
known artists in order to more fully understand the artistic culture of an important early
modern metropolis. In doing so, we are then better equipped to understand canonical
(and often historiographically isolated) figures like Andrés Sánchez Gallque and
Angelino Medoro, whose careers and contributions the book subsequently fleshes out in
new ways. For instance, Webster brings to light a number of new documents that show
Sánchez Gallque’s association with some of Quito’s most prominent individuals and his
imbrication in the networks of artists and patrons that permeated colonial society.
Book Reviews / Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries 725

Lettered Artists and the Languages ofEmpire will richly challenge students’ established
points of reference, in which task it is helped by its lucid language and clear organization.
One wishes that the transcriptions of a number of painters’ contracts, included in the
appendix, had been translated, as they could have been an invaluable resource for
teaching with primary sources. As such, their appeal will primarily be to scholars, for
whom the book is undoubtedly an important touchstone. Indeed, Lettered Artists and the
Languages of Empire promises to be a premier English-language resource, and likely the
most thoroughly researched one, on the art of colonial Quito for years to come. More
broadly, the book will appeal to those interested in artistic education, workshop practices,
issues of literacy, and the agency of individuals—indigenous, mestizo, creole, or
Spanish—in navigating, and succeeding in, the complexities of colonial society.

adam jasienski, Southern Methodist University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160468

Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries

The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women’s Circuit,
1876–1910. By ronald briggs. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2017.
Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ix, 254 pp. Cloth, $55.00.

In the mid-1870s, Argentine writer Juana Manuela Gorriti organized a series of literary
soirees in Lima. Participants included both women and men who delivered talks, recited
poetry, and performed songs. Scholars consider these soirees exceptional because they
gave Peruvian women writers such as Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, Clorinda Matto
de Turner, and Teresa González de Fanning, among others, the chance to position
themselves as valid interlocutors to their male peers. The participants also advocated for
women’s access to higher education and professional occupations. In his book, Ronald
Briggs argues that the Lima women’s circuit tied gender emancipation to reading,
writing, and publishing within political and intellectual contexts dominated by men.
Aware of the ideas circulated by equivalent networks in the rest of the Americas and
Europe, these South American authors embraced the premise that the printed word was
a means to educate and reform society, especially in moral terms. To achieve this goal, the
Lima group relied on novels, journals, biographical compilations, and school textbooks.
Briggs effectively demonstrates that nineteenth-century Latin American writers imag-
ined literature as an educational instrument. His work also provides some insights into
the history of pedagogy and educators in the region.
One of the strengths of Briggs’s book is placing the work of Lima women writers
within transatlantic and hemispheric intellectual contexts. In contrast to older scholar-
ship that claimed that Latin American intellectuals simply copied foreign ideas, Briggs’s
work demonstrates the critical engagement of these authors with outside concepts. The
concept of moral electricity, first advanced during the French Revolution, referred to an
invisible, progressive force that accelerated social change. In the nineteenth century,
726 HAHR / November

US and Latin American writers held that the printed word could serve as a conduit for
such force. French writer Madame de Staël (1766–1817)—frequently cited in Spanish-
language books and periodicals—maintained that literature provided women with the
opportunity to have a greater influence over society and politics. This idea resonated with
the Lima group, who considered that literature could change customs and, consequently,
the law. An example of this, for the Lima women’s circle, was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
perceived contribution to the abolition of slavery in the United States, through her
abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).
Briggs’s examination of the issue of education—broadly conceived—is valuable,
and his observations on the history of pedagogy and educators in the region are welcome.
In contrast to enlightened thinkers, who argued that education had to bring students in
contact with the world through the senses and ideas, the Lima group claimed that it was
also possible to teach through the feelings and emotions represented in their novels.
Following a Latin American tradition that included Venezuelan Andrés Bello and
Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the Lima writers granted great pedagogical
value to biographies and journals that divulged literary and scientific information. Of
particular importance is how women writers published collective biographies of women
peers, creating a “textual community of heroic figures” that legitimized all intellectuals
(p. 16). Briggs highlights that Gorriti held the soirees in the same building where she ran a
school, and other affiliates of the Lima group such as González de Fanning worked as
teachers. Adding information on local or regional schooling, literacy, and readership
would have completed the picture of the intellectual and cultural contexts within which
the Lima women’s circle was active. More research and data on these social aspects would
also make more precise the racial, ethnic, and class limitations of the women writers’
project. Overall, Briggs’s book shows that these writers not only appropriated but also re-
created European and US ideas, in response to opportunities and challenges that they
perceived in their own societies.

g. antonio espinoza, Virginia Commonwealth University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160479

Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship.


By celso thomas castilho. Pitt Latin American Series. Pittsburgh, PA:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index.
xv, 264 pp. Paper, $28.95.

Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship argues that abo-
litionist organizing and advocacy in Brazil created new forms and expressions of political
participation for men and women in the 1870s and 1880s beyond formal suffrage.
Abolitionists, particularly after the 1871 Free Womb Law, took their demands for slave
emancipation to the populace in assemblies at theaters, law schools, and public streets.
Legislative halls and churches, traditional sites for speeches and elections, no longer
constituted exclusive locales of formal political exchange. The struggle for abolition,
Book Reviews / Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries 727

which culminated with final emancipation on May 13, 1888, generated new spaces and
modes of protest and thereby opened new pathways for political involvement. This book
joins an expanding body ofresearch aimed at rectifying the notion offormal voting alone as
the primary measure of political participation across postindependence Latin America.
Celso Castilho details abolitionist organizing using a regionalist approach that
emphasizes the province of Pernambuco and adjacent provinces but also the city of
Recife, which was the third-largest city in nineteenth-century Brazil (p. 13). Recife was
an important provincial capital in the northeast region since the city held a law school, an
active press, a deep tradition of clubs and associations, and a bustling activist “theater
scene” that advocated for the end of slavery in halls designed for performances of music,
drama, and spectacle (pp. 13, 38, 44, 107). Castilho analyzes daily and partisan newspapers,
law journals, legal statutes, plays, speeches given at emancipation ceremonies, and special
programs in Recife, and he then uses extant historiography to compare that city’s abo-
litionist organizing patterns to the national capital of Rio de Janeiro and provincial
capitals across the nation.
Castilho makes several important contributions to modern Latin American histo-
riography focused on abolition, concepts of citizenship, and “popular participation,” or
nonelite political involvement. The author analyzes traditional liberal and conservative
partisan politics around abolition, but he also brilliantly documents increasing interest
and advocacy for abolition in public discourse, which is the strength of his work. For
example, his evidence of women’s participation in establishing and supporting emanci-
pation funds and societies highlights women as social actors normalizing antislavery
discourse in private and public. Furthermore, at every stage in the work Castilho iden-
tifies enslaved and formerly enslaved people as critical, collective actors creating direct
pressure on the slave system, thereby acknowledging how bondspeople worked at every
instance, using flight, freedom suits, and negotiations with masters, to achieve freedom.
Castilho argues that an important new form of protest emergent in abolitionist
organizing was the “abolitionist parade” (p. 105). This interpretation provides much-
needed emphasis on how supporters of emancipation made the street, generally seen as a
place ofdisorder and dishonor, an increasingly acceptable space for political mobilization
and ideological exchange. However, by thinking of the abolitionist parade as a com-
pletely “new type of political event” the author underemphasizes how religious culture
made the street a potentially viable site of political action and governance (p. 105).
Brazilians in cities across the empire poured into streets to celebrate saints, to ask for
divine protection against epidemics, and to thankfully greet soldiers returning from the
Paraguayan War, all of which transformed ordinary roadways into temporary spaces of
civic action. Abolitionist parades were not without religious or secular precedent.
Several chapters of the book depend too heavily on evidence related to the activities
of law school students and their journals to demonstrate popular participation in abo-
litionist organizing. In the nineteenth century, law did not represent a field of study that
incorporated large numbers of students from nonelite backgrounds. Priests entering the
clergy were more likely to come from families of modest means. Law school students
certainly held diverse views and committed these ideas to print; therefore, it is clear why
728 HAHR / November

speeches and journals by law students offer a deep well in terms of source material.
However, it is not clear why the author designates law school students as a “popular”
element or sector. Law school students were elites in training, if not already so by family
affiliation. Several chapters of the book would have benefited from fewer pages
chronicling the actions and ideas of law students in order to give deeper individualized,
biographical analysis of enslaved people, who appear fleetingly when gaining freedom in
lawsuits and emancipation ceremonies.
This is a book for specialists interested in the topic of abolition in Brazil and the
increasingly popular topic of citizenship and political participation patterns beyond
voting. Scholars of Brazil and wider Latin America will finish this book with a newfound
appreciation of the city of Recife and the province of Pernambuco, which is an important
geographical area in the colonial period but which is traditionally decentered in studies
of the modern period. Castilho persuasively makes the case for this region to be con-
sidered at the center of Brazilian experience and historiography during the period of the
empire (1822–89).

alicia l. monroe, College of the Holy Cross


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160490

Pueblos y soberanı́a: Continuidades y rupturas conceptuales durante la insurgencia en el


reino de Quito (1809–1813). By ahmed i. deidán de la torre. Quito:
Sección Nacional del Ecuador del IPGH, 2016. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. 114
pp. Paper, ECS$5.00.

The present study is a revised version of the author’s bachelor thesis that focuses on the
kingdom of Quito’s response to the global political crisis generated by the imprisonment
of Ferdinand VII in 1808. By analyzing the evolution of two concepts, pueblo (people)
and sovereignty, the author seeks to demonstrate that the political language of the time
used by both insurgents and royalists had its intellectual foundation in Hispanic neo-
scholasticism instead of the Enlightenment, as has been assumed. After a short first
chapter in which the author introduces the global context for the monarchical crisis that
took place in Spain after 1808, the second chapter analyzes the intellectual debate that
took place in the kingdom of Quito in the early 1800s. The third and fourth chapters
center on the language utilized in the moment of the Junta Suprema (1809–10) and of the
Junta Superior and Estado de Quito (1810–12). The fifth and last chapter deals with the
promulgation of the Constitution of Cádiz in 1812 and its application in the kingdom of
Quito.
The author makes a valuable contribution by analyzing the discourse employed in
the discussions over the creation of a local government ( junta). His study of the cabildo’s
records highlights the variety of political and philosophical positions and the efforts
made by the Quiteño insurgents to present their desire for more political autonomy and
representation as a “change of government instead of a break from the current political
system” (p. 51). Although Quiteños failed to convince a significant part of the population,
Book Reviews / Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries 729

they proposed an idea that would prove very popular throughout Spanish America: “The
American territories had the same rights and obligations as the Iberian territories” (p. 62).
Moreover, by analyzing proclamations and letters penned by different social groups,
the author shows the mutability of the concepts of pueblo and sovereignty. The author
demonstrates how pueblo changed from its traditional corporative definition to another
that was both individual and collective. In this sense, several pueblos comprised the
Spanish monarchy but could also be one people who constituted the Spanish nation.
Similarly, the concept of sovereignty developed in Quito was rooted neither in one
people nor in individuals but in corporative entities such as cities. For Quiteños, sov-
ereignty was only shared with the king, which allowed them to declare independence
from other cities such as Lima or Santafé. Nevertheless, Quiteños remained subordinate
to the Junta Central and, later, the Constitution of Cádiz. The author successfully shows
how while these and other concepts were being debated simultaneously in Cádiz and in
Quito, all these ideas were rooted in the same philosophical principles of Hispanic neo-
scholasticism. However, these concepts were also being shaped by local political debate
and discussion that, in time, led to different meanings. This is the reason why in Quito the
notions of pueblo and sovereignty differed dramatically from those conveyed in the
Constitution of Cádiz. Moreover, other cities of the region elaborated their own defi-
nitions of these concepts, which allowed them to reject Quito’s leadership.
This is a valuable study that makes a strong case for the dynamism and intellectual
complexity of the debates that occurred in Quito during the monarchical crisis. At the
same time, the book highlights how Hispanic neo-scholasticism was attuned to the main
political debates that happened in other regions of western Europe without copying or
reproducing these debates. Nonetheless, at times the chronology of the events gets lost in
the analysis, which makes the argument a bit confusing. Furthermore, the study would
have benefited from dialogue with other Latin American historiographies, in particular
the work of José Carlos Chiaramonte and Vı́ctor Peralta Ruiz. As the author notes,
similar debates took place in other regional spaces, but comparison with these other
spaces could have strengthened the uniqueness of the political debate that took place in
Quito, in particular with respect to Buenos Aires and Lima. Beyond this criticism, this is a
great first monograph, and we can expect more valuable contributions from Ahmed I.
Deidán de la Torre in the future.

silvia escanilla huerta, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160501

Riot! Tobacco, Reform, and Violence in Eighteenth-Century Papantla, Mexico.


By jake frederick. Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2016. Maps. Figures.
Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. vii, 161 pp. Cloth, $69.95.

Jake Frederick undertook this study to better understand how shifts in eighteenth-
century imperial policy affected the balance of power in local Mexican settings (p. 3). To
accomplish this he examines four of six uprisings in Papantla, Veracruz, between 1736
730 HAHR / November

and 1787. The book assesses how Papantla fit within an increasingly more aggressive
Spanish colonial system aimed at greater control over New Spain’s economic, social, and
political development. This resurgence of imperial authority began with a new Bourbon
ruling house that ascended the Spanish throne in 1701. Adopting French administrative
philosophy, the Bourbons stressed centralization of political authority, a more relaxed
form of colonial mercantilism, and assimilation of modern social ideals that stressed
European superiority over colonized subjects. Frederick correctly points out that the
resulting Bourbon reforms intensified under the reign of Charles III (1759–88), a period
during which all but one of the four uprisings that he examines took place.
Frederick then focuses on one Bourbon reform in particular, the 1765 tobacco
monopoly, and its impact on Papantla as illustrative of how imperial policy affected
power relations on the ground in Mexico. The monopoly restricted production of
tobacco to a few sites within New Spain. Papantla was not one of them. Totonac Indians
there had grown tobacco for centuries prior to the monopoly’s abrupt outlawing of this
activity. This change, according to Frederick, represented an economic hardship for the
area’s indigenous population. It also upset the local political balance of power, sowing
increased levels of unrest within the region’s Spanish, Indian, and Afro-mestizo sub-
communities between 1765 and 1787.
Throughout the text Frederick analytically ties changes in international conditions
to changes in local conditions, arriving at a nuanced interpretation of why violence
increased in Papantla immediately after royal imposition of the tobacco monopoly. He
then compares his findings with those of scholars dealing with local unrest in other parts
of New Spain during the same period, such as William Taylor and Ronald Spores
(Oaxaca), Eric Van Young (Guadalajara), Michael Ducey (the Huasteca region), and
Raymond Buve (central Mexico), in order to both control for local variance and assess the
association between increased levels of local violence in the colony during the second
half of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth-century struggle for indepen-
dence. No mean feat in 116 pages of text.
This book rests on an impressive body of primary and secondary sources. The
quality of the primary sources is of special note. These documents recorded testimonies
of witnesses and participants in the region’s late colonial upheavals from all racial, ethnic,
and class sectors of the population. Their testimonies provide a comprehensive set of
perspectives on the causes of these uprisings. They also expose the elite Spanish and
indigenous interest groups competing for power in a local setting with limited resources
made even scarcer by a Bourbon change in colonial rule, the tobacco monopoly. Finally,
these testimonies inform Frederick about more mundane yet elusive topics such as
plebeian life experiences. Frederick’s contextualization of such a vast array of informa-
tion in his analysis of Papantla’s local uprisings represents a strength of the work.
This study, like any other, has a few shortcomings. Ironically, some redundancies
appear within a text that does so much in so little space (pp. 76, 82, 87, 95, 97). The author
could have also profited from additional references to the parish registries for Papantla
provided online by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They would have
likely provided more evidence for the author’s treatment of Afro-Papantecos’ ties to the
Book Reviews / Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries 731

region’s indigenous Totonac community. Finally, Frederick too often conflates race with
ethnicity, something that I would argue the indigenous subjects of his study seldom did
(pp. 26, 33–40).
On balance, the contributions of Jake Frederick’s book far outweigh its short-
comings. The work’s strengths lie in its scope and synthesis of conditions and events
ranging from Europe to Papantla and the contextualization of its findings within a body
of works by other scholars who deal with like themes. Moreover, it is a good read.
I strongly recommend it to scholars of unrest in late colonial Mexico. It will also serve as a
useful and engaging supplemental case study to more general studies of late colonial
Mexico assigned in upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses.

patrick j. carroll, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160512

The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770–1830.


By brian r. hamnett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. viii, 364 pp. Paper, £27.99.

