Hispanic American Historical Review 2007 Shumway 618 9

Hispanic American Historical Review
Book Reviews
General
Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian
Candombl. By j. lorand matory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. viii, 383 pp.
Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $26.95.
Cultural histories of the black Atlantic, as Africa and its various diasporas are fashionably called in the academy, are less than 75 years old, but theyve already established their
own orthodoxies. It is Professor Matorys evident pleasure to skewer many of their perceived truths and to include in his skewering those globalization theorists who suppose
transnationalism began with frequent-flyer miles or DirecTV. To them he says, check
the traffic flows between Brazil and Nigeria for the last couple hundred years.
Prevailing roots scholarship (Melville Herskovits, Roger Bastide et al.) traces
a unilinear movement of African religions from West and Central Africa to the New
World, where they were communally reestablished by rural blacks hiding their primordial divinities behind Catholic rituals and images. Matory will have none of this. Rather
than roots, he sees rhizomes running in all directions between the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa. In his model, agency is returned not to surreptitious peasants, but
to a complex ethno-class of Afro-Brazilians acting out of enlightened self-interest.
This group, which includes international merchants as the foremost agents but also
musicians, literati, translators, and priests, including alienated Christian missionaries
and leading Freemasons, comprised diverse units of collective self-construction that
imagined the diaspora as a community (pp. 1023).
Matory describes this process of religious self-fashioning as Anagonization, from
the term Nago used to describe Yoruba people in Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas.
But the universality of his argument is vitiated by this focus on an African people who
constructed a national identity for themselves only late in the nineteenth century, at
about the same time the Nagos were framing their own identity in Brazil. There are all
sorts of historical and geographic contingencies (including the ease and profitability of
Atlantic trade routes and the late date of Brazilian emancipation) that make the YorubaCandombl case unique and thus distant from the various Kongo-derived religions or
Vodou, for example. Perhaps the only other convincing example of Black transnationalism is that of the Jeje, whose emerging ethnic and religious solidarity in Brazil may
have inspired a parallel self-fashioning among their kindred in Dahomey, a wonderful
example of those rhizomes Matory suggests.
Hispanic American Historical Review 87:3
Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press
572
HAHR / August
For a religious culture that celebrates its African purity, Candombl is also
remarkable for the emergence of a matriarchal priesthood without precedent in Nigeria. Given his stress on Afro-Brazilian agency, Matory ascribes this gender anomaly to
a surprising source: Ruth Landess City of Women (1947), in which the author offers
Candombl as a living and time-honored example of matriarchy, available to inspire the
opponents of sexism in . . . the United States (p. 189). Matory thus allows an awful lot of
agency to an Anglo-American anthropologist, especially since the ascension of priestly
women involves a corollary demotion of priestly men: Landes effectively founded the
Brazilian tradition by which a temples commitment to excluding men from the possession priesthood became a significant measure of its African purity (p. 191). One marvels at the power of an anthropologist to so significantly reshape the religious practice
of her subject, but one also wonders if there were not other undiscussed factors in the
Bahian Weltanschauung that supported such a gender revolution.
Discussion of gender leads to the touchy issue of the ad or male possession priest, a
ritual specialist of great importance in Yorubaland (see Matory, Sex and the Empire That
Is No More, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994), who is now identified with passive homosexuality in Brazil. Matory carefully traces the evolution of the transvestite priesthood
from the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo to Bahia, adumbrating questions about sexuality that
were memorably aroused by Jim Wafers flamboyant account of spirit possession in a
homosexual Candombl temple (The Taste of Blood, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
There is a more than a bit of pater lacademie in Matorys writing, which some will
find engaging. Parts of the book are clearly addressed to a relatively small class of scholars; others will find the critique of transnational and globalization theory bracing. For
either of these reasons, or for Matorys grander project of restoring agency to the unsung
entrepreneurs who shaped contemporary expressions of black Atlantic religion, this is a
book that deserves to be read and discussed.