Brian Hamnett, a historian with a long and distinguished career working on late colonial
and independence-era Spanish America, has written an important new book that reas-
sesses the breakdown of the Iberian empires in the Americas. This is a topic that has
attracted a great deal of scholarly interest over generations, whether one thinks of works
on creole patriotism, the legal and intellectual history of constitutionalism and repub-
licanism, or the histories of the insurgencies themselves, including their popular ele-
ments. In this crowded field Hamnett takes a slightly different approach, focusing on
what he refers to as the “disaggregation” of the empires, rather than, say, the origins of the
independence movements or the development of protonational sentiment. While one
might question the decision to separate these often overlapping processes, his perspec-
tive, which is a glance backward more than forward, places the long-term, structural
problems of the two empires in sharp focus. It also draws our attention to the ways that
the independence movements grew out of internal conflict within the Americas over the
nature and form of the imperial relationship.
The book draws on a large secondary literature in English, Spanish, and Portuguese
and gracefully integrates archival documents and printed primary sources. Its historio-
graphical breadth is matched by how it ranges widely across time and space, examining
disaggregation on the peninsula and throughout Ibero-America. While Hamnett
emphasizes the Spanish American experience, he devotes significant attention to the
breakdown of the Portuguese empire in the Americas, a combined analysis uncommon in
much of the historiography. He also rejects labeling the book an “Atlantic history,” since
he pursues the flow of ideas and people not only across the Atlantic but also within the
Americas (p. 11). This shuttling back and forth is breathtaking in scope and amounts to a
style of analysis that is more synoptic than explicitly comparative, as Hamnett brings
many different historical contexts into play in any given chapter. While an intriguing
732 HAHR / November

approach, and one that will be of interest to many researchers, it also makes for a
challenging and dense text that at times assumes significant prior knowledge. As a result,
the book’s readership will probably be limited to specialists. Numerous typographical
errors also mar the fine scholarship.
While the book’s many threads are difficult to weave into a tight summary, its three
parts provide a useful structure for Hamnett’s main ideas. Part 1 establishes some of the
challenges that plagued the eighteenth-century Iberian empires, including imperial
authorities’ inability to respond successfully to ongoing fiscal crises and failure to address
the diverging political and economic interests of the American territories. These early
chapters also highlight the fragmented politics of eighteenth-century Brazil and their
implications for nineteenth-century developments, as well as some of the more radical
Andean movements of the eighteenth century, including the Túpac Amaru and Tomás
Katari rebellions (primarily contrasted with the later, much more conservative visions of
political community emerging from the independence era). Finally, Hamnett surveys
attempts by some officials and intellectuals to frame Spain or Portugal as “one sole
nation,” not, of course, as a kind of protonationalism but to give coherence and stability
to the empires, with their many internal differences and competing interests. Though
these initiatives at times received support up to the level of the Spanish monarch, none
made it beyond paper. Nonetheless, the very existence of such projects strongly supports
Hamnett’s deep periodization of imperial breakdown.
Part 2, the book’s argumentative center, examines the unruly and violent decade
unleashed by the imperial crises of 1808–9, including the formation of juntas and the
Cádiz Constitution. Hamnett makes a number of aggressively revisionist arguments. As
noted above, he places a great deal ofexplanatory weight on the long-term contradictions
in the Iberian imperial systems, giving them primacy over the triggering effect of the
French invasion or the particular qualities of the autonomy movements themselves.
Above all, he radically recasts the Spanish experiment in constitutionalism. For Hamnett,
the Constitution of 1812 was less a forward-looking experiment in liberty and more “a
last ditch attempt to hold together the Monarchy already breaking apart” and cobble a
political community under the banner of one sole nation (p. 146). As Hamnett notes, the
debates at Cádiz took place amid violent conflict already underway in key parts of the
American territories, including New Spain and Venezuela.
Part 3 serves as a kind of extended denouement, surveying liberalism’s collapse in
Portugal and Spain in the 1820s and the eventual consummation of independence in
most of the Ibero-American territories.
Some scholars will no doubt raise objections to Hamnett’s methodology and pro-
vocative conclusions. Why, for example, does the book focus mostly on elite actors
without additional attention to how the actions and motivations of popular sectors might
have contributed to disaggregation? Others might question his stark characterization of
the Cádiz experiment, which for all its limitations acted as a great catalyst to political
mobilization in many parts of the Americas. When a work provokes such debate, it is
usually a sign of its significance. Such is the case here. Hamnett’s work compels us to
Book Reviews / Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries 733

rethink some of the standard narratives of change during this important period. That is a
major accomplishment indeed.

matt o’hara, University of California, Santa Cruz


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160523

The Strange Career ofWilliam Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire.
By karl jacoby. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2016. Plates. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. xxviii, 304 pp. Cloth, $27.95.

Karl Jacoby’s The Strange Career of William Ellis is a testament to the power of tenacious
research and beautiful writing. The book tells the remarkable story of how William Ellis,
an African American born into slavery in South Texas, rose to wealth and privilege by
crossing borders of race, class, and nationality.
Ellis began life enslaved on a Victoria, Texas, plantation in 1864 but grew up in the
fluid postemancipation era when new opportunities and harsh realities surrounded
African Americans throughout the United States. The arrival of the railroad in Victoria
in 1882 opened the world to Ellis, and he soon relocated to San Antonio, where he
reinvented himself as Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, a Mexican-born international dealer in
cotton and hides. By seizing on his fluency in Spanish and dressing the part of a high-born
Latino businessman, Ellis began a life of hiding in plain sight, claiming Mexican heritage
because it allowed him to escape suffocating restrictions placed on African Americans
living in the late nineteenth-century US South.
Yet even as he “passed” as an ethnic Mexican, Ellis never separated himself entirely
from African Americans. He made brief forays into Republican Party politics in Texas,
cultivated contacts with black political leaders, and maintained relationships with his
(openly) black extended family throughout his life. As his business ventures regularly
brought him south of the US-Mexican border, he attempted to launch colonization
schemes that would transport African Americans to Mexico. In 1895, Ellis relocated
more than 800 African American sharecroppers from Alabama to a cotton hacienda in
northern Mexico. Ellis managed this by building political connections with the Porfirio
Dı́az regime, which wanted laborers for developing northern Mexico, and Ellis hoped to
profit handsomely. Yet Ellis also clearly believed that life in Mexico could offer freedoms
and liberties denied to African Americans in the United States, a reality that he had lived
himself. The experiment, however, failed spectacularly—as did so many of Ellis’s grand
schemes—and the fallout exposed Ellis within Texas as an African American.
In response, Ellis fled to New York City, where he reinvented himself again, as a
Wall Street broker, and continued to construct a public identity within white society
(portraying himself variously as Cuban, Hawaiian, and Mexican). He married a white
woman and attained a national reputation as a man of influence—at one point repre-
senting the United States in a treaty exchange with Ethiopia. By playing the role of a
“trickster,” as Jacoby styles him, Ellis attained both success and access to power that
would undoubtedly have been unavailable to him otherwise. Yet Ellis also lived under the
734 HAHR / November

constant shadow of being “unmasked” and therefore needed to keep up appearances even
when his business ventures began failing (which they did at a rapid clip during the chaos
of the Mexican Revolution) and he found himself in dire financial straits. When Ellis died
in 1923 at the age of 59, his wife and children inherited his debt but also his access to
white society.
The power of the book comes from Jacoby’s ability to evoke the worlds in which
Ellis lived, in both the United States and Mexico. This allows Jacoby to use Ellis’s
experiences in each country as a window into the other. Ellis’s adventures in the United
States and Mexico, then, are used as a means for contrasting and critiquing concepts of
race in both countries (less examined, although no less relevant, is the concept ofclass). In
that sense, the book is as much about the times and places in which Ellis lived as it is about
the man himself, who sometimes disappears for stretches within the book.
Jacoby does this, in part, because he must: Ellis is an elusive character, even for his
biographer. The research that Jacoby has done is remarkable, yet tracing the life of a man
who made it his business to hide himself requires Jacoby to fill in gaps about Ellis’s life,
intentions, and motivations that surviving sources do not cover. Jacoby handles this well,
usually by drawing on parallel experiences of other African Americans, travelers, and
“passers” as points of reference in understanding the man. In these instances, Jacoby is
reluctant to critique Ellis, usually offering generous interpretations of Ellis’s motiva-
tions. While Jacoby may be right in those moments, the maddening truth is that Ellis
built such high walls around his inner self that we are left to wonder what Ellis thought
about issues of race and identity during his quiet moments alone.
Ultimately, Jacoby has rendered a beautifully written story that joins a growing
comparative literature on the history of race in Mexico and the United States. The book
demonstrates how projects that are willing to span the US-Mexican border can provide
powerful new windows into the histories of both countries.

andrew j. torget, University of North Texas


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160534

Polı́tica y hacienda del tabaco en los imperios Ibéricos (siglos XVII–XIX).


Edited by santiago de luxán. Colección Historia de la Sociedad Polı́tica.
Madrid: Centro de Estudios Polı́ticos Constitucionales, 2014. Photographs.
Illustrations. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. 367 pp. Paper, e25.00.

First encountered by Europeans during Christopher Columbus’s maiden voyage,


tobacco slowly gained worldwide popularity. Royals such as France’s Catherine de
Médicis benefited from its touted medicinal uses, and England’s James I decried its use in
print while enjoying the profits from his Virginia colony. Later during the colonial era,
both Portugal and Spain placed a royal monopoly on tobacco, raising much-needed
funds for the crown. Tobacco was in such high demand that even during the Age of
Revolution it continued to cross the war-torn Atlantic Ocean when virtually all other
shipping ceased or was severely interrupted by blockades and hostile vessels.
Book Reviews / Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries 735

However, many studies of the Spanish and Portuguese empires’ agricultural


products focused not on tobacco but rather on sugar. Seminal works such as Manuel
Moreno Fraginals’s El ingenio: El complejo económico social cubano del azúcar (1964) and
Stuart B. Schwartz’s Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–
1835 (1985) emphasize the strong connection between sugar and African servitude. For
Cuba, Fernando Ortiz (in 1940’s Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar) and others
generally emphasized the identity of those growing tobacco, called vegueros. Later
scholarship, including Jean Stubbs’s Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour
History, 1860–1958 (1985) and Charlotte Cosner’s The Golden Leaf: How Tobacco Shaped
Cuba and the Atlantic World (2015), challenged Ortiz’s characterization of vegueros as
poor white Canary Islanders and demonstrated the diversity of those laboring in the
fields and factories to produce Cuba’s tobacco. Similarly, economic studies of the Atlantic
world such as Peggy K. Liss’s Atlantic Empires: The Network ofTrade and Revolution, 1713–
1826 (1982) successfully established the interconnected commercial web during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Polı́tica y hacienda del tabaco en los imperios Ibéricos (siglos XVII–XIX), edited by San-
tiago de Luxán, successfully builds on earlier tobacco and trade studies. This work, an
important contribution to the historiography of tobacco, provides a detailed examination
of the Atlantic and Iberian tobacco trade from the seventeenth century through the
nineteenth. Through an introduction and ten chapters, Spanish and Portuguese scholars
collaborate to analyze what Luxán describes as the “Atlantic Tobacco System” (pp. 9–10).
The chapters primarily cover the economic aspects of tobacco in Brazil and Portugal and
in Cuba and Spain.
Four chapters address tobacco and the Luso-Atlantic world. Leonor Costa Freire,
examining the Brazilian tobacco monopoly and market from 1600 to 1700, argues that
Portuguese economic practices gave incentives to tobacco while devaluing sugar. João
Paulo Salvado demonstrates that in the eighteenth century Brazilian tobacco was a
valuable source of income for the Portuguese crown. Yet, he contends, it was small to
midsize Lisbon merchants who predominated in the first half of the century rather than
large merchants, as was the case after 1765. This valuable commodity proved tempting
for many in Portugal, João Figueiroa Rego argues in another chapter, including eccle-
siastics who used tobacco and even participated in its contraband trade. Tobacco proved
to be an important economic commodity even in distant areas of the Luso-Atlantic
world, as Marı́a Margarida Vaz do Rego Machado reveals for the Azores.
The remaining chapters are dedicated to Cuba and Spain. Marı́a de los Reyes
Hernández Socorro details the stages of the Cuban tobacco monopoly and analyzes
Cuba’s captains general who implemented it. Santiago de Luxán argues that Spain’s many
tobacco monopolies provided funds to assist the empire’s defenses and bankroll five
separate military conflicts from the second half of the eighteenth century to the early
nineteenth century. Citing the economic importance of tobacco for Cuba as well as
Spain, Marı́a Montserrat Gárate Ojanguren builds on Luxán’s work and contends that
the very structure of the Cuban monopoly destined it for failure. Among other con-
tributing factors, she argues, “Cuba continued growing elevated quantities of tobacco
736 HAHR / November

whose most important destination was not the peninsular market” (p. 242). Lack offunds
from New Spain to pay Cuban farmers led them to seek markets outside the legal system.
Vicent Sanz Rozalén notes that in western Cuba tobacco farms were small in scale; like
Gárate Ojanguren, he argues that the monopoly’s inability to pay farmers for their
tobacco led them to enter the contraband market. The need for tobacco to meet the
demands of Seville’s tobacco factory was so great that importations of Virginia tobacco
were needed between 1701 and 1760, José Manuel Rodrı́guez Gordillo demonstrates.
Rodrı́guez Gordillo reveals that Virginia tobacco regularly accounted for around one-
third of all tobacco entering the Seville facility. In 1717, the amount of tobacco from
Virginia, at almost 947,000 pounds, was slightly higher than that arriving from the
Spanish colonies.
This work is well researched, drawing on both archival and extensive Spanish-,
Portuguese-, and English-language secondary sources. This study’s audience is primarily
scholars interested in tobacco, Atlantic trade, and monopolies in general. However,
graduate courses in either Latin American or Atlantic history would find it valuable as an
example of a detailed analysis of the depth of Atlantic world economics and adminis-
tration.

charlotte a. cosner, Greenfield Commonwealth Virtual School


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160545

Reasoning against Madness: Psychiatry and the State in Rio de Janeiro, 1830–1944.
By manuella meyer. Rochester Studies in Medical History. Rochester, NY:
University of Rochester Press, 2017. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography.
Index. xi, 248 pp. Cloth, $125.00.

Reasoning against Madness offers a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of the emergence
and development of psychiatry in Rio de Janeiro, focusing on its complex and evolving
relationship with the imperial and republican state. The book examines the evolution of
Carioca psychiatry, from the process that led to the establishment of the Hospı́cio Dom
Pedro II (later renamed the Hospı́cio Nacional de Alienados) in the mid-nineteenth
century to the diffusion of psychoanalysis in the twentieth.
The volume under review encompasses, at the same time, both more and less than
what is usually expected from a history of psychiatry. It embraces more because, focusing
on the historical evolution of a single mental institution, it offers a larger picture of social,
political, and cultural developments taking place in Brazil during a century-long period.
Although Manuella Meyer’s analysis is not confined to the history of the Hospı́cio Dom
Pedro II, the asylum occupies, nonetheless, a central place in her narrative. However, the
book offers relatively little information about issues that are considered crucial to the
history of madness and its treatment, such as the evolution of specific psychiatric prac-
tices or the evolving procedures through which someone became a mental patient. Thus,
the volume is more successful as a “sociopolitical history of psychiatry” than as an
“intellectual and cultural construction of madness as a field of knowledge” (pp. 3–4).
Book Reviews / Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries 737

Reasoning against Madness starts by analyzing the reception of French psychiatric


ideas in Brazil, the construction of a myth around Philippe Pinel’s supposed abolition of
physical constraints for the mentally ill, and the concomitant campaign for the creation
of a mental asylum in the capital of the Brazilian empire. Meyer follows the conflicts
developing between the incipient psychiatric profession and the well-established Cath-
olic institutions around the care of the insane and the very definition of insanity. She
shows that psychiatry developed in Brazil (as it did elsewhere) through a long process of
conflict, accommodation, and permanent negotiation not only with the state and the
church but also with other institutions and practices that claimed for themselves the
power and ability to define and treat madness. Thus, the Hospı́cio Dom Pedro II was
born as a result of negotiations between Catholic institutions, the imperial state, and the
medical community (p. 40).
The process of ensuring legitimacy for psychiatry as a scientific approach to mental
diseases was a long and difficult one. Psychiatrists saw themselves and their knowledge as
protagonists in the process of social and state modernization, defining and secluding
those members of society considered undesirable by the elites (mostly the black and the
marginal poor). However, until the beginning of the twentieth century psychiatry had
very little to offer in terms of successful therapeutic techniques. Only in the twentieth
century did psychiatrists become accepted as experts who possessed a specific form of
(useful) knowledge. Meyer focuses on the trajectory of two psychiatrists who were
directors of the hospı́cio and who played an important role in the modernization of Rio
de Janeiro psychiatry: João Carlos Teixeira Brandão (the first psychiatrist to serve as the
hospı́cio’s administrative director) and Juliano Moreira. The descendant of African
slaves, Moreira overcame the social limits imposed by his ethnic origins in a racist society
and was (and still is) considered as the main modernizer of Brazilian psychiatry. He
introduced in Brazil the ideas of Emil Kraepelin and, more significantly, of Sigmund
Freud. As Meyer argues (perhaps with some exaggeration), psychoanalysis would play an
important role in the modernization of psychiatry during the first half of the twentieth
century.
During the imperial era, psychiatrists’ struggle for professionalization and legiti-
macy was mainly directed against the Catholic Church. In republican times, other sys-
tems of belief, besides Catholicism, disputed psychiatry’s legitimacy. The last chapter of
the book—the most original one, in my opinion—focuses on the conflicting relationship
between psychiatry and two forms of what Meyer broadly calls “spiritism.” While can-
domblé is a religion of African origins, Kardecist spiritism was born in France in the
nineteenth century. Both forms of spiritism were popular in Brazil at the turn of the
twentieth century and, according to Meyer, they (particularly Kardecist spiritism) pro-
moted a hybrid combination of both modern and traditional cultural elements. Although
candomblé was widely practiced by the black population, it also attracted (and still
attracts) members of the social elite. Kardecist spiritism was mostly confined to the white,
liberal, elite sectors. Candomblé and Kardecist spiritism had therapeutic claims
regarding madness and therefore were perceived as competitors to psychiatry. It is no
738 HAHR / November

wonder that psychiatrists were, at least until the 1940s, at the forefront of the struggle to
outlaw both spiritist practices.
Reasoning against Madness is a fine piece of scholarship based on solid research. It will
be mandatory reading for everybody interested in the history of psychiatry in Latin
America and in the history of Brazil in general. It is unfortunate, however, that sprinkled
throughout the book are an unusual number of minor factual mistakes that start at the very
first line of the introduction, where we read “Pedro I” instead of the correct “Pedro II.”

mariano ben plotkin, CIS-CONICET/IDES / Universidad Nacional de Tres de


Febrero
doi 10.1215/00182168-7160575

The Blood Contingent: The Military and the Making of Modern Mexico, 1876–1911.
By stephen b. neufeld. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017.
Photographs. Maps. Figures. Table. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 383 pp.
Paper, $29.95.

Histories of Mexico tend to give a broad brush to the army of Porfirio Dı́az. The details
of daily life in the army have been missing. Stephen Neufeld, who is on faculty at
California State University, Fullerton, spent years researching and writing this imagi-
native study. His task was to understand the army during the Porfiriato (1876–1911).
Easier said than done.
The portrait that he presents is sharp and explains a lot about Mexico during those
years. Recruitment was forced and random. Young men, often those without local
standing or protection, were literally grabbed from village lanes, chained together, and
marched off to distant barracks where they were beaten into submissive ranks. The new
soldiers were less recruits than captives. The barracks reflected their dishonored status.
Many, such as the one at Tlatelolco in the capital, were former convents built around a
central courtyard, with very high walls, barred windows, and guarded gateways. The
atmosphere was more of a prison than military quarters. Many of these poor men were
indigenous, with limited or no Spanish. The army’s mission was to turn them into
Mexicans. As Neufeld relates, “The barracks developed its own language, a cant largely
indecipherable to officers that wed a community of conscripts from various regions who
may not otherwise have shared a common tongue” (p. 210). In theory officers acted as
teachers, but in Neufeld’s telling the training routine was so brutal that one wonders how
effective it could have been in producing effective soldiers.
The ragged conscripts trained, drilled, and learned basic soldierly skills in the
central courtyard. They also took their meals and spread their sleeping mats there.
Seemingly the only relief that they had from the harshness was smuggled-in alcohol,
cheap cigarettes, and marijuana, the singing ofcorridos, and their female companions, the
soldaderas, and their offspring. The army rations, based on European foods, were
designed to break with native diets, from which the conscripts were saved by the sol-
daderas’ proper tacos. The women and children were allowed in only at night. By day
Book Reviews / Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries 739

they roamed the streets rummaging for food and water. Some did a lively commerce with
such forage. For months on end they provided the conscripts with their main link to the
outside. Eventually conscripts were allowed more freedom to go out.
It seems a mismatch for the regime to have wanted educated professional officers to
oversee such dismal ranks. The military academy, located in Mexico City’s Chapultepec
Castle, had the mission of taking “boys from privilege” and transforming them into
earnest “young officers to lead the country forward” (p. 129). They “learned a scientific
and rational approach to modern warfare and a shared military lore that . . . molded their
worldview” (p. 129). Their destiny would be to direct Mexico “away from tradition and
toward the progress they saw in London or Paris” (p. 129). The majority of cadets were
from similar backgrounds, many from military families of upper middle or upper classes,
raised in the larger cities. The tuition and cost of uniforms limited those who could apply.
There were few indigenous or nonwhites. The routine, topics studied, and discipline
were similar to the academies at West Point, Berlin, and Sandhurst. According to
Neufeld, “The perfect cadet would be brave in battle and polished in salons, ready to face
opponents with pen or sword, and able . . . to serve even a sworn enemy for the good of
Mexico” (p. 133). The disillusion that most of them would experience when faced with
the reality of the barracks must have been severe. The better connected would be the
Europeanized face that the regime sent on assignment as military attachés.
Neufeld gives the text a powerful structure that dissects the army’s social and cul-
tural history. He opens by carefully placing the army into the national story, then goes on
to examine the horror of conscription, the destruction of the captive and the creation of
the soldier through drill and ritual, the varied roles of the soldaderas, the education of the
officer corps, life in the barracks, and the taking of the army into battle against Yaqui in
the north and Maya in the south. As chapter 8 reveals, it was the modern conquest of
Mexico, as the army made the colonization of the national map possible. His use of
semifictional characters to people introductory sections is extremely effective.
In discussing the legacies of the Porfirian army, Neufeld ominously proposes that it
set a background for “the rising public fear” of today’s military and the “widespread
governmental corruption” that hinders “national prosperity” (p. 309). Throughout the
twentieth century the Mexican army remained an “important element in the weaving of
political culture” (p. 310).

frank d. mccann, University of New Hampshire


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160586

“Em benefı́cio do povo”: Obras, governo e sociedade na cidade colonial.


Edited by jorun poettering and gefferson ramos rodrigues. Rio de
Janeiro: Mauad, 2016. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. 380 pp. Paper, R$69.00.

Spaniards and Portuguese imagined their settlement in the New World as focused on
urban spaces—not the real cities from which they came, but those envisaged by theorists
since Roman times, beginning with Vitruvius. Rectilinear towns with central plazas and
740 HAHR / November

prominently placed churches and government palaces made religious and secular
authority real. Besides laying out plans and maintaining order, authorities would also
protect the property of the rich and succor the poor and the sick. In Portuguese America
these broad functions fell under the rubric of polı́cia, as is still true today.
Urban planning and social assistance (with an underlying interest in social control)
link the 13 chapters of this book edited by two scholars, a German and a Brazilian. All but
three chapters deal with Latin America, principally Brazil. But the subjects raised touch
on universal issues and experiences as cities everywhere have confronted the dilemmas
posed by growing populations and conflicting interests. Planners made concessions to
geographical realities and, over time, significant alterations to original plans; in Rio de
Janeiro, for instance, leaders confronted an uneven topography, with the original center
of town on swampy ground. But Sabine Panzram calculates that over 40 percent of all
colonial cities in Spanish America were rectangular, and she shows how King Philip II’s
ordenanzas were largely based on the works of Vitruvius.
Antonia da Silva Mota examines more than 800 petitions for land addressed to the
county council (câmara) of São Luı́s do Maranhão from 1720 to 1820, which included the
petitioners’ names as well as their professions, ethnicity or race, and gender. She finds
that, despite an earlier plan reflecting Renaissance notions of symmetry and rational
order, many, many urban lots were taken over and built on before any legal steps
regarding ownership had even been taken. Imprecise and overlapping boundaries were
the result. A boom in exports ofcotton and rice in the latter halfof the eighteenth century
resulted in an enormous jump in land value. City councilmen began to use their position
for private gain, revoking earlier restrictions on lot size. This led to the concentration of
ownership and the expulsion of earlier settlers, who were then forced onto swampy areas
or very distant lots. On the other hand, the exchange of cash enabled a few persons of
once lowly position—even former slaves—to secure titles to valuable urban plots.
George F. Cabral de Souza focuses his attention on the county council of Recife,
cautioning the reader that Recife should not be considered typical. Here it is not physical
structures that loom predominant in the records of the council but public health: illness
and hygiene, medical care, orphans, the handicapped, food supply (especially proteins),
or cattle loose on the streets. Unintended consequences are exemplified by the fact that
when leather from elsewhere undercut the market in Recife, the supply of meat in the city
plummeted and its price radically increased.
The cities of Olinda and Recife sometimes clashed over the problem of relying on
the same water supply, but for different and conflicting purposes. Olinda, the older city
founded in the 1530s, had built a dam on the adjoining small river to form a small lake
with an appropriate spillway. Across the top of the dam they built a road. Eventually the
slightly downstream Recife—begun later but enjoying a better port—greatly out-
stripped Olinda in wealth. Its residents believed, or said that they believed, that the lake
was a breeding ground for disease-transmitting mosquitoes. Depending on which side
gained the ear ofthe Lisbon-appointed governor, the dam was torn down, rebuilt, and then
torn down again. The dispute lasted for decades, providing historian Gefferson Ramos
Rodrigues with a plenitude of documents that demonstrate shifting centers of power.
Book Reviews / Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries 741

The supply of water inevitably played a crucial part in urban planning, a point
driven home by Denise Maria Ribeiro Tedeschi’s chapter on the eighteenth-century
Brazilian mining town of Mariana. The enterprise of mining itself, as practiced here,
relied on an abundant supply of rushing water to uncover veins ofgold. As the population
ballooned, the town’s water supply emerged as a central issue. Reports on the bidding for
public contracts to supply water to the town’s residents, along with the council’s expense
records, open an intriguing window on the vagaries of water supply. Elaborate water-
works were built—canals lined with tiles measuring three hands wide and three and a
half hands high—with enough declivity to make the system work but not so much as to
destroy it. At other places builders used tubular tiles placed underground. Water was
channeled to pipes leading to fountains, two at first and fourteen eventually. Here resi-
dents caught water in a barrel or, a bit further downstream, watered their horses. And
there were benches where they could sit, waiting their turn.
Luciano Raposo de Almeida Figueiredo and Marieta Pinheiro de Carvalho deal
with the intendência de polı́cia in Rio de Janeiro. This agency dealt not only with issues of
crime and security but with the drainage of swampy land, the regulation of the slaugh-
terhouse, the placement of cemeteries (instead of burial in churches), urban lighting,
street cleaning, and road building. Despite all the outcry, such works were paid for by
relatively small extraordinary taxes, the revenue from which had to be used for the
declared and specific purpose. Gradually custom came to require that such expenditures
be for the common good, and public works became evidence of the contract between the
people and their sovereign.
Taken together, these essays stimulate our interest in seemingly mundane issues of
city governance. The editors gathered a productive group of authors and encouraged a
diversity of approaches and writing styles. They appear to have done little editing: a
single paragraph spans from page 50 to page 55, and, at least in one case, the same longish
phrase is needlessly repeated two pages later (pp. 71, 73). But no matter: the approach
allowed contributors the freedom to innovate and pursue divergent interests, intro-
ducing readers to historical actors with contrasting geographical origins, different cul-
tures, varying political theories, and disparate social practices. All this in places where
central state power was weaker than in Europe and city governments enjoyed greater
freedom of action. Well worth the read.

richard graham, University of Texas at Austin


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160597

La república imaginada: Representaciones culturales y discursos polı́ticos en la época de la


independencia. By rolando rojas. Estudios Históricos. Lima: Instituto de Estudios
Peruanos, 2017. Notes. Bibliography. 156 pp. Paper, PEN$10.50.

This book by Rolando Rojas analyzes how Peru’s liberal elite imagined the nation-state
after independence in the early 1820s. Rojas starts by observing that today nobody doubts
that the social and political realities of independence-era Peru did not conform to the
742 HAHR / November

ideals outlined by the constitution. According to the constitution, all Peruvians were
equal before the law. All adult men had political rights, and both the parliament and the
head of state were to be elected through fair and competitive elections. The new political
order put an end to the Old Regime’s division between commoners and nobility.
However, discrimination against indigenous people and the urban poor did not disap-
pear. The rule of law did not exist for most Peruvians throughout the nineteenth century
(or the twentieth, one might add). Therefore, the legal order had little in common with
actual political and social life. While many historians have discussed the divide between
the official and the real Peru, Rojas is one of the few interested in the way that the liberal
elite imagined a country so different from liberal ideals.
The book is divided into three chapters. In the first, Rojas describes the group that
he calls “criollos liberales.” On the one hand, he distinguishes these criollos from foreign
leaders during independence. As we know, foreigners led the most important armies of
Peru’s independence war. The criollos, therefore, had to explain why they had not been
able to lead the independence movement. To this end, they described colonial Lima as
the bulwark of Spanish rule, which had made it difficult for Lima’s liberals to stand up for
an independent Peru. Nevertheless, according to the criollos liberales, they had worked
for independence in such heroic ways that Lima eventually fell to the independence
movement without any battle. Thus, Lima’s liberal elite could claim to be the natural
leaders of independent Peru. Unlike the royalists in Lima, the criollos liberales had
fought for independence, risking their lives and those of their families; unlike the foreign
armies of Simón Bolı́var and José de San Martı́n they were Peruvian born, interested in
the well-being of their nation and their compatriots. The liberal elite of Lima created a
self-description that legitimated their national leadership while delegitimizing the role
of other elite groups.
The second chapter describes the way that the liberal elite imagined indigenous
people. The chapter is titled, in a play on the article by Cecilia Méndez, “Incas sı́, indios
también.” According to Rojas, the liberal elite imagined a nation-state of educated and
“civilized” citizens—that is to say, a nation-state without indigenous people. However,
Rojas argues that liberals believed in educating indigenous people. That is why he speaks
of a “liberalismo indigenista” (p. 66). According to this view, liberals created a positive
image of the indigenous population, describing them as patriots who had fought for
independence. At the same time, liberals created the idea of the Peruvian “family,” which
included everybody living in Peru (p. 65). However, liberals did not believe indigenous
people equal to the elite of Lima. On the contrary, indigenous people had to be educated
through schools and the political life of the nation-state, especially elections.
The third chapter is about how the liberals imagined the popular classes of Lima.
Liberals described them in a similar way as they did indigenous people, as uneducated
and “ignorant” (p. 131). The urban poor of Lima, many of whom were enslaved or freed
men and women, were imagined as a threat to liberal rule, a fearful potential source of
rebellions and disorders.
In his concluding remarks, Rojas speaks of a “fictitious nation” (p. 136). The nation
imagined by the liberal elite did not exist and would never exist. Nevertheless, the
Book Reviews / Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries 743

discourse of the liberal elite was of great importance, as it explained and justified the
contradictory political and social order. Focusing on texts written in Lima in the early
1820s, Rojas argues that the ideas that he describes were fundamental until the war with
Chile (1879–84). Liberals never believed the indigenous and the poor to be citizens with
all rights. They were imagined as potential citizens who had to be educated—in other
words, supervised and controlled. Rojas’s book is an important contribution at a moment
when some historians are once again describing the liberal elite as the group who wanted
to forge a Peru for all people. Rojas reminds us that the liberal elite did not intend to
change the country; instead, by elaborating a discourse on the Peruvian nation, liberals
justified the racist social order.

ulrich mücke, Universität Hamburg


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160608

The Vanguard ofthe Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy
in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. By james e. sanders. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2014. Maps. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi, 339 pp.
Paper, $25.95.

James Sanders asserts in this ambitious and important book that the young states of
Spanish America, far from lagging behind the United States and Europe in the pursuit of
liberty, democracy, and republicanism, stood at the “vanguard of the Atlantic world,”
especially during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Focusing on these times
of intractable political instability and international conflict, which North Americans and
Europeans evoked to justify their imputation that Spanish America’s fledgling republics
were unfit for self-rule, Sanders argues passionately that it was precisely during this
period that the egalitarian, democratic, and republican ideas suppressed elsewhere in the
Atlantic world in the wake of the 1848 revolutions found their fullest expression, in what
Sanders calls “American republican modernity,” the rise and decline of which constitute
the leitmotif of the book. Readers familiar with Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics,
Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (2004) can now follow Sanders’s style of
analysis, which tracks the interface between sociability, political discourse, and direct
action, on a broader, continental scale.
Although the interplay of race and politics in southeastern Colombia remains the
anchor for the book, with the Cauca’s charismatic mixed-race Liberal caudillo David
Peña meriting a chapter of his own, Sanders explores two other regional contexts where
ideas of equality, democracy, and republicanism found fertile ground midcentury:
Uruguay, where the beleaguered liberal Colorados deployed the military skills of freed
slaves and Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Italian legion to successfully challenge their Blanco
opponents backed jointly by imperial, slave-owning Brazil and by Argentina, under the
oppressive Juan Manuel de Rosas; and Mexico, where Conservative reaction followed by
European intervention brought forth the Zapotec provincial lawyer Benito Juárez,
founder of the continent’s most successful movement of liberal secularism and patriotic
nationalism.
744 HAHR / November

How convincing is Sanders’s assertion that “Latin American politics were critically
central to the development of universalism, rights, equality, and democracy in world
history, not just a sideshow to the history of the West,” and how effectively does the book
advance this argument (p. 235)? Constructing a hemispheric analysis of political dis-
course and practice based on periodical sources (125 newspapers, most of them pro-
vincial, were consulted, mainly drawn from Peru, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay), on
soundings in Mexican, Colombian, and Uruguayan archives, and on the conclusions of a
small number of local and regional studies poses conceptual and methodological chal-
lenges that Sanders only partly resolves. With the exception of the introductory chapter
on Uruguay and the sixth on Peña’s southern Colombia, limits of space prevent adequate
regional and historical contextualization of the numerous examples of radical republican
discourse garnered from elsewhere. Sparseness of context is particularly problematic for
Mexico, where even a brief discussion of the geography of the Liberals’ rise would have
helped readers understand why so many of Sanders’s examples of popular liberal dis-
course emanated from Veracruz, home of the Juárez government during the Three Years
War, and Chihuahua, the government’s home during the French Intervention.
If the evidence of radical republican discourse often lacks regional or temporal
contextualization, the presentation of the ideas themselves is at times repetitive and
overly schematized. Sanders traces three consecutive stages of dominant liberal and
republican discourse over the century: elite “Europhile modernity” from independence
until the 1850s, “American republican modernity” from the 1840s to the 1870s, and
“Western industrial modernity” from the 1870s until well into the twentieth century.
Rather than ease his task, these cumbersome labels cloud and cramp an analysis further
burdened with reductionist and imprecise social descriptors such as “subalterns” and
“elites.” This reviewer would have preferred the great stories that Sanders tells, and the
interesting personalities that he portrays, to be allowed to speak eloquently for them-
selves rather than be shoehorned into anachronistic social categories and conceptual
paradigms. The egalitarian, democratic, and republican ideas associated with “American
republican modernity” preceded and survived beyond midcentury, just as did their
antonyms, in both North and South America and on both sides of the Atlantic. Just why
these ideas and movements should have had such popular appeal in Latin America during
the midcentury requires fuller explanation by reference, for example, to the weakness of
states; the opportunities provided by vast territory, mountainous terrain, and poor
internal communications; the impact of mass print communication on increased literacy;
and the arrival (or not) of the telegraph and the steamship.
In spite of these methodological and semantic reservations, Sanders must be praised
for his perseverance in stubbornly maintaining his focus on popular engagement with the
egalitarian, democratic, and republican ideas that pervaded the nineteenth-century
Atlantic world. What emerges is a Latin version of American exceptionalism, Sanders
showing how indigenous peasants and former slaves in Mexico and Colombia, led by
charismatic mixed-race caudillos, demonstrated to the North Atlantic and Mediterra-
nean worlds what it was to be egalitarian, republican, and democratic. The Vanguard ofthe
Atlantic World paints a convincing portrait of how progressive Latin Americans saw
Book Reviews / Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries 745

themselves and how progressive Europeans saw the republics of Spanish America,
especially during the European intervention in Mexico between 1861 and 1867, a dra-
matic event that Sanders returns to throughout the book.

guy thomson, University of Warwick


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160619

Slave Families and the Hato Economy in Puerto Rico. By david m. stark. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2015. Tables. Illustrations. Notes. Appendixes.
Bibliography. Index. xv, 251 pp. Cloth, $74.95.