But it is J. Lorand Matory who suggests this final irony: that the writer may provide the best evidence for his own thesis. Having discussed the important role that the
English Professors of Brazilwhich is to say, the Afro-Brazilian intellectuals who
traveled between Bahia and Lagos at the end of the nineteenth centuryplayed in the
development of Candombl, Matory reveals himself as their heir, growing up in a Yorubacentric academic family, immersing himself in their religion. I am a son of Ogum. He
rules my head and molds my personality. He makes me strong like steel (p. 246). In that
his book may well become canonized by Candombl practitioners, Matory (like Landes?)
could wind up reshaping a religion whose past he has so carefully construed.
donald cosentino, University of California at Los Angeles

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-005
Book Reviews / General
573
Democracy in Latin America, 17601900. Vol. 1, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico
and Peru. By carlos foment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Maps.
Tables. Figures. Notes. Index. xxix, 454 pp. Cloth, $39.00.
Few fields have been revisited so thoroughly as that of political and civic life in nineteenth-century Latin America. Ideas concerning citizenship, elections, representation,
participation, political groups and parties, communitarism, and civic patterns have
undergone considerable revision and are the subject of ongoing research. Renewed theoretical and practical concerns have led historians and social scientists to reorient their
quests, to reinterpret old data, andmost important of allto track down repositories
and information sources that have not been previously tapped. This turn has challenged
long-standing views and has launched a lively re-examination of political and civic practices in the nineteenth century. The resulting debateencompassing a broad range of
scholars in the Americas and Europeis not merely academic; indeed, it sheds light (and
certain shadows) on more recent political concerns.
Carlos Foments analysis makes a substantial and often passionate contribution to
this revisionist trend. The book revisits the emergence and scope of democratic life in
Latin America, understanding the sovereignty of the people as the horizontal capacity to generate social power rather than as a structural by-product of state building,
economic development, and modernization (p. 29). To that end, he projects on the
region the Tocquevillian perspective based on civic life that enlightened our understanding of North American society more than 150 years ago. Diving into a vast array
of documentary sourcespamphlets, tabloids, travelogues, private letters, journals, and
so onthe author offers a striking panorama of associational life in nineteenth-century
Latin America. He challenges the idea that civic life and the performance of democratic
principles are linked to a unique pattern of democratic practices. His research spans
Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and Cuba, and although the present volume focuses only on
the first two, it is evident that this multisided research project influenced the complexity
of his analytical vision.
Tocquevilles nineteenth-century account of North American civic life inspired this
revision of civic association in Latin America; historians and social scientists should be
grateful for this enriching panorama that had hardly been glimpsed previously. However,
by employing Tocquevilles model, Foment restricts and minimizes the very scope of his
analysis, imposing an externally crafted and lopsided pattern that obscures the complexities and interconnections of Latin American civic and political processes. This is related
to the fact that although Foments analysis forms part of the revisionist trend discussed
above, he does not demonstrate familiarity with the historiographical debates at the core
of that trend. Though conversant with an interesting amount of theoretical literature,
he tends to ignore certain recent historiographical productions relevant to his question.
Attending to this growing body of literature would have helped him avoid commonplace
perspectives that oversimplify, and even discredit, some parts of his analysis
574
HAHR / August
I shall give three examples. Foments documentary evidence, however rich, does
not support the idea that postcolonial life was radically lopsided, with citizens inclined
to practice democracy in civil society more than in any other terrain, and radically
bifurcated, with citizens depositing their sovereignty on each other rather than in government institutions. In fact, the underlying idea that civic life developed in Latin
America within an everlasting authoritarian context ignores the complexity, as well as
the diversity, of political processes in Latin America during the long period covered by
the analysis. Also, the notion that subaltern groups were totally segregated from civic
and political life has been disavowed by a wide literature that shows the political participation and civic life of indigenous, mulatto, and mestizo populations, at different levels
and through changing, nonlinear patterns across the century. Finally, the perspective of
a political vocabulary based exclusively on Civic Catholic notions of selfhood entails
biased implications that ignore the weight of the theological discussion in the political
developments of the Western worldnot just in the Catholic parts of the sameand
disregards the considerable influence gained by the secularist trend in some Latin American countries during the nineteenth century (such as the Leyes de Reforma in Mexico or
the laws on education and civil marriage in Argentina).