Recently, historians of the early modern Caribbean have begun to move beyond a tra-
ditional focus on sugar plantations by highlighting alternate economic, environmental,
and political systems that structured the social lives of enslaved and free people. David
M. Stark’s Slave Families and the Hato Economy in Puerto Rico is a major contribution to
this literature. Stark examines the relationship between slave labor, demography, and
family structure in Puerto Rico from 1660 to 1815, a period during which the island
produced little sugar and legally exported few cash crops. Stark shows that far from being
an economic backwater, midcolonial Puerto Rico produced a diversity of commodities,
including hides, foodstuffs, and timber, most of which entered the contraband trade.
These were the principal products of large rural ranches called hatos, where many of the
island’s slaves lived and worked. Hatos were less regimented than sugar plantations,
allowing slaves in Puerto Rico to achieve higher birth rates, live longer lives, and form
more stable families than their counterparts elsewhere in the Caribbean. Ultimately,
Stark argues that the hato economy fostered the development of an Afro-creole society
and culture that were particular to Puerto Rico.
Stark first describes the rise of the hato economy in the late seventeenth century,
when Puerto Rico experienced a sharp decline in legal trading opportunities and waning
cash crop production. Where some historians have seen stagnation, Stark sees the origin
of a more diversified economy, typified by the hato. Relative to sugar plantations, hatos
required few laborers and allowed more time for provision farming, both of which had
an ameliorative effect on the hardships of slavery. The result was a stable slave population
that, Stark argues, did not rely on the regular introduction of new slaves via the slave
trade. Using baptismal records to work around gaps in shipping evidence, he demon-
strates in chapter 3 that the majority of slaves baptized on the island were baptized as
infants, which indicates that the slave trade was a minor source of the island’s enslaved
population. This, Stark argues, led to the “deculturation” of African-born slaves, rapid
creolization, and the emergence of a “coherent, functional, and unified Afro-Puerto
Rican slave community” (p. 94). Social cohesion, in turn, manifested in marital oppor-
tunities and family stability, the subjects of the final two chapters. In chapter 4, we learn
not only that slave marriage rates were higher in Puerto Rico than elsewhere in the
Caribbean but also that spousal selection was not dictated strictly by age, place of birth,
or relationships between owners, which indicates that slaves exercised some freedom of
746 HAHR / November

choice in marriage. Finally, chapter 5 introduces what is possibly Stark’s most significant
finding: that slaves in Puerto Rico achieved high birth rates and, ultimately, a natural
growth rate, both exceedingly rare in Caribbean slave societies.
Stark builds his arguments on an impressive foundation of quantitative evidence,
collected from the marital, baptismal, and burial records of 21 parochial archives across
Puerto Rico. He concentrates on the northwestern province of Arecibo, where the hato
economy was most entrenched and where records are most complete, and contextualizes
his findings there within the broader scope of the island. Stark uses the method of family
reconstitution—reading disparate records side by side to map changes to individual
families—allowing him insights into issues that are often not addressed explicitly, like
the size of slave populations on individual hatos. Although the limitations of parish
records are evident throughout—a fact that Stark discusses frankly—his methodology is
a valuable model for scholars confronting similar evidentiary constraints.
There are some areas in which the book’s limits are more noticeable. For instance,
Stark regularly shuffles between quantitative measures in an effort to extract as much
meaningful data as possible, which occasionally leads to greater confusion than it does
clarity. More seriously, Stark’s reading of hato slavery, contrasted with the brutality of
plantation slavery, sometimes appears somewhat rose-colored. A more critical analysis of
racial violence and power dynamics would have been a helpful complement to Stark’s
explicitly comparative approach.
Stark is meticulous in his research, clear in his writing, and judicious in his argu-
ment. By connecting contraband trade to rural slave labor, Stark successfully fuses
familiar strains of Caribbean social history with more recent interest in transimperial
commerce. Above all, this book makes a thoroughly original contribution to scholarship
on a time and place that are both understudied and central to our understanding of
Caribbean slavery beyond the sugar plantation. For these reasons, it constitutes a major
addition to Caribbean history and the history of slavery more generally and will be of
lasting importance to scholars in these fields.

j. m. h. clark, University of Kentucky


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160633

Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries

The Peculiar Revolution: Rethinking the Peruvian Experiment under Military Rule.
Edited by carlos aguirre and paulo drinot. Austin: University of Texas Press,
2017. Maps. Figures. Notes. Index. vii, 353 pp. Paper, $29.95.

This is a book that we have long needed on a regime and period in Peru’s recent past that
has largely faded from popular memory, been erased from official recognition, and gone
mostly ignored in recent scholarship. Recall that for a startling few years the revolu-
tionary military regime of General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–75) turned Peru upside
down in a striking effort to bring the notoriously tradition-bound, oligarchy-ruled, and
generally socially archaic country into the twentieth century.
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 747

Expertly edited by two of the country’s leading historians, this book brings together
a collection of original essays by a group of veteran and new Peruvian scholars to probe
and assess the process and outcome of a wholly uncommon military regime that trans-
fixed observers at the time due to its unusual transformational goals. As to be expected in
a collection of this type, there is no central thesis to the book. However, it constitutes an
important shift away from the political science–dominated approach that characterized
the immediate, first-generation scholarship on the regime, which the editors carefully
survey in the introduction. Rather, The Peculiar Revolution takes a new cultural, ideo-
logical, and interdisciplinary approach to the subject in a set of themes and interpreta-
tions that are consistent with the cultural turn in historical studies over the past couple of
decades.
This can be seen clearly in the organization of the book into three parts, respectively
titled “Symbols, Icons, and Contested Memories: Cultural Approaches to the Peruvian
Revolution,” “Teachers, Peasants, Generals: Military Nationalism and Its Agents,” and
“Decentering the Revolution: Regional Approaches to Velasco’s Peru.” Part 1 consists of
four contributions. Carlos Aguirre examines the regime’s patronization of the sesqui-
centennial celebration of independence to illustrate its national liberation credentials.
Similarly, Charles Walker skillfully shows how the Revolutionary Government of the
Armed Forces (RGAF) championed the eighteenth-century revolutionary leader Túpac
Amaru II as a national symbol of its goal to liberate Peru from internal and external
domination. Adrián Lerner offers a narrative history of General Velasco Alvarado’s
funeral to illustrate many of the characteristics of the regime that he led. Paulo Drinot
analyzes the contested memories of the RGAF in an innovative way through an exami-
nation of hundreds of comments on the regime uploaded on YouTube.
Part 2 examines the particular policies of the RGAF and its key institutions. Patricia
Oliart focuses on the regime’s education reform, particularly influences that shaped it
such as Paulo Freire as well as the opposition from teachers aligned with the left-wing
Unified Syndicate of Workers in Education of Peru. Jaymie Patricia Heilman considers
how land reform was limited to changes in land tenure but also its long-run impact on
peasant organizations and politics. Lourdes Hurtado explores the divisions within the
masculine culture of the armed forces that, along with other factors, thrust the army into
the central role in the reform movement and created the popular view of Velasco
Alvarado as a father figure. George Philip adroitly explains the rapidity and completeness
of the decline of the Velasco Alvarado regime between 1973 and 1975, although he
observes correctly that it was attributable not just to him but to the failure of the entire
military experiment.
The third and final section comprises five contributions. Anna Cant reveals the local
dynamics and contexts of the revolution, normally only examined from on high via Peru’s
Lima-centric polity. While the National System of Support for Social Mobilization
established overall policy from the center, on the ground the group was subject to local
conditions and pressures. Mark Carey opens up a heretofore-neglected but important
subject: the impact of the regime’s new water laws and irrigation projects on agriculture
and agrarian reform on the coast. Nathan Clarke examines for the first time the
748 HAHR / November

Chimbotazo, the riot that exploded in 1973 in Chimbote, Peru’s most important port
city. Mark Rice shifts attention to Cuzco in the context of the understudied subject of
tourism. Finally, Stefano Varese brings his personal experience to bear in his contribution
on the impact of the reforms on the Amazonian peoples.
All these chapters open a window on new subjects, illuminated for the first time,
with impeccable scholarship and clear, accessible writing. It is a work that will draw a wide
range ofreaders to a seminal event in recent Peruvian and South American history, one that
contrasts sharply with the other Cold War–driven military interventions in the region.

peter klarén, George Washington University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160644

Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory.


By robert f. alegre. Foreword by elena poniatowska. The Mexican
Experience. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Photographs. Map. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. xx, 275 pp. Paper, $40.00.

Robert Alegre writes with palpable empathy. He cares for the railway men and women
whom he portrays in Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico. The result is a thoughtful
examination of the lives and times of railroad workers, especially in the years immediately
following World War II until the massive strikes that rocked Mexico’s railways in 1958
and 1959.
The book focuses on three interweaving themes. The first is the brief but important
redemocratization of the Sindicato de Trabajadores Ferrocarrileros de México (STFRM)
and the important strikes, particularly in the late 1950s, in which workers sought better
wages, improved benefits, and greater autonomy. The second theme is gender. Alegre is
primarily interested in including women in the male-dominated story and in framing
Mexico’s railway industry as ruled by patriarchal norms and machismo. Of these two
themes, the political narrative is more dominant, in part due to Alegre’s choice to focus on
the politics and economics driving STFRM actions and in part due to a lack of sources
documenting women. The STFRM only allowed male members who, in turn, worked in
a male-dominated industry. The lack of documents about women’s lives also points to
one of the regrettable consequences of patriarchy in mid-twentieth-century Mexico
more broadly. But Alegre’s decision to incorporate gender nonetheless makes Railroad
Radicals in Cold War Mexico original, refreshing, and insightful. The third theme is the
Cold War and how it affected the politics of the era.
Alegre makes a number of arguments. The one that stands out is that after years of
discontentment over stagnating wages and charro (government-allegiant and corrupt)
union bosses, members of the STFRM victoriously kicked out the charros and created a
more democratic syndicate that obtained benefits for its workers while threatening the
hegemony of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, Mexico’s ruling political party.
Alegre argues that these were genuine successes for these workers, even if they were
short-lived and ultimately quashed following a strike in 1959. Alegre’s more gender-
themed arguments are that women such as Lilia Benitez and Virginia López López were
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 749

vital to this movement and the railroad-worker communities that sustained it. Women
built networks, aided male union members, shamed scabs and cowards, and joined picket
lines. While often supportive of the men in their lives who worked on the railways,
women had different experiences than men. Reflecting back, men recalled their work
with macho nostalgia. It was a time of hard but rewarding work, drinking, and sexual
conquests. Many women remembered life differently. They reflected on difficult eco-
nomic times, loneliness, physical abuse, and strong women who politicized the kitchen
when their male family members and friends hid in the hills to avoid authorities.
Another prominent argument is that Cold War rhetoric created a “dichotomizing
idiom” that painted STFRM protesters as Soviet-influenced communists and STFRM
opponents as reactionaries and partners of US imperialists (p. 177). Some heads of the
STFRM were Marxists, but Alegre shows that most rank-and-file members, and many
leaders, were nationalists who referenced the revolutionary Constitution of 1917. Alegre
finds little evidence of US direct involvement in the Mexican government’s eventual
crackdown on the STFRM, though US and International Monetary Fund officials
pressured the administration of Adolfo López Mateos to maintain pro-business, free-
market policies.
The book would have benefited from a little more attention to the motives of the
government agents, industrialists, and middle-class Mexicans who became disgruntled
with the STFRM. As Alegre points out, the government railways faced serious financial
difficulties. There were differences of opinion across professions and class lines. Not all
STFRM opponents were corrupt government officials and union bosses looking to profit
at the railway workers’ expense (though surely some were). Sympathizing with the
workers, Alegre never genuinely explores the thoughts, politics, and economics of the
people opposed to the union’s radicalism.
The best-documented and most coherent story in the book pertains to Demetrio
Vallejo and the strikes of 1958 and 1959. Vallejo, who originally hailed from the state of
Oaxaca and who had worked in the small but important coastal port of Coatzacoalcos,
Veracruz, rose from obscurity to lead the charge against the charros. Elected by workers
during the STFRM’s push for democratic reform, Vallejo headed the union during its
greatest victories and ultimate defeat toward the end of the 1950s, when the STFRM,
whose members worked on government-owned railways, attempted to help laborers
working for private railways gain wage increases.
Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico is a strong contribution to the historical liter-
ature on railway workers, unions, and gender in post–World War II Mexico. The
numerous oral histories that Alegre uses are particularly compelling and insightful. A
relatively brief book that is clearly written and tackles a myriad of important themes, it
would make an excellent classroom text. It definitely belongs on the shelves of historians
of twentieth-century Mexico.

j. justin castro, Arkansas State University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160655
750 HAHR / November

A History of Boxing in Mexico: Masculinity, Modernity, and Nationalism.


By stephen d. allen. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017.
Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 281 pp. Cloth, $65.00.

Boxers wrapped in Mexican flags have become an iconic image of the patria. Stephen
Allen argues in A History ofBoxing in Mexico: Masculinity, Modernity, and Nationalism that
this national eminence emerged during the 1930s in concert with changing ideals. The
sport of boxing both shaped and was shaped by Mexican identity alongside performances
ofgender and modernity. Allen contends that boxers became symbolic figures used by the
elite in order to brand the revolutionary nation as commercialized and fit for mass
consumer capitalism. At the same time, boxers themselves sought high-status careers and
the rewards of celebrity. Through the sport, its adherents, and its pugilists, Mexicans
made sense of an urbanizing and industrializing world. Lofty abstracts—courage, dis-
cipline, mexicanidad—played out in emotional theaters mediated by corrupt officials,
media magnates, and international rivalries.
Allen primarily examines the sport from the 1940s to the 1980s with a combination
of archival documents, specialty periodicals, oral interviews, and a broad array of sec-
ondary literature. He tracks the sport from its 1930s acceptance in Mexico to the golden
age of the 1940s, the celebrity culture of the 1950s, and, finally, the shifting gender
landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s. He attaches each era to a particular star fighter (as
indeed did the Partido Revolucionario Institucional [PRI] government sponsors), giving
close coverage to Rodolfo “Chango” Casanova, Raúl Macı́as, Vicente Saldı́var, Rubén
Olivares, and José Nápoles. He successfully uses these exemplars to demonstrate ideas
that transcend boxing itself. Earning popularity for the sport required eschewing its
foreign origins, which Allen reveals in the context of the developing polarity between
Mexico City and Los Angeles. In one of several contradictory threads, he shows how
boxing became Mexican at the same time that Los Angeles did. The sport flourished in
Los Angeles between the 1932 and 1984 Olympics hosted there due to the late arrival of
other national sports leagues but more crucially to the influx of Mexican migrants that
marked the city as racially different from other US centers. World War II and mass television
viewing shaped the sport, as did shifting attitudes to immigration and political developments
in Mexico, as the PRI lost legitimacy and the economic miracle faltered. Some of Allen’s
best analyses come in his use of cultural sources such as corridos and fan writings, which
add depth to considerations of how boxing mattered, how much, and for whom.
A History of Boxing in Mexico offers significant insights into Mexican identities. A
strength of this work is how Allen builds on the methods of Clifford Geertz by looking
for “deep play” via a close reading of the fights and fighters. In this, the sport becomes a
theater in which people “tell stories to themselves about their nation’s place in the
community of nations following World War II” (p. 12). Allen’s intention to find deeper
meaning in the boxer’s experience is welcome and leads to a sophisticated discussion of
changing masculinities. Embedded in the pageantry of the boxing match, from training
to postfight analyses, one finds contradictory ideas about male respectability, brutality,
decorum, stoicism, and local pride versus international standing. The match could be
exultant or, equally, tragic. Mass media played its part in this by increasing the stakes of
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 751

the sport both rhetorically and financially. As aspects of masculinity received varying
focus over time, so too did related ideas of race. An emotional masculinity emerges in his
analysis in which public and personal expectations of self-discipline, family values, and
proper manners shaped how boxers acted and how fans reacted to them. Lower-class
men, often with indigenous features, overcame their stereotyped nature in the ring by
showing hard-earned skill and self-control. The PRI and sports promoters set this story
at the heart of boxing’s theater; the match in the ring—win or lose—redeemed lower-
class manliness and reflected directly on national honor. The boxer stood in for mas-
culine citizenship and even, as Allen shows, financial prudence. These fighters became
the center of a fervent cult of transnational competition framed in ways of understanding
Mexican manhood. Through the 40 years of this study, we see this cult develop along
with the culture of the nation more generally, and most especially, Allen demonstrates a
significant transformation during the countercultural 1960s.
Ultimately Allen’s work delivers an excellent use of sports as a lens to see national
change as well as a great history of boxing itself. This well-written and substantially
researched work contributes a unique view of Mexico and Mexican identity between the
1930s and 1980s. Well suited for specialists, students, and boxing aficionados, A History
of Boxing in Mexico offers new approaches to understanding masculine nationalism. In
showing the complex ties between identities, mass media promotions, and cosmopolitan
visions, Allen has landed a sweet scholarly uppercut.

stephen neufeld, California State University, Fullerton


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160666

El apóstol de los Andes: El culto a Túpac Amaru en Cusco durante la revolución velasquista
(1968–1975). By raúl h. asensio. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2017.
Photographs. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. 347 pp. Paper, PEN$21.50.

In September 1970, General Juan Velasco Alvarado’s Revolutionary Government of the


Armed Forces launched a competition for the best portrait of José Gabriel Con-
dorcanqui, better known as Túpac Amaru II, the leader of the insurrection that shook the
Spanish colonial regime from the high provinces ( provincias altas) of Cuzco between
1780 and 1783. The radical Peruvian military regime had appropriated Túpac Amaru as
the keystone of its nationalist, antioligarchic imagery: at long last, a revolutionary
indigenous hero for the postcolonial Andean nation. In that spirit, the winning portrait
would replace that of Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in Lima’s presidential
palace. The symbolism of the gesture seemed transparent, but official rhetoric could
hardly hide the polysemy and political ambiguity of the historical character. No con-
temporary portraits of Condorcanqui had survived his time; only a description given to
counterrevolutionary Spanish judges by an artist who had painted him remained. In this
version, he was styled as wearing the traditional garments of Inca authorities; by contrast,
the regime’s Túpac Amaru usually featured the attire of a colonial mestizo, iconic wide-
brimmed hat included. In Lima and Cuzco, the pictorial contest led to heated debates
752 HAHR / November

about how to represent Túpac Amaru: neo-Inca or colonial, Indian or mestizo, historical
truth or revolutionary archetype, decided in Lima, the city of Cuzco, or the high provinces.
El apóstol de los Andes traces myriad similar disputes in the public sphere of twentieth-
century Cuzco. The book argues that a cult of Túpac Amaru emanated from the towns of
the high provinces in the 1950s, expanded to the city of Cuzco through indigenista
intellectuals and activists, and was adopted (rather than invented, as is often believed) by
Velasco Alvarado’s government, whose propaganda apparatus turned Condorcanqui into
a nationwide hero by the 1970s. Raúl H. Asensio skillfully unpacks the complex nego-
tiations and nuances that shaped this process. These are stories of schoolteachers and
Catholic priests in the high provinces, of grassroots interprovincial conflicts over local
heroes, and of tensions between Cuzco, its hinterlands, and Lima. These stories are also
about the local uses of state-sanctioned celebrations and about different strands of
indigenismo, with their corresponding aesthetic and political preferences. Ultimately,
Asensio offers a history that explores the multiple identities of urban and rural Cuzco
during the city’s decades-long reconstruction after the 1950 earthquake and during the
agrarian mobilization (and reform) of the 1960s and 1970s and combines this history
with the military government’s efforts to establish a revolutionary cultural hegemony
between 1968 and 1975. The regime’s demise and the growing sway of transnational
ideas about historical heritage and tourism as sources ofeconomic development in Cuzco
defined the end of the process.
To reconstruct these stories, the book largely follows the traditional newspaper El
Comercio de Cusco from the 1950s to the 1970s. While this reliance on one source might
have warranted a more systematic analysis of its potential biases, the author never loses
sight of its limitations, expertly framing his findings with abundant, in some cases
comparative, secondary literature, often through fascinating (albeit sometimes rather
long) digressions. These are supplemented with occasional references to other primary
sources—like the notable, and underused, drafts of the acts of the military regime’s
cabinet meetings. The newspaper, moreover, proves to be an extraordinary source,
representing a multiplicity of perspectives from the Cuzco region. More problematic is
the deployment of certain concepts throughout the book. Despite the undeniable
Catholic flavor of the popular devotion, it is not clear what Túpac Amaru stood for as an
“apostle.” More importantly, despite attempts to create a typology in terms of “con-
centric circles,” the notion of a singular “community of cult” seems at odds with the
heterogeneity emphasized by the author (pp. 18, 26). Similarly, the repeated treatment of
tupacamarismo as an “ideology” is less convincing than its characterization, later in the
book, as a “political language” (p. 314).
These quibbles notwithstanding, El apóstol de los Andes thoroughly documents its
central claim—beginning with its beautiful cover’s recognizable-yet-faceless Túpac
Amaru, in the mold of Peruvian pop artist Jesús Ruiz Durand’s official emblem for the
regime—that Túpac Amaru was a “highly prestigious, empty signifier” who could elicit
genuine popular fervor but who also alternatively constituted an effective governmental
tool and a vehicle for innumerable different agendas, from specific political demands to
the interests of private businesses (p. 16). Furthermore, the book does a lot more than
that. It encapsulates some of the major tensions of Peru’s exceptional military
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 753

government in a key regional setting, adds to a growing literature about the military
government’s cultural politics, and sheds light on little-known episodes of the history of
Cuzco’s rich public sphere. At a broader level, it is an important contribution—written in
jargon-free Spanish, based on a regional case study and local sources, and published in
Peru—to the cultural history of Cold War Latin America and to the predicaments and
contradictions of postcolonial nation making.

adrián lerner, Yale University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160677

Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia.


By luis e. carranza and fernando luiz lara. Foreword by
jorge francisco liernur. Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin
American and Latino Art and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014.
Photographs. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvi, 406 pp. Paper, $45.00.

Interest in the architecture of Latin America is experiencing a major revival, with new
scholarship and museum exhibitions receiving critical and popular acclaim. A particu-
larly welcome addition is Luis Carranza and Fernando Lara’s Modern Architecture in Latin
America: Art, Technology, and Utopia. This generously illustrated volume offers readers a
sharp analysis of the region’s greatest (and most controversial) experiments with modern
architecture.
The core of the book spans a period of 100 years, from 1903 to 2003. More tra-
ditional scholars maintain that the 1920s marked the arrival of modern architecture in
Latin America. For Carranza and Lara, however, modern architecture is a broad category
that includes not only art deco, late century eclecticism, and other styles but also
painting, sculpture, city planning, landscape design, and an array of technical, historical,
and ideological concerns that extend beyond the previously proposed periodization. To
hold these different yet related domains together—and to provide readers with a
coherent analytical framework to interpret such a wide range of cultural and material
developments—the authors structure their book around a “navigational system” cen-
tered on three themes: art, technology, and utopia (p. 6). This open-ended structure
allows readers to consume the book chronologically, regionally, or thematically.
For the sections on art, Carranza and Lara explore the rich dialogue between
architects and artists in such buildings as the Secretarı́a de Educación Pública, where
Diego Rivera gave visual form to José Vasconcelos’s raza cósmica; El Eco Experimental
Museum, by Mathias Goeritz; the elite homes designed by Luis Barragán and Max Cetto
in El Pedregal; and several university campuses throughout the region. Influential texts
from the Chilean architect-trained artist Roberto Matta, publications such as Martı́n
Fierro from Argentina and Pampulha from Brazil, and artistic installations by Hélio
Oiticica and Jesús Rafael Soto are also examined. Central to this theme is the tension
between local concerns and international influence, especially in relation to the role of
artists and architects in the formation (and critique) of national identities.
754 HAHR / November

Under the theme of technology, attention is given to the means and methods of
production, including innovative construction techniques and the use of materials such
as reinforced concrete. Several iconic and not-so-iconic projects are discussed, among
them Oscar Niemeyer’s undulating buildings, João Batista Vilanova Artigas’s brutalism,
and Wladimiro Acosta’s Vivienda y ciudad, which highlights the relationship between
ecology, leisure, and urban life. Barragán’s penchant for integrating volcanic stone into
his designs as well as the formal differences between the Carioca and Paulista schools are also
considered. Evident from these entries is that local architects were able to create audacious
forms, but their aspirations to practice a socially minded architecture were often undercut by
technological limitations. Unable to make modern architecture affordable, many architects
opted to design flashy buildings that catered to middle- and upper-class residents.
For the entries on utopia, the authors explore attempts to improve the living and
working conditions of the region’s inhabitants. These would include several utopian
master plans and pioneering educational endeavors such as Lúcio Costa’s tenure as
director of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro and La Escuelita in
Argentina under the military dictatorship. Public housing projects such as Mario Pani’s
Multifamiliares in Mexico City and Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI) in
Lima are closely investigated. Innovative transportation solutions including Bogotá’s
TransMilenio and cable cars in low-income neighborhoods are lauded by the authors.
While the book tends to celebrate modern architecture, the authors also discuss the dark
underside of the modernist ideology. They acknowledge a tendency toward absolute
control, the often cozy relationship between architects, planners, and authoritarian
regimes, and how top-down efforts to reshape the city tend to have a negative impact on
the lives of the urban working poor.
Carranza and Lara conclude their survey with “provocations” (p. 351). They argue
that the themes that defined modern architecture in Latin America over the last century
have lost their relevance and that a new set of concerns is emerging. The authors forecast
that in the twenty-first century architecture in Latin America will be guided by what they
call materiality, social awareness, and conceptual design. Through these themes, the
authors highlight several gravity-defying creations of a new generation of architects,
greater regional integration and exchange, a targeted approach to urban interventions,
and Latin America’s contribution to a radical rethinking of the profession. Ultimately, the
authors still have faith in modern architecture to solve some of the region’s most
enduring challenges. An additional hope is that in the years ahead the profession will also
continue to diversify to include traditionally underrepresented groups, especially
women. Although there are some important exceptions, such as Lina Bo Bardi, the last
century was largely dominated by men of relative wealth and privilege.
As a whole, Modern Architecture in Latin America is a major achievement, both in its
scope and in its depth. It is sure to entice newcomers and keep the experts inspired.

marcio siwi, Harvard University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160688
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 755

Embarcados: Los trabajadores marı́timos y la vida a bordo: Sindicato, empresa y estado


en el puerto de Buenos Aires, 1889–1921. By laura caruso. Colección Archivos:
Estudios de Historia del Movimiento Obrero y la Izquierda. Buenos Aires: Imago
Mundi, 2016. Photographs. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxxv,
283 pp. Paper, AR$210.00.

Embarcados is the first book-length study of early twentieth-century Argentine syndi-


calism to focus on the labor process onboard ships in analyzing trade unionism and
its relationship to the fledgling state. This departs from earlier studies (by Hugo del
Campo, David Rock, Edgardo Bilsky, and Jeremy Adelman) that analyzed the period
leading up to the 1921 strike’s defeat from the perspective of Argentina’s first Radical
Civic Union (UCR) government. Her central thesis, not unlike Ruth Thompson’s
conclusion about the early anarchist movement, is that revolutionary rhetoric notwith-
standing, unions were pragmatically inclined to seek piecemeal reforms and the state’s
protection.
Laura Caruso unveils the informal, fragmented, and hierarchical nature of maritime
work’s division of labor as well as trade unions’ fostering of masculinity via gendered
rituals, which periodically aligned subaltern workers and their officers to protect the
corporatist demands of the Maritime Workers’ Federation (FOM). She links these to the
unique configuration of Buenos Aires’s port: because it extended from the southern,
cosmopolitan working-class district of the Vuelta de Rocha to the northern dock near the
downtown Retiro train station, there was a high strategic premium on disciplining an
unruly and powerful labor force. From their inception, mariners’ organizations realized
how uniting across areas of specialization gave them leverage in negotiations for higher
wages and improved working conditions along with an influence on the national labor
movement far beyond their numbers.
The book is original in several respects. It goes beyond formal syndicalist pro-
nouncements to explore the cultural, economic, and intraregional backdrop for the
FOM and its formidable influence and leadership in the anarchist and revolutionary
syndicalist movements under early UCR rule. She argues that the FOM was more
pragmatic than ideological, prone to seek the mediation of state agencies that it pub-
licly excoriated. Caruso uses trade-union sources alongside the records of shipping
firms and the powerful Center of Transatlantic Navigation, National Labor Depart-
ment documents, and the archives of the Yugoslav Mutual Aid Society, long central to
trade union and maritime politics. Finally, she uses gender as an analytical category to
study the organization of an all-male workforce, the family’s role in union life, and the
use of metaphors of maternal protection and domesticity to describe the FOM’s work
and achievements.
Certain relevant aspects of this history could have been highlighted more clearly.
For example, a social Catholic tendency within the maritime workers’ movement, which
preceded the emergence of anarchist resistance societies and syndicalist unions, might
also feed into the family-centered values and discourses of maritime unionism studied
by Caruso, central to the perennial mutual aid traditions that coexisted with more
756 HAHR / November

revolutionary tactics of economic subversion and organizational autonomy. Also, the


FOM did not disappear after 1921; it became first a radicalized bastion of the Argentine
Workers’ Union prior to 1930 and then pushed for a more accommodating, pro-welfare,
legislative version of this union in the late 1930s.
Caruso also unveils the alliances between subaltern personnel and their onboard
management overseers, most notably ship captains, who were less cosmopolitan, more
closely tied to UCR electoral politics, and often united with seamen in resistance to state-
sponsored rules and regulations that interfered with the informality that typified the
labor process. She correctly identifies how in 1916 older societies of sailors and firemen
were joined by new ones, such as the catering personnel organized by the Trade Union
Propaganda Committee, a pro-labor faction of the Socialist Party that contributed a core
of communist leaders to the FOM. Due to the movement’s federalist statutes and
deliberative organization, these revolutionary components of the FOM, despite its
apolitical principles, were never purged. They produced many prominent leaders, as
did the earlier anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist tendencies within the sailors’ and
firemen’s sections. The coexistence of pro-UCR officers, radically antiauthoritarian
anarchist and syndicalist militants, socialists, communists, and more reform-minded
unionists was a long-standing feature of the maritime workers’ everyday sociability,
obscured by the union’s far Right opponents.
Caruso also shows the continuing overlap of maritime workers with stevedores, cart
and truck drivers, and shipyard and warehouse workers, who had their own unions and even
anarchist resistance societies. Scholars have long thought that syndicalist longshoremen had
left the FOM after the division of the Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation into sep-
arate anarchist and syndicalist factions. Anarchists remained influential, however, which
translated into effective networks of cooperation and solidarity across ideological (and
territorial) boundaries. While Caruso focuses less on these anarchist remnants after the
First World War, she does underscore the role of local labor federations, which were
predominantly anarcho-syndicalist, in spreading the FOM beyond its Buenos Aires base.
When these cross-class, intraregional, and panideological alliances functioned,
maritime unionism was strong, weak when it succumbed to division and state repression.
Perhaps this study’s main flaw is that it focuses primarily on the period of the FOM’s
history most often studied and most nationally influential, while both the union’s con-
servative, heavily ethnic, and mutualist beginnings and its anarchist decade are less
examined. Yet the earlier traditions and organizational forms of social Catholicism and
anarcho-syndicalism continued to affect maritime workers from the 1920s to the 1940s,
which helps to explain not only their many divisions during that period but also their
subsequent unification into one of the most formidable labor organizations to join the
Laborist alliance and later clash with Juan Perón.

geoffroy de laforcade, Norfolk State University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160699
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 757

Empire’s Guestworkers: Haitian Migrants in Cuba during the Age of US


Occupation. By matthew casey. Afro-Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017. Photographs. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography.
Index. xii, 317 pp. Paper, $25.95.

Academics who study Cuba, Haiti, and the Caribbean are aware of the importance of
Haitian migration to Cuba. Yet with the notable exception of a few scholarly articles,
our knowledge about Haitian migrants in Cuba has been both superficial and one-
dimensional. Superficial because we knew very little about how and why Haitians went
to Cuba; one-dimensional because most writing about Haitians in Cuba portrays them
as a passive workforce under the complete control of US sugar companies. With the
publication of Empire’s Guestworkers, we now have a much more sophisticated, nuanced,
and, above all, human account about who Haitian migrants were, why and how they
left Haiti, and how they forged their own histories under very difficult circumstances.
We also get a much clearer picture of how Haitian migration shaped state formation in
Cuba and Haiti. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Cuban,
Haitian, and Caribbean history. It makes a notable contribution to migration and dias-
pora studies, labor history, transnational history, and empire.
Space does not permit a thorough rendering of the many important insights and
new information in Empire’s Guestworkers. But for this reviewer the book makes three
major contributions. First, Matthew Casey sheds new light on how and why Haitians
went to Cuba, as well as the regional origins of migrants. Between 1918 and 1923 a series
of Haitian migration laws and regulations changed migration patterns to Cuba from
localized and private initiatives into state-regulated policy. Haitian migration to Cuba
predated US occupation in 1915 but increased markedly because of it. The US occu-
pation fostered both the growth and centralization of the Haitian state. Rural Haitians
experienced state formation and occupation through a combination of the loss of cus-
tomary rights to land, disrupted subsistence and trading activities, high food prices, and
the militarization of the countryside. One way to evade these challenges was to go to
Cuba. Before the US occupation, migration to Cuba was from the southern coastal areas of
Haiti and the region around Port-au-Prince; thereafter, people from the northern regions
migrated in larger numbers, with the active encouragement of state officials and the sugar
companies. As a consequence of these changes, Haitian migration policy was forced to mesh
with Cuban immigration legislation. Casey does an admirable job discussing and analyzing
the interconnected processes of state formation, US occupation, and labor migration.
A second major contribution of the book is to counter the common portrayal of
Haitians in Cuba as passive cheap labor whose sole function was to work as cane cutters.
Casey shows that to the contrary, the occupational structures of sugar plantations were
not as monolithic as the companies or Cuban officials claimed. Not all Haitians were cane
cutters, and many worked in skilled occupations within the mills or in transportation and
supply networks. Indeed, Empire’s Guestworkers provides valuable insight and new evi-
dence that shows both the limitations of company power over workers and how the racist
stereotypes that portrayed some workers as more fit for certain kinds of labor had little to
do with realities on the ground. Casey brings to the fore the lived experience and agency
758 HAHR / November

of Haitian guest workers who forged their own histories and found ways of surviving and
thriving despite the power of the companies and the Cuban state. One such strategy was
to leave the sugar zones and become coffee farmers. In the 1920s and 1930s Haitians
made notable contributions to the Cuban coffee industry. Casey provides new infor-
mation and analysis of Haitian religious life in eastern Cuba. He also discusses the
contributions of Haitian journalists and writers in Cuba, especially on the topic of
immigration and race. Haitians and their families carved out spaces of freedom that
would not have been possible had they remained working for the sugar companies. One
of the author’s objectives was to show how the actions of individual people shaped the
processes of migration, state formation, and imperial policy. Casey has succeeded
admirably in fulfilling this objective.
The third contribution ofEmpire’s Guestworkers pertains to research. In the past, it was
common for historians to muse that it was impossible to write a really good history of
Haitian migration because the sources were simply not there. Casey has proven that notion
mistaken. His extensive research in all the important Cuban regional and local archives is
impressive, and he has uncovered new information that many scholars believed did not
exist. His use of Haitian and US archival and secondary sources is equally impressive.
Not only has Casey managed to write a book that fills a major gap in the scholarship
in Cuban, Haitian, and Caribbean studies, but he has also provided fertile ground and
wonderfully suggestive observations that should encourage graduate students and
established scholars to write more about migration, state formation, and empire.

robert whitney, University of New Brunswick


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160710

Comics and Memory in Latin America.


Edited by jorge catalá carrasco, paulo drinot, and james scorer.
Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas. Pittsburgh, PA: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Photograph. Figures. Notes. Bibliographies.
Index. vii, 262 pp. Paper, $27.95.

A conference at the University of London in 2012 provided the occasion for the pre-
sentations that became this book, and its contents retain the character of proceedings.
Judged from this perspective, the collection is rather well done. The editors and authors
have several strengths, especially the commitment to using comics as expressions of
collective and social memory. Others include the attention to lesser-known comics such
as those from Peru and Nicaragua, the utilization of several theoretical approaches to
memory, especially those laid out in Maurice Halbwachs’s On Collective Memory and
Alison Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation ofAmerican Remembrance in the
Age ofMass Culture, and the appropriate recognition of the importance of Ariel Dorfman
and Armand Mattelart’s Para leer al Pato Donald without resorting to its shopworn and
simplistic dependency thesis.
Two essays express the volume’s best features. Jorge L. Catalá Carrasco’s “Raising
the Cuban Flag: Comics, Collective Memory, and the Spanish-Cuban-American War
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 759

(1898)” addresses one issue, from the series Historietas de Inés, Aldo y Beto, entitled La
emboscada (1982). The comic displays the revolutionary Cuban interpretation of the
Spanish-American War with a fictional account of treachery in Santiago de Cuba, which
it makes appealing especially to younger readers by the time travel of the three protag-
onists using the charming fantasidoscopio. Catalá Carrasco provides ample historical con-
text for the comic’s events and theoretical framework, calling on both Halbwachs and
Landsberg to allow for a motivating discussion of comics, memory, and patrimony. In a
rather different kind of essay, focused on an internationally famous comic character,
Isabella Cosse examines Mafalda as a “talisman ofdemocracy and icon ofnostalgia for the
1960s.” This essay considers the history of this character after the artist Quino ( Joaquı́n
Salvador Lavado) stopped drawing the comic strip during the military dictatorship
in Argentina. The political role given by fans to Mafalda makes for quite intriguing
reading. Beyond these two essays, readers will no doubt identify their own favorites
because of national allegiances or revolutionary alliances.
The chapters do suffer the uneven quality typical of such anthologies in terms of
what is included, what is not, and what is ignored completely. The countries discussed
include Cuba, Argentina (two essays), Nicaragua, Peru (two essays), Chile, and Brazil.
This geographical distribution ignores essential comics from Mexico (Rius, for example,
is mentioned only in passing) as well as prominent ones from Cuba, Brazil, and Chile.
There are, again as one would expect, some superb chapters, some weaker ones, and some
obvious missing ones. This asymmetry makes the parts greater than the whole.
The narrative of the introduction needs to be tighter, which could have been helped
with better copyediting by the publisher. Examples of this need include the statement by
the book’s editors that the authors look at “processes of memory formation around a
number of historical processes,” which leaves unclear what these processes are (p. 4). The
introduction also holds that comics offer a particularly fruitful way to examine memory
studies, without specifying in what ways, how, or why (p. 4). Similarly vague statements
detract from the introduction’s usefulness in laying out the essays’ arguments and the
intervention offered by the collection as a whole.
Additionally, because several of the authors point to the influence of Landsberg’s
Prosthetic Memory in memory and identity discussions, the editors or the authors should
have considered the relationship of this text’s interpretation with the standard perspective
offered by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
ofNationalism. Landsberg and Anderson seem to describe two sides of the same coin, but
this needs serious analysis, which does not appear in the collection. This represents a
glaring omission, one that the peer reviewers should have raised.
As it stands, the book editors offer a volume of proceedings that provides an
introduction to the topic of memory creation and comic books.

william h. beezley, University of Arizona


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160721
760 HAHR / November

San Miguel de Allende: Mexicans, Foreigners, and the Making ofa World Heritage Site.
By lisa pinley covert. The Mexican Experience. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2017. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxix, 289 pp.
Paper, $65.00.