Although these criticisms do not negate the pathbreaking character of Foments
proposal, his perspective would have been strengthened if more contrasting historiographical information had been taken into account. Perhaps this aspect will be addressed
in the second volume on Argentina and Cuba.
mnica quijada, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-006
Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America.

Edited by matthew restall. Dilogos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 2005. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography.
Index. xv, 303 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Paper, $22.95.
Many scholars of Latin American colonial history have a habit of distinguishing between
Indo-America and Afro-America. The first region is made up of places where the colonization process was grounded in the presence of massive contingents of pre-Columbian
peoples, particularly in the Andes and Mesoamerica. The second region consists of
places where the native population was scarce or was depleted early on; here, the colonial
project depended on the forced immigration of millions of Africans in order to make the
continent attractive to European settlers. Brazil and the Caribbean thus would constitute the main backdrop for the Afro-American drama.
This taxonomy is a classic example of a situation where the analytical instrument
becomes so deeply rooted that it spills over into the academic conscience and replaces the
reality to be investigated. In fact, it is not uncommon for scholars to take the separation
of Indians and blacks in Latin American history as natural and unquestionable. This
575
conceptualization may be rooted in the fact that the period of Europes global expansion
and colonization coincided with the creation and consolidation of the well-known asymmetrical system that classified human types into races and nations: whites on top,
blacks at the bottom, Indians and Asians somewhere in the middle. It is less well known,
however, that the various forms that European colonization assumed in different locales
often shook up this taxonomy. Under these circumstances, individuals of mixed heritage
who did not fit within the original classificatory system were either turned into aberrations or simply had an indisputable invisibility imposed upon them.
These were the two ways in which groups of people whose culture and physical
appearance reflect the experience of interaction between natives and Africansstill
visible in all parts of the Americas in varying numbershave been denied adequate
historiographic treatment. If its only goal were to rescue these groups from such historiographic limbo, Beyond Black and Red would have fulfilled an excellent roleit is, after
all, the first English-language book dedicated specifically to the relationship between
Indians and Africans and people of African descent in colonial Latin America. But the
book goes further, allowing us to grasp the relations between Africans and Indians in a
variety of contexts, bringing together research on both Spanish and Portuguese areas of
colonization and on urban, agrarian, and mining settlements. This approach is extremely
useful and allows the book to look past the usual simplistic perspective that sees the predominant pattern of interaction between Indians and Africans as a hostile one, since
both groups were divided by the efforts of the colonial authorities to pit one against the
other in order to better control them. The perspective that emerges in this collection
suggests, in contrast, a huge range of possible interactions. These included conflict, to
be sure, but also cultural exchanges, mutual aid, romantic and parental relationships, and
resignifications of many types. In the end, the concept that perhaps better ties together
the cases in question is relational diversity.
The careful reader will note that a good part of the books nine chapters deconstruct
another concept, equally prevalent in much of traditional Latin American historiography, especially within the Marxist school. I refer to the enduring idea that Africans
and, to a lesser extent, Indians constitute homogeneous social categories, separated
out from the rest of society on the basis of their legal status as slaves or for the simple
fact of belonging to socially subordinate groups. In different degrees, some chapters of
the collection question such simplifications, bringing to light situations where actions
and practices crossed class and ethnic lines, implying as a result that individuals took
conscious positions in the face of equally objective circumstances. As result, relationships between Africans and Indians assume a form that is quite often ambiguous, if not
explicitly contradictoryas tends to happen with all human actions.