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet W. D. Snodgrass once said of his wintering in San Miguel de
Allende: “I think it pays to get out of your mother country, the place where you formed
your basic restraints and limitations.” Echoing that sentiment, and drawn by cheap living
in a colonial town, hundreds of foreign writers and artists have settled in this central
Mexican locale since the 1930s. So have thousands more who simply craved a sunny place
to retire, where domestic help and nursing cost a fraction of what they do at home.
Annual legions of tourists have followed. San Miguel is not unique, havens of US and
Canadian retirees now dotting Mexico from Ensenada to Mérida, but it was probably the
first such enclave and is certainly the best known.
San Miguel is therefore worth studying for what it suggests about the long-standing
expatriate presence in Mexico, its cultural and economic impact, and the agency of
townspeople in the face of foreign spending power and governmental designs to harness
it. Lessons learned here (in an academic sense, but also in a public policy sense) can be
applied elsewhere. Lisa Covert’s San Miguel de Allende is thus an important addition to
our understanding of modern Mexico as well as a rare case of taking Mexican tourism
studies into a city-specific context. Strange as it may seem, we still await book-length
scholarly histories of Acapulco, Cancún, and (post-1940) Tijuana and Mexico City.
The popular view of San Miguel (not least among its expats) is that its growth as
a bohemian and tourist mecca was driven by entrepreneurial foreigners. Covert
acknowledges their crucial role, but she reveals that it was Mexican opera singer José
Mojica who first put the town on the cosmopolitan map, and she challenges on various
fronts the notion of outsiders rescuing San Miguel from underdevelopment amid local
passivity. Many townsfolk advocated for textile production over tourism, and the success
for many decades of the mill La Aurora shows a path that could have been taken had not
state authorities excluded San Miguel from industrial initiatives. Concerted resistance
came from activist Catholics, especially parish priest José Mercadillo, who for 30 years
railed against corrupting influences; his sermons were echoed in the press and likely
helped contain the presence of beatniks and hippies, who in one celebrated instance were
jailed and forcibly shaven. In the struggle for the town’s economic soul the Yankee dollar
won, but many locals remained unsatisfied and many saw little benefit.
In her final chapter, on the period from the 1970s to 2001, Covert questions the
impact of expatriate hiring practices and philanthropy, contending that the former
feminized the economy by offering little to male workers while the latter “reproduced the
very structural conditions that exacerbated poverty” (p. 150). The chapter is both fas-
cinating and problematic. While the author illustrates how expats paid their maids
unfairly low wages (and how some maids launched successful challenges over unfair
dismissal), she omits to say whether the local wealthy did any differently. Her economic
critique of expat philanthropy is speculative and would properly require engagement
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 761

with statistical and qualitative data. On the other hand, her general point that San Miguel
has functioned as a model for neoliberalism—with attendant inequalities, such as
those caused by escalation in downtown property values and rents—is suggestive and
troubling.
With its orange-hued packaging, featuring a gorgeous screen print of the city,
Covert’s book calls out to be picked up. But the text rather lacks the color that its cover
implies, limiting both its readerly appeal and its sense of contingency. The author
declines to let principal players come to life, either by rendering them as individuals—as
opposed to representatives of a given faction—or by quoting them. The priest Merca-
dillo emerges as a mere embodiment of provincial conservatism. An amusing passage in
which an expat waxes on “gracious living” proves all too rare (p. 176). Greater attention to
character and ambience would not necessarily have lengthened the text, for the analytical
passages include much repetition that could have been shorn. San Miguel boasts 16,000
foreign residents and hundreds of thousands of annual visitors, some of whom might
have been prompted to rethink their imprint by prose of greater ambition.
Yet as a work of scholarship, Covert’s study is invaluable. Few monographs on
modern Mexico interweave culture, economics, and politics so seamlessly and (for the
most part) persuasively. Its breadth of sources includes several private archives and
interviews with dozens of residents. The study enriches the historiographies of Mexican-
US relations, Mexican industrialization, cultural imperialism, gender, and inequality.
Although jargon creeps into the latter chapters, the style is uncomplicated. Given these
advantages and a longue durée scope, running from 1935 to the near present, San Miguel de
Allende is instructive reading for a host of scholars and eminently assignable to under-
graduates.

andrew paxman, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE)


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160732

From Fascism to Populism in History. By federico finchelstein. Oakland:


University of California Press, 2017. Notes. Index. xx, 328 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

Federico Finchelstein has pioneered innovative approaches to the study of Argentine


fascism and is the leading scholar on this topic today. He has probed its ceremonies,
construction of masculinity, use of myth and memory, and sexual and racial obsessions, as
well as the simultaneous development of fascism in Argentina and Europe and their
mutual influences. In From Fascism to Populism in History, Finchelstein analyzes fascism
and populism, their origins, the similarities and differences between them, and how the
first morphed into the second. Finchelstein’s gaze from the South enhances this com-
parative and transnational study, which treats Europe, Asia, and the United States as well
as Latin America.
The author defines fascism as an ever-changing global ideology that refashioned
itself in many settings. This antidemocratic, antiliberal, anti-Marxist, hypermasculine,
and extreme nationalist creed spread through much of the world, including Latin
762 HAHR / November

America, during the Great Depression and intertwined political crisis. It sought to
demolish democracy, replace it with a severe dictatorship that prohibited political
opposition, and erase the divides between public and private and the state and citizenry.
Fascist movements and regimes mandated loyalty to the nation and to the leader, who
embodied popular sovereignty. Seeking working-class support while papering over social
divisions, fascists supported a corporatist harmonizing of capital and labor and a “third
way” between liberalism and socialism that addressed popular needs while retaining a
heavily regulated national capitalism. They also substituted political myths for sub-
stantiated facts. Inherent to fascism was its persecution of perceived enemies and exal-
tation of violence and warfare. Variants of fascism borrowed from and competed with
each other.
Fascists wore shirts whose colors varied by country (including green for Brazil,
gold for Mexico, and gray for Chile), a practice that, according to Finchelstein, high-
lighted the importance of local distinctions. Yet Peronism, the first modern populist
regime, was “shirtless,” which for the author signified the shift to a new ideology
that departed from fascism (p. 18). Indeed, the Holocaust and defeat of the Axis ren-
dered fascism untenable after 1945, and populism took its place in the new post-
war context. Juan Perón’s numerous shirtless (descamisado) followers also indicated that
while “fascism mobilized the middle class, Peronism rallied the working class” (p. 149).
(One should note, however, that in Brazil, Chile, Hungary, and elsewhere laborers
and the poor composed a significant minority within fascist ranks.) Not to be con-
fused with neofascism, populism differs from its precursor by accepting electoral
democracy, albeit in an authoritarian form that permits yet stigmatizes political rivals;
rejecting the emphasis on violence; and including leftist and rightist manifestations.
Among the carryovers from fascism are ultranationalism mixed with social concerns,
belief in a charismatic leader who stands for the people, deployment of myths,
demonization of perceived enemies, and antiliberalism. Some rightist populisms tend
toward a vulgar hypermasculinity, but others, along with leftist versions, do not. Like
fascism, populism is a fluid transnational and global ideology with distinctive features
in each location.
This book’s importance for Latin Americanists resides largely in Finchelstein’s
decentering of these phenomena. He inserts many Latin American (and US and Asian)
examples into his discussions of fascism and populism. Furthermore, he explains how
generic definitions of fascism and fascist “minimums” based on European cases do not
necessarily apply to non-European ones (pp. 53–56). The difficulty in fitting non-
European movements into these static, homogenizing models encourages local histo-
rians who idealize their country’s past to deny that such groups were fascist. Even when
theorists have recognized national variations, they generally have overlooked the
transnational nature of fascism. Ignoring the circulation of ideas among movements,
some have claimed that fascism simply spread in one direction from Europe to other
places. Finchelstein argues convincingly that one must study a number ofcases, including
ones outside Europe; situate them within the context of international fascism; and
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 763

examine global exchanges. He says much the same about populism, which, as he observes,
began in Argentina and the South, not the North Atlantic.
A cogent example of the importance of transnational exchanges relates to the
Holocaust. Some specialists have characterized Nazi Germany as a fascist outlier because
it murdered millions. Yet Finchelstein explains how these efforts drew on previous
European imperialist policies and fascist brutalities of the 1930s in Africa and Spain.
European and Latin American fascists collaborated with and justified Nazi genocide,
enabling Germany to take fascism to its ultimate extreme. Viewing the Holocaust
through a transnational lens places it squarely within the history of fascism and dem-
onstrates the complicity of global actors in this genocide.
Finchelstein combines original research on many countries with a superb synthesis
and critical examination of the literature on fascism and populism. A short review cannot
do justice to his provocative insights. It would be useful to study in greater detail what
Finchelstein calls pre- and protopopulism to distinguish more clearly between them and
full-blown populism. This minor caveat, however, does not detract from the quality of
his timely and fascinating book.

sandra mcgee deutsch, University of Texas at El Paso


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160743

Revolutionary Ideology and Political Destiny in Mexico, 1928–1934: Lázaro Cárdenas


and Adalberto Tejeda. By eitan ginzberg. Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic
Press, 2015. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 276 pp.
Paper, $39.95.

Following the Mexican Revolution, agrarian reformists sought to create an ejidal system
that would transform the oligarchic economy and incorporate peasants into the political
life of the state. By the late 1920s, reformists were increasingly at odds with many veterans
of the revolution, especially Plutarco Elı́as Calles and his cabinet. For radical peasants
and politicians, a weak federal dedication to land redistribution represented a frustrated
Mexican Revolution, one that was far from living up to the promises of the 1917 con-
stitution.
Eitan Ginzberg’s intrepid book is the first to compare two key agrarian governors:
Adalberto Tejeda and Lázaro Cárdenas, who respectively represented Veracruz and
Michoacán between 1928 and 1932. Analyzing municipal documents, state circulars, and
legislation, the book juxtaposes Tejeda and Cárdenas in terms of their ideologies, their
strategies for implementing social reform, and their relationships with federal and
municipal governments, agrarian leagues, and the Catholic Church. Both governors
made significant efforts toward land reform, and both aimed to improve their states’
economies by collectivizing factories, building infrastructure, increasing exports, and
curbing the influence of foreign capitalists in their states. The two reformist governors
also shared the desire to develop rational and progressive—revolutionary—peasantries.
They undertook literacy campaigns and opened secular (eventually socialist-minded)
764 HAHR / November

public schooling, while Tejeda also closed churches and curtailed religious practices. In
1934, both men made a bid for the presidency. While Cárdenas enjoyed a landslide
victory—winning 98.2 percent of the vote and becoming the widely celebrated icon of
the cultural revolution—the federal government did everything in its power to oppose
Tejeda’s increasingly radical platform. They succeeded in ostracizing and vilifying
Tejeda, who drew only.68 percent of the ballots. In his carefully researched, well-written,
and cogently argued book, Ginzberg explains why and how Cárdenas and Tejeda came to
such distinct political ends despite their similar aims.
Cárdenas’s political success owed to his efforts to forge alliances within the federal
government while also widening the net of social reform to include moderates, conser-
vatives, and religious. For Ginzberg, however, Cárdenas was less dedicated than Tejeda
to the revolutionary cause. Cárdenas’s most significant agrarian reforms coincided with
popular unrest, and these efforts declined once dissenters had been appeased. Such a top-
down, corporate approach to agrarianism resulted in the allocation of less land, dis-
tributed at a slower pace, to peasants in Michoacán than to those in Veracruz. Ginzberg
ultimately suggests that Cardenismo became a statist, centralist, bureaucratic, and
opportunistic approach to state building. Such accommodationism not only stymied the
possibility of a radical, nationwide socialist revolution but also prevented the state from
achieving full democratization.
Ginzberg’s analysis of Cardenismo offers a provocative counter to Mary Kay
Vaughan’s work on the political legacy of the cultural revolution. More contentious,
perhaps, is Ginzberg’s insistence that the revolution constituted a break with liberalism.
For his part, the author is clearly sympathetic to Tejeda, whom he sees as having been
motivated by a true or pure radical ideology. (It is worth noting that Tejeda’s political
orientation, while Marxist, was also ultrapositivistic, Europhilic, and ill adapted for
Mexico’s social and economic context.) Whereas Cárdenas treated land reform as
negotiable, Tejeda made the Veracruzan Agrarian League—which boasted 140,000
members and 2,000 agrarian committees—a major center of his state’s power. At the
same time, however, Tejeda used coercion and violence to flex his political muscle. He
unnecessarily antagonized the Veracruz University (which he saw as bourgeois),
implemented an extensive spy network across the state (whose informants alerted him of
antirevolutionary activities), and was quick to remove municipal authorities who did not
capitulate to his demands. While Ginzberg tends to see these political decisions as
personality quirks that made Tejeda unwise and paranoid, he avoids characterizing the
governor as undemocratic, reactionary, or reliant on bossism. By portraying Tejeda as
egalitarian, Ginzberg may flatten the contradictions between the controversial gover-
nor’s dedication to the grassroots, on the one hand, and his exclusionary methods, on
the other.
Ginzberg’s framework is unapologetically Marxist. His analysis is structuralist and
based on the material economy, and he sympathizes more strongly with anticapitalist
historical subjects. Notwithstanding the conceptual questions that arise from this
approach, the author has written an impressive book. The argument rests on exhaustive
archival research in municipal and state archives, and the use of empirical data to bolster
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 765

our understanding of agrarian reform is valuable. Ginzberg’s close reading of political


documents makes this book a very useful resource, especially for scholars interested in
land reform and radical politics in any geographic region.

elizabeth o’brien, University of Texas at Austin


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160754

Black Autonomy: Race, Gender, and Afro-Nicaraguan Activism. By jennifer goett.


Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Photographs. Map. Figures. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. ix, 222 pp. Paper, $25.95.

In a valuable contribution to scholarship on Nicaragua’s east coast and the “official


multiculturalism” now prevalent throughout Latin America, Jennifer Goett interrogates
the meaning of autonomy for the Afro-descendant Creole residents of the community of
Monkey Point. Revolution and counterrevolution brought to the east coast strong
constitutional protections for community autonomy, but residents there remain subject
to overlapping forms of intimate and state-sponsored violence that weigh especially
heavily on the lives of Creole women. In the tradition of scholars such as Charles Hale
and Edmund Gordon, Goett’s engaged ethnography interrogates the forms of accom-
modation and resistance that people in Monkey Point use to negotiate citizenship and
belonging. Goett also examines the limitations of official multiculturalism based on
recognition of cultural difference while finding local understandings of self-determination
“far more expansive and robust than highly compromised autonomy regimes might
indicate” (pp. 5–6).
In Goett’s telling, Monkey Point, located on Nicaragua’s “easternmost rocky out-
cropping of land,” might be far from the center of national life but is wracked by
dilemmas created by global capitalism, militarized drug war, and the everyday forms of
violence and resistance that characterize much of Central America (p. 1). Based on over a
decade’s experience in the community, Goett deploys arguments about the interplay of
the personal and the political, the possibilities and limitations of autonomy, and the need
for a liberatory politics that combines feminist and race-conscious critique. Beginning
with “Women’s Origin Stories,” she tells the history of Monkey Point through local
women who have constructed their identities around the memory of black diasporic
founders. These memories form the basis for demands for autonomy and access to
communal land, demands that shaped community life during and after the Somoza
regime, the Sandinista Revolution, and the contra war. Though women differ in their
appraisal of which of these epochs was most responsive to their needs, their stories
convey an “intimate and historically deep critique of race-gender-class oppression as well
as pride and pleasure in the rural lifestyle that their ancestors built for them” that
undergirds community life and politics (p. 54).
In “ ‘Bad Boys’ and Direct Resistance,” Goett describes how masculine sociality and
women’s affective political labor sometimes work together to attain community goals.
She tells how an uprising of “bad boys,” young men steeped in counterculture and prone
766 HAHR / November

to drug use, drove out US corporate investors encroaching on community lands. Goett
argues that such disruptive masculine forms of action in this case complemented the
organizational work of women who lobby the government and nongovernmental
organizations to respect communal claims. If women’s affective labor provides the means
of legitimizing community resistance, it also provides the basis of “sharing and coop-
eration based on affective and familial bonds with other women” (p. 88). For women on
the lowest end of an international division of labor, who often resort to precarious labor
on cruise ships to gain a modicum of livelihood and personal autonomy, such bonds
provide an essential support network and the foundation for political organization.
For the people of Monkey Point, the geopolitical strife that has characterized
Nicaragua’s troubled history also projects onto their own community. In “From Cold
Wars to Drug Wars,” Goett tells how the militarization of the coast since the Cold War
has transformed into a drug war that has subjected Monkey Point to quasi-military
occupation and intrusive race-based policing. She then describes local activists’ efforts to
gain a hearing in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights over sexual abuse by
Nicaraguan armed forces. Though the hearing brought attention to the widespread
abuse of women in the country, Goett argues that successful feminist critique must also
address the ongoing role of structural violence rooted in racism perpetuated by both the
police and local forms of patriarchy.
Goett’s work is a vivid example of engaged scholarship, and she weaves throughout
her story her own experiences of brushing away sand flies while listening to women’s
stories, working with feminist groups, and observing the ambivalent messages in local
dancehall-inspired music. While her work provides a compelling snapshot of the
vibrancy of life in Monkey Point, her efforts at engaged scholarship have taught her the
limits of a multicultural autonomy based solely on rights to territory and natural
resources. A “more expansive politics of liberation,” she argues, requires attention to the
“prolonged everyday violence” that permeates life on Nicaragua’s coast (p. 5). Her work
demonstrates how critical feminist scholarship on racial violence can root itself in
community understandings. She contributes to a growing scholarship illuminating the
lived reality of neoliberal multiculturalism, which makes her work relevant to students,
scholars, and activists interested in the dynamics of Central American life and the nature
of structural inequality more broadly.

david johnson lee, Temple University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160765

The Prophet of Cuernavaca: Ivan Illich and the Crisis ofthe West. By todd hartch.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii,
235 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

Catholic priest and social critic Ivan Illich shaped a generation of scholars and Catholic
clergy who studied Spanish language and Latin American culture at the Centro Inter-
cultural de Documentación (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Operating from 1961 to
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 767

1976, the center initially offered language classes targeted at clergy preparing for mis-
sionary assignments. By the mid-1960s, CIDOC also offered an open university with
class themes including history, philosophy, religion, and social work. A respected alter-
native research center and a publisher of journals, CIDOC housed an often more
complete collection than professional libraries.
CIDOC was a space where clergy, activists, and intellectuals could meet up and
discuss new approaches toward social justice issues in post–Vatican II Latin America.
While the lectures, seminars, and gatherings at this center and its counterpart in Brazil
provided an atmosphere for bishops such as Gustavo Gutiérrez to develop liberation
theology, Illich did not identify with this movement. He wanted social and economic
change but did not think that the church as an institution should do it.
Austrian-born Illich used missionary work as a starting point in criticizing insti-
tutions of the West. Influenced by his experience working in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Illich
believed that the church had to take on the customs of the local culture in order to be
effective missionaries. Illich saw missionaries as pawns of US cultural imperialism,
“materialistic, impersonal, and un-Christian” as well as allied with John F. Kennedy’s
Alliance for Progress (p. 58). To that end, he wrote antimissionary articles, which by the
late 1960s incurred the anger of the Vatican.
Todd Hartch, a historian of global Christianity, gives one of the first book-length
treatments of Illich’s role in CIDOC. The Prophet ofCuernavaca provides new insight into
the complexities of Latin American missions. Illich thought that all missions were
imperialist in nature. Hartch, who has written on missionary organizations such as the
Summer Institute of Linguistics, analyzes Illich’s take on 1960s missions as colonialist;
Hartch notes that in the global South, Christianity is still exploding, without the North
American missionaries. Hartch suggests that by so fiercely opposing missionary work,
Illich missed the “dynamic encounter” between missionaries and indigenous Christians
(p. 163).
Hartch builds on Francine du Plessix Gray’s Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic
Radicalism (1971). Yet Hartch adds new emphasis on Illich’s role at CIDOC before it
became secularized. Scholars have hitherto devoted more attention to the 1967–76 phase
of Illich’s career in Mexico: his controversy with the Vatican, his criticism of public
schools, and his decision to close CIDOC. Instead, Hartch concentrates on the Catholic
period—the years when CIDOC received funding from the Archdiocese of New York—
and explains its relationship to the later phase. Hartch describes Illich as a priest “of
conscious orthodoxy grappling with the crisis of Western modernity” (p. 11). Hartch
argues that an examination of Illich’s personal and intellectual thought bridges the gap
between traditionalists and radicals in the church.
The book provides an important snapshot of 1960s Mexico. Illich arrives to
Cuernavaca when the Vatican called for 10 percent of American clergy to go to Latin
America. In Mexico, the national episcopacy criticized Illich’s friend Bishop Sergio
Méndez Arceo of Cuernavaca, often lumping Illich into their critique of Méndez Arceo’s
support of the student protests and guerrilla movements. Accused of associating with
Marxist intellectuals, Illich left the priesthood after his 1969 secret hearing at the Vatican.
768 HAHR / November

Hartch asks if Illich’s rejection of American Catholic missionaries ultimately cost


Illich the chance to meet some well-meaning and progressive clergy. If missionaries had
been given the chance to see why American ways might not work in remote regions,
maybe they would have come to the ideas that Illich was espousing on their own. Maybe
they would have challenged the West, reinterpreted the Gospel, or rejected consumerism
and modernity.
Illich argued that it was better for Latin American Catholics to do without priests
rather than face exposure to American values. But Hartch posits that maybe Catholics in
Latin America didn’t want to be on the margins of the church. Hartch also suggests that
the rise of Pentecostalism was part of the side effect of Illich not embracing Catholic
missionaries. Hartch notes that “Protestantism spread like wildfire” in this period, even
though the “consumer mentality fostered by Protestantism was exactly what Illich was
trying to keep out of Latin America” (p. 164).
Hartch labels Illich a prophet since he risked everything to present his ideas to the
world (p. 172). Hartch posits that even if Illich got it wrong about missionaries, he
stimulated debates on other Western institutions such as the public school system and
hospitals. This important and accessible book will be of interest to a wide range of
readers, including scholars of liberation theology, philosophy, and Latin American
studies.

kathleen m. mcintyre, Clarion University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160776

Transforming Brazil: A History of National Development in the Postwar Era.


By rafael r. ioris. Routledge Studies in Latin American Politics. New York:
Routledge, 2014. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. x, 266 pp. Cloth, $155.00.

This is an important political and economic history of the late 1950s in Brazil, from the
last years of Getúlio Vargas’s presidency (and tragic death) through the administration of
President Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–61). It relies on significant archival research in Rio
de Janeiro and São Paulo as well as analysis of government and industry publications.
Rafael Ioris traces conflicts over development policy during these years that, he argues,
laid the groundwork for political fractures that culminated in the military coup of 1964.
Central debates regarding development policy included the degree to which industri-
alization should be prioritized over agricultural sectors, the importance (and desirability)
of attracting greater foreign investment, and the appropriate role of the federal
government—versus the private, corporate sector—in spurring economic growth. The
book’s final chapters discuss the impact of spiraling inflation on working people and the
organized response of unions to carestia (the exorbitant prices of basic goods relative
to wages).
Ioris views development policy under the Kubitschek administration as highly
technocratic, with federal agencies focused on economic policies that would (bureaucrats
believed) facilitate the expansion of private industry and foreign investment without
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 769

obligating the state to directly manage new industries, as had been attempted during the
latter Vargas years. The automotive industry is an example of this. Kubitschek’s advisers
advocated “favorable exchange rates, fiscal benefits, preferential credit terms, and market
guarantees via tariff protection” to (quite successfully) catalyze partnerships between
domestic parts suppliers and foreign car manufacturers, while eschewing state-run
automotive production along the lines pursued by Vargas (p. 105). In outlining Kubit-
schek’s developmentalist ideology, Ioris weighs the influence of both regional and
national economists, like Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado, and the US Eisenhower
administration on Brazilian policies.
The second half of the book discusses alternatives to Kubitschek’s market-oriented
approach to development that were influential during his presidency but largely over-
looked by his administration. By the end of the decade these conflicting views produced
what Ioris terms “ideational cacophony, ideological divergence, and political polariza-
tion” (pp. 177–78). Nationalist intellectuals at the Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies
(ISEB), particularly Hélio Jaguaribe and Roland Corbisier, offered one alternative
developmental vision that focused on the conditions of underdevelopment shared by
many postcolonial states. In their view, development was in part a psychological process,
aimed at achieving autonomy from foreign influences, that must include popular sectors
and not merely privileged classes. Ioris contrasts this with the Kubitschek administra-
tion’s equation of development with rapid economic growth “under a logic that clearly
meant the downplaying . . . of the very search for political autonomy that had been so
forcefully argued for by most members of the institute [the ISEB]” (p. 141).
More successful in gaining the Kubitschek administration’s attention were indus-
trial associations. Nonetheless, Ioris’s analysis of several influential business and industry
publications reveals mounting criticism of the Kubitschek government as being overly
interventionist and accommodating to demands from organized labor. The final chapter
traces pressure exerted by labor unions—often working illegally together—to rein in the
prices offood and basic goods. These organizations advocated land reform and increased
support for local farmers (rather than multinational food producers) as essential struc-
tural changes, measures that many policymakers in Kubitschek’s administration opposed.
Without discounting the importance of João Goulart’s presidency (which followed
Kubitschek’s) and US Cold War ideology in the aftermath of Fidel Castro’s rise to power
in Cuba, Ioris concludes that “what provoked the final destabilization of the democratic
political system” in 1964 was “that the wider social conceptions and expectations related
to national development were flattened . . . into a top-down plan centered exclusively on
fostering fast rates of absolute economic growth” (p. 224). Few Brazilians realized the
benefits promised by Kubitschek’s ambitious development schemes, and many suffered
from the inflation that his administration’s overextension provoked.
Scholars of this period in Brazilian history will welcome Ioris’s detailed explication
of the academic institutions, industry organizations, and labor groups that vied to
influence economic policy during the Kubitschek administration. Ioris’s research helps to
resolve a conundrum in Brazilian historiography, in which the decade from 1955 to 1964
is often narrated as a period of developmentalist euphoria followed by fractious social
770 HAHR / November

unraveling and political collapse. This book corrects that sense of inexplicable rupture by
demonstrating the rising discontent among ordinary Brazilians during the latter
Kubitschek years. It is a densely argued work, not easily accessible to students below the
graduate level. As a social historian, I would have appreciated more detailed examination
of the individuals involved, including Kubitschek himself. There is some high drama
indicated in this account, particularly the escalating food crisis that precipitated a month-
long shutdown of São Paulo’s industrial production in October 1957. Yet Ioris’s focus on
social sectors and organizations only occasionally suggests how ordinary Brazilians
experienced such events. There is also an underlying critique of populist regimes
throughout the book, which could be more explicitly articulated.

eve e. buckley, University of Delaware


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160787

Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining


Path Peru. By anne lambright. Liverpool Latin American Studies. Liverpool,
UK: Liverpool University Press, 2015. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. x, 212
pp. Cloth, £80.00.

A charitable interpretation of Andean Truths would proclaim that Anne Lambright has
written two books. At the core, she provides a fine analysis of the diverse ways that
individuals and communities processed, commemorated, or remembered the gruesome
violence of Peru from 1980 to 1992, when the Shining Path and the Peruvian state outdid
one another in human rights violations. She examines cinema, literature, theater, and art
(individual and collective) to explore the many ways that people understood the violence
and its aftermath as well as potential paths toward reconciliation or justice. She frames
this project, however, by casting the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(CVR) and its final report as a conformist or mainstream version of events written from
the perspective of the powers that be in Lima. The works that she studies, from her
perspective, radically diverge from and question the CVR. This is a terrible misrepre-
sentation that puts into question the validity of her larger arguments.
In the introduction, Lambright contends that the CVR produced a “largely offi-
cialist discourse of truth” and implies that this discourse was part of a broader neoliberal
effort to bring indigenous people “into the fold” (pp. 2–3). In doing so, she both distorts
the CVR and employs an odd notion of neoliberalism. She questions whether the CVR
adequately addressed race and ethnicity and whether it ultimately converted indigenous
people into mere victims. Lambright seeks to present the CVR as a rather conservative
interpreter of the period of extreme violence in order to highlight the complexity and
heterogeneity of the cultural practices that she examines in the latter chapters. In setting
up this contrast, she misrepresents the CVR and ultimately weakens her analysis.
Readers without much knowledge of Peru would understand the CVR as window
dressing or even a cover-up. The architect of the CVR, the anthropologist Carlos Iván
Degregori (1945–2011), would be mortified to read this. I am certain that he would
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 771

have written a rebuttal to the introduction. The CVR wrote in the face of great oppo-
sition from supporters of former president and dictator Alberto Fujimori, other con-
servative political parties, and the armed forces. These groups sought to sabotage the
truth commission from the beginning and continue to go to great lengths to belittle or
obscure its findings. The CVR’s deeply researched final report spread the blame widely,
criticizing not only those who committed the crimes but also other groups that covered
them up or hesitated in criticizing the state and the Shining Path. Indignation fuels the
report.
Contrary to Lambright’s contentions, the CVR examined historical and social
causes of the violence much more than other truth commissions. It did not overlook race
and ethnicity but instead underlined from the beginning the brutal fact that 75 percent of
the victims were rural and indigenous. The final report (widely available online) consists
of nine volumes, including regional summaries, detailed analyses of specific massacres,
lengthy testimonies, sophisticated data analysis, and more. In Andean Truths, I found only
four citations beyond volume 1. Perhaps a deeper reading of the entire report would have
uncovered how radically the CVR diverged from official Peru, which has sought to
silence the truth commission’s work since the report’s preparation.
Of course, the CVR is not infallible and deserves critical readings. Scholars such as
Kimberly Theidon and Jelke Boesten have questioned the inattention to sexual violence,
while many have pointed out the lack of Quechua speakers among the commissioners.
Critiquing the final report or the Lugar de la Memoria (LUM) is almost a rite of passage
for those who work in cultural studies in Peru. But these critiques have been much more
thoughtful and careful than Lambright’s characterization of the CVR.
This is a shame, as Lambright did not need to set up such a contrast between the
supposedly mainstream perspective of the CVR and the divergent views and activities of
the artists and activists whom she studies. They develop many of the themes of the CVR
and point out its silences and missteps. Her analysis of Peru’s famed theater group
Yuyachkani is solid, showing how they pushed for a deeper understanding of the violence
than the CVR provided and how their work highlighted multiple perspectives on the
violence and the period. She is less original in her critique of Lima authors Alonso Cueto,
Iván Thays, and Santiago Roncagliolo but makes interesting points. When she moves her
analysis to Ayacucho, she shows how groups and individuals have sought to call attention
to sexual violence by the military and the Shining Path.
Lambright finishes with a few pages of reflections on the LUM, which had not yet
opened when she was writing. In a final effort to contrast the CVR and its repercussions
with the artists and movements that she studies, Lambright calls the LUM’s perspective
“hegemonic” (p. 188). In reality, the LUM has showcased the artists studied in Andean
Truths and other divergent voices and concluded on March 11, 2018, an exhibit by
Edilberto Jiménez, a retablo artist featured in Andean Truths. The contrast does not work.
I am finishing this review two days after the pardon of Fujimori. Protesters have taken to
the streets in Lima and other cities while “Fujitrolls” attack all those who deem to
question the pardon. In their venom, they target the CVR and the LUM as well as other
individuals and organizations who fight for justice. In Peru, virtually no one would
772 HAHR / November

contrast the CVR and the fascinating communities of memory and commemoration.
Lambright does, to the great detriment of her book.

charles f. walker, University of California, Davis


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160798

Culture and Revolution: Violence, Memory, and the Making of Modern Mexico.
By horacio legrás. Border Hispanisms. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.
Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. viii, 236 pp. Paper, $29.95.

“Culture did not provide the revolution with a nation because the revolution wanted one,
but simply because the revolution revealed itself as an almost pure wanting”; “It was the
function of the void to elicit an entity able to satiate its own vacuums through the
expediency of cultural intervention” (pp. 15, 20).
Disclaiming relevant specialization when a book baffles may be defeatist, but Culture
and Revolution frequently baffled this historian. It is perhaps not so much a work of
Mexican history as one of critical studies, yet it tells stories about the past, some of them
good ones; its characters act in the classic period of revolutionary state building and
cultural transformation, 1920–40; it draws on major historians, such as Daniel Cosı́o
Villegas, Enrique Florescano, Gilbert M. Joseph, and Alan Knight; and it is billed as
social and political history in the Library of Congress cataloging data, so it seems rea-
sonable to read Horacio Legrás’s book as (at least in part) history.
As a work of history it suffers from errors of interpretation and fact. At the broadest
level, Legrás’s presentation of the last 30 years of historical thinking on the Mexican
Revolution is wrong. Citing with approval Leonard Folgarait’s argument that a dramatic
growth of scholarship has made “the causes, origins, and early development of the
Mexican Revolution” more obscure than ever, he bypasses the broad agreement on a
largely endogenous, strongly agrarian revolution that arose from the Alan Knight–John
Mason Hart debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s, reinforced by Friedrich Katz’s
later work, and developed and matizado by further research on Porfirian economy and
culture, citing instead an art historian and a historiographical overview from 1978
(p. 3). The attachment to the patria chica that regional studies established as a critical
determinant in Mexican political behavior is absent; instead “people do not belong
naturally to any particular region” (p. 5). In terms of outcomes, 20 years of revisionism
are overlooked in favor of a restatement of the 1930s as a time when “state power
consolidated rapidly” and Cardenismo “never lacked regional experts on the ground”
(pp. 1, 62). At times the imprecision is surreal but unimportant, as when he notes that
“although Galeana was illiterate, she typed out her autobiography,” or when things
become “even more unique,” or when synchronicity is “the technical desire to present a
diversity of figures and motives under a unified representation” (pp. 87, 30, 7). (Either
time or Carl Jung is dead, it seems.) At other times it really does matter, as when the
modern census defines respondents racially (and as “creole” into the bargain), or the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) is created in the late 1930s, or Hispanism is
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 773

established “under the tutelage of Alfonso Reyes” and is “seldom considered together”
with indigenismo, perpetuating “the colonial division between Indians and creoles”
(pp. 57, 114, 6). The census of the 1930s and 1940s never defined respondents racially, the
PRI was created in 1946, and hispanismo dates back to the late nineteenth century and
from more or less the start was intertwined, in both popular and academic perception and
debate, with indigenista discourses.
Legrás’s overall project is to assess the revolution as a series of texts through five
organizing concepts, each of which gets a chapter: extension, depth, life, fantasy, and
synchronicity. The range of those texts is impressive, spanning novels, memoirs, auto-
biographies, films, photography, painting, and interesting lives tout court: thus Colonel
Amelio Robles, the gifted transgender Zapatista, rubs shoulders with Alfonso Reyes and a
large cast of intellectuals and creators in a series of miniessays. These deal with topics as
disparate as La noche mexicana, a complex piece of nationalist public theatre, José Vas-
concelos’s memoirs and political career, Manuel Gamio’s work at Teotihuacán, and
Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva México! Most texts are mainstream; some, such as the novel
on which ¡Vámanos con Pancho Villa! is based or the long-lost film Redes, are not. Legrás’s
depth is not always manifest: writing about Frieda Kahlo as “the most successful self-
created character of the revolutionary myth,” he omits the quite relevant detail that she
was half-German (p. 90). But his breadth is incontestable and means that most readers
will find something new in his synthesis.
What it all adds up to, though, is difficult to see, a difficulty increased by the absence
of a conclusion; the book ends abruptly in the “gibberish” of Cantinflas’s masterpiece,
Ahı́ está el detalle (p. 183). Both Legrás’s vignettes and ocurrencias are often worth having:
the pages on popular theater and revolutionary photography are good. Yet drawing on
that material is difficult due to inaccuracy; when factual claims seemed surprising and
were checked, they didn’t invariably stack up. The population statistics cited on page 47
are indeed from the source footnoted, but nearly 30 pages away from the page reference
given. Diego Rivera was not the oldest of the three great muralists of the revolution; that
honor goes to José Clemente Orozco (p. 140). Again, neither of these was of any real
importance. But in combination with the more important errors of fact and interpre-
tation above, they cast the sneaking suspicion over many another interesting detail—is
this really true? And given the linguistic and empirical casualness of Culture and Revo-
lution, it is hard to tell.

paul gillingham, Northwestern University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160809

Mexico’s Uneven Development: The Geographical and Historical Context of Inequality.