Much of this new historiographic approach is due to the unique nature of Iberian
law (especially Portuguese), which, as Frank Tannembaum and Gilbert Freyre have
indicated, by granting at least certain rights to Africans and Indians often generated
masses of documentation that is rich in its intertextuality. Likewise, the Inquisition
courts of Spanish America also produced innumerable cases from which, in one way or
576
HAHR / August
another according to the skill of the investigator, we can capture the words of Indians
and enslaved Africans and, in this way, reconstruct many of the aspects of interactions
between them.
Finally, underlying several chapters of the collection one finds a theoretical path
little explored by the authors, but that could sharpen the focus on the common ground
that unites most of the experiences of interaction that the book proposes to analyze.
More than just recovering Indians and Africans as active agents of their history, the
interactions between both (and with peninsular or creole whites) can be interpreted as
expressions of social exclusion in its broadest sensethat is, as one of the results of the
poverty and marginalization that enabled colonial Latin American societies to reproduce themselves over time. It is clear that, in the end, such a positioning forces us to
assume that the history of colonial Latin America is far from being reducible to a simple
dichotomy between slavery and freedom.
manolo florentino, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-007
AfroLatin America 18002000. By george reid andrews. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2004. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Glossary.
Bibliography. Index. viii, 284 pp. Paper, $19.95.
This is an ambitious book that presents the history of AfroLatin America over the last
two hundred years. The focus is on Latin Americas black populationwelcome departures from more general treatments that concentrate on the socioeconomic context with
the black experience as part of a much wider panorama. Blacks are presented as actively
contesting their social position and forcing modifications that eventually result in their
inclusion as citizens. Prior to abolition, slaves progressively forced their erstwhile owners to respond to demands and acknowledge mutual interdependence in return for of a
degree of cooperation. Passivity in the face of exploitation is not part of their history.
AfroLatin America is defined as those areas at one time governed by Spain and Portugal. This excludes Haiti and the British West Indies, as well as minor Danish, Dutch,
and French holdings. This tends to narrow the social stage as it sharpens the focus on
AfroLatin Americans. The well informed will be able to supply the Atlantic world context as needed if the work is assigned in classesan attractive possibility.
The work seeks to be comprehensive in its coverage, but inevitably Brazil, Cuba,
Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Panama loom large as the story unfolds. That
Brazil is the home of 70 percent of all AfroLatin Americans (p. 156) is a reality that
justifies its place in this work. A central thesis is the ability of AfroLatin Americans to
negotiate with slave owners, and later with those that depended on their labor, to establish an acceptable socioeconomic balance.
Andrews notes two major economic waves of Africanization: an earlier period connected with the initial establishment of plantation agriculture (notably sugar in Brazil)
577
and an equally important wave that draws black West Indians into nineteenth-century
banana plantations in Central America and sugar plantations in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and
the Dominican Republic. The oil industry in Venezuela and the construction and subsequent operation of the Panama Canal after 1914 add a more-modern technological touch
to this second wave. In reality, the inadequate labor pool in many areas made the introduction of West Indians necessary if Latin America wanted to participate in modern
economic activity. Complaints about the Haitianization of Spanish America reflected
the historic desire to whiten their population, but economics always prevailed. Ironically, labor disputes often failed as large companies adroitly used racial tensions to their
own advantage. The central role of the West Indies as a direct supplier of black labor
makes it somewhat unfortunate that Andrews chose to exclude the islands from his discussion. West Indian blacks only enter the picture after they actually disembark on the
mainland.
As a consequence of economic realities, the region witnessed an ebb and flow of
black to white followed by a reversal from white to black. In Cuba in the 1940 and 1950s,
high birth rates among Afro-Cubans and the flight of white Cubans to Miami after 1959
increased the percentage of black Cubans. Argentina, flooded with European immigrants after the 1870s, became decidedly white, but today it is receiving an influx of
migrants from neighboring countries. A similar flux characterized landownership. Economic booms and busts made land valuable, then cheap and available. The last such cycle
occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. In Brazil, the collapse of coffee exports allowed many
Afro-Brazilians and European immigrants to acquire land both formally and informally.
In our own time, the displacement of Afro-Brazilians in the Northeast has been underway for some time. The link between land use and urbanization seems clear for blacks,
as it does for all races.
Andrews moves the discussion from black and white to todays brown. The brown
category appears to be absorbing both black and white, forming a racial composite. The
recent trend for blacks to self-identify as brown, coupled with that of individuals previously identified as white that now declare themselves brown, leads to fusion. Perhaps it
indicates that Jos Vasconceloss raza csmica has gained acceptance as a hemisphere-wide
self-identified reality. Andrews suggests that Latin Americans have at last given up on
whitening. This may be correct, given the falling birth rates in Western Europe, but
whether it will linger on in a new formulation remains a to be seen. It would seem that
the process described here is a global one, with implication for the United States as the
country debates immigration reform.
This work will be useful for researchers interested in the topic. Much of value is
listed in the notes and the selected bibliography. That the author conducted his research
in libraries throughout Latin America points the way for future in-depth studies.
Professor Andrews has written a thoughtful account that should change the way we
view and teach the role of Africans in the New World.
colin m. maclachlan, Tulane University

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-008
578
HAHR / August
Avatares de la medicalizacin en Amrica Latina, 18701970. Edited by diego armus.

Buenos Aires: Lugar Editorial, 2005. Illustrations. Notes. 304 pp. Paper.
Diego Armuss new collection pairs original analyses with previously published work
to show readers how scholarly research on the history of medicine and public health in
Latin America has developed in recent years. Armus says he selected essays that focus
on Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico between 1870 and 1970 because the historiography for
those countries is especially rich. The articles feature topics ranging from a sensationcausing painting that depicted the 1871 yellow fever epidemic in Buenos Aires to the comparative institutional history of public health and social-service agencies in twentiethcentury Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. The volume presents several carefully selected
approaches to the new history of medicine. At the same time, it makes work previously
published in Portuguese and English available to Spanish speakers and brings scholarship published in Mexican and Brazilian journals to the attention of scholars in Argentina, where the book was published.
Readers familiar with Armuss 2002 edited collection, Disease in the History of Modern Latin America (Duke Univ. Press), will recognize the volumes first essay, in which
Armus charts the origins of the new history of medicine. He shows how the newer
work differs from more traditional histories that offer biographies of famous physicians or discussions of scientific discoveries, and that portray the practice of medicine
as a never-ending march of progress. Armus argues that recent work is characterized
by three themes: emphasis on the social, political, and cultural dimension of epidemics;
consideration of the links between disease and nation building; and examination of the
power relations embedded in discussions of bodies, sickness, and cures.
The volume is organized geographically, beginning with studies of Argentina, followed by work focusing on Brazil and Mexico. The essays on Argentina are unpublished,
as is one of the essays about Brazil. Two essays, those by Laura Maolsetti Costa and
Srgio Carrara, focus on the ways in which illness has been represented culturally. In
her study of the image of yellow fever in Buenos Aires, Malosetti Costa discusses the
intense public discussion provoked shortly after the 1871 epidemic by the presentation
of an oil painting that depicted a nursing child clutching at his dead mothers breast, as
doctors and public health officials look on. Malosetti Costa argues that this image contributed to the emergence of a new sensitivity to sickness and death and underscored the
importance of inculcating so-called modern public health measures in the city (p. 43).
Carraras essay, Estrategias anti-coloniales: Sfilis, raza e identidad nacional en el Brasil
de entreguerras, draws on a variety of sources, including theater dialogue, to demonstrate the diffusion of discourses about syphilis in early twentieth-century Brazil, where
they informed larger discussions about national identity.