By oscar j. martı́nez. New York: Routledge, 2016. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. xx, 325 pp. Paper, $46.95.

This book provides a lucid introduction to the history of economic development in


Mexico by means of a comparison with the United States. It engages with debates in
774 HAHR / November

economic history about the roles and importance of geography and institutions in the
paths to prosperity. It also revisits dependency theory while putting the emphasis on
national contexts.
In part 1 of the book the author gives a succinct account of the interconnected
histories of both countries, which share a 2,000-mile-long border. He proposes a
framework of five “foundational factors” to understand their divergent economic per-
formance throughout the centuries: the natural environment, natural resources, popu-
lation dynamics, foreign relations, and the structure of production and governance. The
first three amount to a country’s factor endowments and are discussed in part 2 of the
book. The fourth one, ranging from political and military pressures to capital flows,
trade, and migration, is the subject of part 3. In this framework, geography and power
relationships between countries trump human choice, institutions are derivative—
outcomes rather than causes—and culture has no significant agency.
Oscar Martı́nez shows that the perception of Mexico as a country of enormous
natural wealth is misplaced. Mexico started with a less advantageous geography than its
northern neighbor. Despite enjoying a larger territory at the time of independence from
Spain in 1821, Mexico possessed fewer prime agricultural areas and a less favorable
climate, which hampered productivity in the sector that employed over 90 percent of the
population. At the same time, Mexico’s lack of navigable rivers, its poor natural harbors
on the coasts, and its mountainous terrain meant that transportation costs were much
higher. The United States, with much more favorable conditions, managed both to
develop a rich agricultural sector and to join the exclusive club of nineteenth-century
industrialized countries, leaving Mexico behind. Along the way the United States became
expansionist. Here lies the connection between the key arguments of the book: geo-
graphical advantages led to early industrialization, giving the United States the ability to
dominate its already-lagging neighbor. Mexico lost half its territory to the United States
in the 1840s, including the gold mines of California and the agricultural, ranching, and
mineral wealth of Texas. Later on, the United States undermined Mexican sovereignty in
subtler but still damaging ways. In the 1920s foreign oil companies resisted the Mexican
government’s attempts to apply the 1917 constitution and charge them taxes, while
Washington kept alive the threat of military intervention. In more recent history, US
diplomatic pressure made it impossible for Mexico to reject neoliberalism in the 1980s.
As a result, Mexico has never managed to overcome its dependency on the United States
and transform into an industrial country. Throughout most of its history, it specialized in
exports of minerals, crops, and oil. Since the 1980s it expanded its export base to include
industrial goods, but these are produced by extremely cheap labor in the maquiladoras ofthe
border. Mexico reached the twenty-first century with a dual economy with a relatively small
modern urban sector, a large informal economy, and high levels of rural and urban poverty.
A few criticisms are warranted. What inequality is the author referring to in the
book’s title? While Mexico’s uneven distributions of income and wealth are mentioned,
the focus is on the economic divergence between Mexico and the United States. Also, this
reviewer would have wanted at least a chapter devoted to the fifth “foundational factor”
proposed by the author—that is, the relationship between the changes in the country’s
economic structure and the evolution of its political institutions. These topics appear
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 775

throughout the book, but the lack of a systematic examination weakens its core argu-
ments. Finally, why conflate illegal trade and migration in the last chapter? The political
implications of doing this go against the book’s otherwise-progressive stance.
Today Mexico faces serious challenges. It suffers from an economy that fails to
provide well-paying jobs to its population despite having successfully integrated into
global production chains, a government that struggles to collect taxes and therefore lacks
resources to tackle the country’s overwhelming social and infrastructural needs, and a
recent surge of lawlessness fueled by the drug trade. Martı́nez delves into history and
geography to explain how we got here. By necessity, such an ambitious project demands
simplifications, which might displease historians. What he gains in return is the ability to
participate in the most pressing current debates. University students and development
practitioners should find Mexico’s Uneven Development most rewarding.

ingrid bleynat, King’s College London


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160820

Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century


Mexico. By sandra c. mendiola garcı́a. The Mexican Experience. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Photographs. Map. Notes. Bibliography.
Index. xvi, 271 pp. Paper, $30.00.

Puebla is one of Mexico’s most picturesque cities. A United Nations Educational, Sci-
entific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, the city’s historic
center boasts an elegant sixteenth-century urban grid and some of the Western Hemi-
sphere’s finest baroque architecture. Sandra Mendiola Garcı́a’s new book tells the story
of the men and women who once made their living on those now pristine streets. The
book centers on the Unión Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes (UPVA), a grassroots
organization of street vendors founded in 1973 that grew into the nation’s largest
independent union, counting more than 10,000 members at its height in the mid-1980s.
Mendiola Garcı́a argues that the UPVA built a democratic labor movement that has
endured for over 40 years, maintaining its autonomy from Mexico’s ruling Partido
Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and surviving the country’s transition from corporatist
to neoliberal rule. Key to the union’s success, the author convincingly shows, was the close
collaboration between the union’s leaders and students and instructors at Puebla’s public
university, the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (UAP), in the early 1970s.
Street Democracy is a significant contribution to the increasingly rich historiography
of post-1968 Mexico. Mendiola Garcı́a uses oral interviews, municipal records, secret
police reports, and newspapers to reveal how the UPVA’s members rejected the PRI-
affiliated charro unions and their long-serving, corrupt bosses and allied instead with
student activists. In doing so, the UPVA forged a cross-sectoral collaboration that struck
at the heart of the PRI’s corporatist model and provided a platform for poor and working-
class poblanos to assert democratic rights. The ruling party did not take the vendors’
defiance in stride. Using records from Mexico’s Dirección Federal de Seguridad and
Dirección General de Investigaciones Polı́ticas y Sociales, the author shows that state and
776 HAHR / November

federal authorities used detentions, beatings, torture, and perhaps even kidnapping to
intimidate militant vendors. These tactics, she argues, further erode the myth of the Pax
PRIista—the idea that under the PRI’s dominance Mexico largely avoided the violence
that gripped other Latin American nations during the Cold War. Equally as significant, the
author shows that the dirty war against UPVA members continued well into the 1990s.
Neoliberalism, in this telling, only exacerbated state violence against militant vendors.
Mendiola Garcı́a traces the UPVA’s history across six neat chapters that unfold
roughly chronologically. Chapter 2 contains some of the study’s most important findings.
Drawing mainly from interviews with participants, the author describes how street
vendors and students and instructors at the UAP and its radical feeder school, the Pre-
paratoria Popular Emiliano Zapata, emboldened by progressive reforms at the university
and by President Luis Echeverrı́a’s ousting of Puebla’s authoritarian governor (part of the
“democratic opening” that occurred under Echeverrı́a’s sexenio), joined forces to organize
an independent union. The collaboration, which participants fostered in study circles on
the city’s streets, turned the UPVA into a potent force in poblano politics. Indeed, the
local government respected the union’s clout and allowed its members to sell in the city’s
streets between 1973 and 1986. In chapter 3, the author describes how vendors sustained
their movement through theatrical performances, films, songs, marches, and public art,
along with the hijacking of public buses—drawing on both Mexican and transnational
social movements and helping to build the New Left in Puebla.
While state and federal authorities employed a number of strategies to intimidate
militant vendors, their most effective weapon proved to be the UNESCO World
Heritage designation. In 1986, as part of their efforts to “dignify” the city center to appeal
to the international body, officials in Puebla successfully displaced street vendors to the
city’s margins. The move led to a drop in the union’s membership but did not crush the
movement. Instead, UPVA leaders began organizing combi drivers and neighborhood
residents in order to remain vital into the twenty-first century.
Mendiola Garcı́a’s use of oral interviews and photographs brings Puebla’s streets to
life, giving us a sense of the sights, smells, and quotidian rhythms of these dynamic public
spaces. Those sources also shed light on aspects of the UPVA’s history that written
documents obscure, especially the central role that women played in the union despite
their exclusion from the highest rungs of its leadership. Mendiola Garcı́a is clearly
sympathetic to her informants and their cause, but she maintains a critical perspective,
probing, for example, why members kept the leader known as Simitrio in power for a
decade when doing so ran counter to the union’s stated goal of avoiding entrenched
leadership. The author’s prose is lucid, and the book is a pleasure to read. It will certainly
interest historians of twentieth-century Mexico and Latin America as well as scholars of
neoliberalism, the informal economy, and social movements across the global South. It
would be an excellent addition to graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses.

andrew konove, University of Texas at San Antonio


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160831
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 777

Legacy ofthe Lash: Race and Corporal Punishment in the Brazilian Navy.
By zachary r. morgan. Blacks in the Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2014. Figures. Table. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 320 pp.
Cloth, $65.00.

On November 22, 1910, shouting out “End the chibata!” and “Long live liberty!”
Brazilian sailors staged one of the most impressive naval revolts of the twentieth century
(p. 197). For four days, some 2,000 men took command of four battleships, two of which
were sophisticated dreadnoughts recently purchased from England by the Brazilian
government. These men managed to skillfully maneuver these vessels on the coast of Rio
de Janeiro, which was then the capital of the country, and threatened to destroy the city if
their demands were not met. Their leaders were André Avelino, Francisco Dias Martins,
Manuel Gregório do Nascimento, and João Cândido Felisberto—the last of whom, the
most notorious of the group, was also known as the Black Admiral.
This book by Zachary R. Morgan tells the story of the event, which became known
as the Revolt of the Lash (Revolta da Chibata). The book, which is very well written and
based on extensive documentary research, portrays the existence of a strict social and
racial hierarchy in Brazil, thus adding to countless studies that, for the past several
decades, have challenged the still-quite-persistent idea that the country is an example of
racial harmony. Traditionally, blacks were an absolute majority among the sailors in
Brazil, while all the officers came from wealthier families. With the decline of slavery and
the progressive deconstruction of the slave masters’ power, the elites associated with the
state entrusted certain institutions with disciplinary control ofthe black population. Among
such institutions, the navy assumed a position ofgreat prominence and expanded the scope
of its long-standing mission to incorporate the poor black population into state control.
According to the author, the exemplary and ritualized punishment of whipping,
which was typical of the slave system, was not only maintained but also intensified in the
navy after slavery’s abolition in 1888, despite constitutional guarantees and successive
legal impediments against this practice. The idea that sailors could only be disciplined
through physical coercion was incontrovertible among the officers. The exhausting pace
of work and the compulsory forms of recruitment also brought the experience of sailors
closer to captivity. Thus the rebels of 1910 were not using mere rhetorical artifice when
railing in their manifesto against “slavery as practiced in the Brazilian Navy” (p. 20).
Inspired by Orlando Patterson, Morgan advocates the adoption of a more comprehen-
sive idea of slavery, understood as a process of uprooting, violent domination, and
dishonor that radiates beyond its formal extinction.
Interestingly, the author notes that while the movement had its roots in slavery, its
outbreak was modern. The Revolt of the Lash was a response to the violence involved in
the renovation of the capital city, which was remodeled at the expense of the black
population’s marginalization (which led to the beginning of the slums in Rio de Janeiro).
Popular dissatisfaction was increasing; because of their social and racial condition, sailors
were affected likewise. The precarity of naval service was also a result of the ongoing
exclusion. In this context, in 1909 hundreds of black sailors were sent to Newcastle,
England, in order to undergo training to man the new vessels just acquired from a local
778 HAHR / November

company. This experience was crucial. The city’s antiracist atmosphere, the ebullience of
the local labor movement, and the better conditions of the English sailors evidenced, like
never before, the anachronism of the practice of whipping in the Brazilian navy, not to
mention the possibility of better living conditions in general. The sailors’ aspirations
changed as they acquired the skills to fight for them.
Morgan broadly reviews the historiography pertinent to the revolt, identifying
tendencies and limitations such as the attempt by military historians to undermine the
memory of the movement. He convincingly states that the revolt may be better under-
stood within the context of Atlantic slavery (p. 9). However, in view of this assertion,
recent works on slavery in Brazil and its ties with the Atlantic world should have been
included. Most of his references to this field do not go beyond the 1990s. Additionally,
while several pages are dedicated to comparing the navy with the army, exposing
important differences between the institutions, Morgan does not provide an interpre-
tation of these differences. If readers seek a good answer as to why the navy, unlike the
army, was so caught up in slavery’s past, they will not find one. Nevertheless, none of this
discredits the contributions of the book, which by adopting a transnational and long-
term perspective has the merit of breaking the boundaries that limit the understanding of
phenomena such as the revolt. The work coherently integrates the imperial and repub-
lican periods, in addition to the pre- and postabolition contexts of slavery in Brazil. At the
same time, Morgan situates the revolt in the international processes of the African
diaspora and the struggle of workers in the Atlantic.

waldomiro lourenço da silva júnior, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160842

Los indispensables: Dirigentes de la segunda lı́nea peronista.


Edited by raanan rein and claudio panella. Ciencias Sociales. San Martı́n,
Argentina: UNSAM Edita, 2017. Notes. 275 pp. Paper, AR$321.00.

Since the publication of Peronismo, populismo y polı́tica (1998), Raanan Rein has been
stressing the importance of what he calls the second line of Peronist leadership, whose
role, he argues, is vital to understanding the nature of the Peronist regime and Juan
Perón’s relationship with his followers. The argument makes total sense and should have
been obvious, but it was not.
The book under review is the second collection of studies on secondary Peronist
leaders put together by Rein and Claudio Panella, the first of which was published in
2013. This second book contains 13 chapters written by different authors discussing such
leaders. All except one chapter are focused on men who had their principal impact at the
national level; unlike the previous volume, no women are discussed. The chapters
highlight different aspects of the men’s careers. A few of the contributions look almost
entirely at these men’s activities prior to the beginning of the Peronist era, but the other
essays examine the Peronist period almost exclusively. The most successful chapters tell
us a great deal about the making and carrying out of policies during the years from 1943
to 1955. Undoubtedly much depended on the nature of the sources that were available.
Book Reviews / Twentieth–Twenty-First Centuries 779

The best chapters give a picture of an important actor during the first Peronist era
and show how he helped shape some aspect of that time. In doing so, they demonstrate
the complexity of the period and the many contradictions that occurred in part due to the
very different sets of beliefs of Perón’s supporters. One of the better chapters is that of
Raanan Rein and David Sheinin on Jerónimo Remorino, who served as minister of
foreign relations between 1951 and 1955. Using a wide range of sources including
archives in Argentina and abroad, Rein and Sheinin present a man who despite his
familial ties to the conservative political elite supported Perón. Remorino served in
several bureaucratic positions before becoming ambassador to the United States. In this
post he adopted a position friendlier to the United States than that held by the foreign
minister at the time, Juan Bramuglia. The essay then discusses the nature of the infighting
that occurred, how Remorino ascended to the cabinet, and what he did while in office.
Through the discussion of Remorino, we can see how Perón drew into his government
people from very different political backgrounds: Bramuglia had been a socialist, while
Remorino had been a conservative. We can also see the political infighting that occurred
as well as the loyalty of key figures to Perón.
Another exemplary chapter is that by César Tcach, which examines the brief gov-
ernorship of the province of Córdoba by Juan San Martı́n. Tcach anchors his study in a
wide range of primary sources. San Martı́n, while democratically elected, was clearly
chosen by Perón as his candidate for the governorship. He was an officer in the air force
on active duty and an engineer trained in Italy. Although San Martı́n is most famous for
his role in creating an Argentine aircraft industry and for the encouragement of Cór-
doba’s industrialization, the chapter focuses on how he centralized power in the province
in the governor’s office and worked hard to stamp out dissension. Perón’s central role can
be seen in how he not only handpicked the governor but also—despite what could be
considered a successful term from the president’s perspective—appointed San Martı́n to
be air force minister, leaving the province without its elected governor.
If there is going to be a third volume (and there are a number of men and women
who cry out for study), I would like to see greater emphasis on those who helped shape the
nature of the regime away from the capital. Peronism away from Buenos Aires is different
and arguably more enduring. Also, given the sheer number of studies on the second line
of Peronist leaders (in Rein and Panella’s edited volumes and elsewhere), is it not time to
try to rethink the nature of the regime and its relationship with its followers? Reex-
amining Perón’s role in his government and its ties with the populace will not be easy.
However, given the quantity of information that can be gleaned from the many well-done
studies of Peronism published in the last two decades, such reexamination is necessary
for gaining a clearer idea of what new avenues need to be explored.
The chapters under review take us one step closer to a fuller vision of the Peronist
government. They provide us an interesting and important set of perspectives on some of
the men who provided the necessary labor and ideas for the movement. Like all collective
works it is uneven, but it is well worth reading and an important contribution.

joel horowitz, St. Bonaventure University


doi 10.1215/00182168-7160853
Extent and Nature of Circulation
Average number of copies of each issue published during the preceding twelve
months: (A) total number of copies printed, 553; (B.1) paid/requested mail
subscriptions, 326; (B.4) paid distribution by other classes, 2; (C) total paid/
requested circulation, 328; (D.1) samples, complimentary, and other non-
requested copies, 17.5; (D.4) nonrequested copies distributed through outside
the mail, 47; (E) total nonrequested distribution (sum of D.1 & D.4), 64.5; (F)
total distribution (sum of C & E), 392.5; (G) copies not distributed (office use,
leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing, returns from news agents), 160.5;
(H) total (sum of F & G), 553.

Actual number of copies of a single issue published nearest to filing date: (A)
total number of copies printed, 554; (B.1) paid/requested mail subscriptions,
388; (B.4) paid distribution by other classes, 2; (C) total paid/requested circu-
lation, 390; (D.1) samples, complimentary, and other nonrequested copies, 20;
(D.4) nonrequested copies distributed through outside the mail, 47; (E) total
nonrequested distribution (sum of D.1 & D.4), 67; (F) total distribution (sum
of C & E), 457; (G) copies not distributed (office use, leftover, unaccounted,
spoiled after printing, returns from news agents), 97; (H) total (sum of F & G),
554.

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