A discussion about race and eugenics features prominently in the collection. Nsia
Trinidade Lima and Gilberto Hochman, like Carrara, explore the links between disease
and national identity in Brazil. In their previously published Condenado por la raza,
absuelto por la medicina: El Brasil descubierto por el movimiento mdico-higienista
579
de la primera repblica, they show that early twentieth-century doctors initiated rural
hygiene campaigns under the belief that residents of the countryside were racially inferior and degenerate compared to city dwellers; however, the authors argue, this contact with hinterlands led doctors to conclude that the health situation in such settings
resulted more from the public sectors neglect than from the inherent degeneracy of the
people. In her examination of hygiene campaigns in Porfirian Mexico, Claudia Agostoni
shows that physicians interested in preventive medicine similarly advanced the use of
public hygiene programs as a way to redeem the population from the ills from which it
suffered. In Mexico, according to Agostoni, public officials especially targeted mothers
as the natural vectors of hygiene education. Alexandra Sterns study of demographic
discourses around mestizaje between 1920 and 1960 shows how Mexican social scientists
mixed an international blend of theories linking race, body, crime, and society into a
uniquely postrevolutionary ideology. Agostonis article appeared previously in Mexican
Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, and previous versions of Sterns have appeared in edited collections released in Mexico and in the United States.
Four additional articles round out this collection. Armus employs social and cultural history to understand the strategies of protesting tuberculosis patients in Argentina sanatoria at the turn of the century, while Eric Van Young reviews the work of
three Mexican authors who focus on the history of mental health and psychiatry in the
country. Susana Belmartinos analysis of the differences among public health institutions
in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile employs a decidedly political-science perspective. And
Simone Petraglia Krops, Nara Azevedo, and Luiz Otvio Ferreira examine the medical
research leading to the discovery and treatment of Chagas disease from the perspectives
of social and institutional history.
While readers may be familiar with some of these essays, Armuss creative assembly
of original and previously published articles will be welcome to those who have not had
an opportunity to appreciate the range of issues the new medical history addresses.
They may wish, as well, to consider how to apply some of the featured approaches to new
diseases, fresh topics, or alternative national or regional contexts.
katherine elaine bliss, Georgetown University

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-009
580
HAHR / August
Background
An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru. By diego de castro titu cusi yupanqui.
Edited and translated by ralph bauer. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005.
Illustrations. Map. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xv, 166 pp. Cloth, $50.00.
Paper, $21.95.
An English translation of Titu Cusi Yupanquis account of the invasion and domination
of the Andean peoples by Francisco Pizarro and his followers and successors is long overdue. This 1570 Relacin, or history and chronicle (here edited, translated, and annotated by Ralph Bauer) purports to tell the story of native resistance and accommodation,
and cultural change, mixture, and survival. The names and actions of five Andean rulers
(Pachacuti Inca, Topa Inca Yupanqui, Huayna Capac, Manco Inca Yupanqui, and Titu
Cusi Yupanqui) frame the personal narrative, which subtly reveals the clash of worldviews and values between natives and Spaniards and the resulting incomprehensibility of
certain Spanish actions and claims from the native point of vieweven after almost 50
years of continuous interaction.
But good translation is difficult and involves far more than the literal substitution
of words from one language for those of another. Bauers introduction points out some
of the problematics of recording and translating oral tradition. Titu Cusi dictated the
content in Quechua to the missionary Fray Marcos Garca, who ordered and translated
it into Spanish. Martn de Pando, Titu Cusis bilingual mestizo secretary, transcribed it.
The result is a chronicle of the impossible, to use Frank Salomons 1982 phrase: a story
of the contact era that, in making itself understandable to the Spanish no longer is faithful to the Andean materials. Bauer underscores the hybridity of the text. The fact that
the account was meant to establish the legitimacy of Titu Cusi and his father as Andean
lords and the illegitimacy of Spanish domination results in the assumption of a Spanish
logic of succession. Other European elements include distances recorded in leagues, not
time, and the use of pesos to assess value. The text suffers further inaccuracies and distortions as it is rendered into English through an English professors cultural filter. Bauer
misdefines such key words and concepts as repartimiento (pp. 1, 10, 129) and encomienda
(p. 24), equating the terms with lands and boundaries. This contradicts his own correct definition of repartimiento in the glossary (p. 160). Tierra(s) is another term found
throughout the text that he translates both as land(s) and country, when in several places
it clearly refers to a population or a people, that is, ethnic group(s). Elsewhere, he renders
passages too loosely, translating, for example se pasaron a esta mi tierra a rreconocerme
por seor as They crossed the border into my land in order to pay tribute to me as their
master (p. 131). The addition of the word border, not found in the original, territorializes an empire that natives still conceptualized in kinship terms. Other translations call
into question his grasp of the Spanish language; for example, el espaol en rrescibindolo [la chicha (corn beer)] de su mano [de Ataguallpa] lo derram (vol. 2, p. 9 in Horacio
Urteagas edition, Relacin de la conquista del Per, Imprenta y Libreria Sanmarti, 1916)
Book Reviews / Background
581
becomes when he [Atahuallpa] offered our customary drink [chicha] to one of them, the
Spaniard poured it out with his own hands (p. 60).
Bauer also makes statements that deserve more annotation. It should be noted,
for example, that Francisco Pizarro was not born a hidalgo, but a poor and uneducated
swineherd (p. 2). He achieved the status of marquis and gentleman relatively late in life, as
a result of his South American exploits. Likewise, upon reading the sentence, Thus, the
marquis had them for lunch before they could have him, because he now knew about the
conspiracy against the Spaniards (p. 69), I was confused, thinking this another example
of mistranslation. Upon checking the originalY sauido por el marqus la traiin que
estaba armada para matarles, antes que los comiesen los almorz l (Urteaga, p. 22)I
found it a reasonable literal translation. Urteaga footnotes the text to explain Pizarros
preventive actions, and it would have been helpful for Bauer to follow suit here.
Finally, the edition suffers by a none-too-careful editing. Typographical and spelling errors abound, but I will not belabor the reader with examples. These faults, and the
fact that it is not an authoritative translation, make this volume unsuitable for classes on
Latin American history and culture or Native American literatures (not withstanding
the claims on the back cover), if accurate rendering, clear cross-cultural understanding,
and standards of English use and grammar are any consideration.
susan elizabeth ramrez, Texas Christian University

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-010
Memorias histrico, fsicas, crtico, apologticas de la Amrica.

By jos eusebio llano zapata. Edited by ricardo ramrez,
antonio garrido, lus millones figueroa, vctor peralta ruiz, and

charles walter. Lima: Instituto Francs de Estudios Andinos / Pontificia
Universidad Catlica del Per / Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2005.
Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. 622 pp. Paper.
Eptome cronolgico o Idea general del Per: Crnica indita de 1776.
Edited by vctor peralta ruiz. Madrid: Fundacin MAPFRE Tavera, 2005.
Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographies. Indexes. 320 pp. Cloth.
Jos Eusebio Llano Zapata is one of the most representative authors of the Spanish
American Enlightenment, yet he is also one of the least known. His invisibility, to be
sure, has to do with the almost complete lack of interest by historians in the intellectual
history of colonial Latin America. Had he been born in Germany, France, or British
America, library shelves would have long been lined with monographs deconstructing
his every utterance, for his was a subtle mind. But more important than the biases of
historians, his invisibility is the result of having his work buried for centuries in dusty
archives. Typical of colonial Spanish American scribal culture, his most important work
circulated only in manuscripts.
582
HAHR / August
In Cdiz, Peruvian folklorist Ricardo Palma obtained a copy of the first volume
of Llano Zapatas magnum opus, the Memorias histrico, fsicas, crtico, apologticas, and
published it in 1904. Peruvian intellectuals, however, under the spell of positivism, found
Llano Zapata too credulous for their taste and made no effort to find and publish the
remaining two, even though all three volumes were duly catalogued at the Biblioteca
del Palacio Real in Madrid. Only through the collective efforts of Ricardo Ramrez,
Antonio Garrido, Luis Millones Figueroa, Vctor Peralta Ruiz, and Charles Walker has
it now been possible to finally bring all three volumes to print. Llano Zapatas Eptome
cronolgico is something else, for since the late nineteenth century the authorship of this
manuscript, at the Real Academia de Historia in Madrid, has been attributed to the
count of Castaeda y de los Lamos. It took the detective work of another subtle Peruvian
mind, Vctor Peralta, to prove (at least to my satisfaction) that the Eptome was penned
by Llano Zapata.
The illegitimate son of a priest, who himself had been born out of wedlock, Llano
Zapata was born in Lima in 1721. After attending the Franciscan College of San Buena
ventura de Guadalupe, Llano Zapata embarked on a career of scholarship and erudition,
publishing works on biblical exegesis, comets, and local earthquakes. Indefatigable, he
mingled with learned Jesuits, founded an academy to promote the study of Greek, and
hoped to become a favorite of the viceregal court. But illegitimacy must have hindered
his efforts at upward mobility, for in 1750 Llano Zapata left for Cdiz, although not until
he had spent five years in Santiago, Mendoza, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Rio de
Janeiro compiling statistics and surveying the new lands. In Cdiz he befriended Julin de
Arriaga, the minister of the Navy and the Indies. Intoxicated by the possibilities of such
a powerful patron, Llano Zapata assembled a massive study of Perus natural resources,
hoping to gain the sympathy of the crown. In 1757, the first volume of his Memorias
histricas, an exhaustive survey of mines in the viceroyalty of Peru, reached the Academy
of History. Although a committee of the academy approved publication, the Council of
Indies, the final arbiter of things American, rejected it. Llano Zapata remained hardpressed for money until his death in 1780 but still hoped his efforts would one day be
rewarded. During those years, he completed the other two volumes of his Memorias, as
well as his Eptome, and published two collections of his letters to famous men.
The editors of Memorias consider Llano Zapatas work to be a treatise of natural history, but it should rather be read as a study of cameralist political economy. Throughout,
Llano Zapata offers a meticulous survey of the myriad mineral, botanical, and animal
resources available in Peru. Packed with statistics and detailed description of technologies and processes of production, the Memorias sought to highlight the untold economic
potential of Peru while promoting mercantilism. For example, Llano Zapata adopts an
organicist view of the origins of minerals (that minerals grow as vegetables) because
he wants to convince his audience that old mines will eventually become productive
again. An overwhelming mass of detail on mines of silver, gold, mercury, iron, loadstone,
pearls, diamonds, rubies, marble, salt, and saltpeter are introduced as an invitation to
Book Reviews / Background
583
streamline production. His volume on minerals includes a section on roads, both natural
and ancient, because he believes that circulation is the key to commerce.
But Llano Zapata was not only a political economist; he also saw himself as the
Peruvian embodiment of the Spanish Benedictine Benito Feijo. Llano Zapatas Memorias bears the title critical for a reason: He seeks to correct misleading, erroneous, and
fantastic accounts about American mines, fauna, and flora peddled by foreign travelers
and unreliable informants. When discussing ruins, Llano Zapata, for example, considers
as a deliberate forgery the stone of Calango, which allegedly had inscriptions documenting the visit of St. Thomas the Apostle to this coastal town in southern Peru: This is not
credible, not even possible (p. 377). Memorias was a Feijnian, sustained attack on the
shallow, untrustworthy accounts of foreign travelers and on Baroque oral (and learned)
traditions. Yet authors like Antonello Gerbi have dismissed Llano Zapata as credulous
and irrelevant. Some of Llano Zapatas entries would superficially appear to confirm
Gerbis views. Take, for example, the case of Llano Zapatas description of the entomodendros tree, drawn verbatim from Antonio Len Pinelos Paraiso del Nuevo Mundo.
Although he himself had never seen the tree, Llano Zapata reluctantly agreed with
Pinelo that the seeds of the tree were in fact insects whose legs would eventually become
the roots and their bodies the trunk (p. 43334). But rather than being representative of
Llano Zapatas credulity, this account should be considered a sign of his modernity, for
when Llano Zapata wrote on the insect-seed, a debate was raging in Europe on a polyp
that behaved both as a plant and as an animal. Llano Zapatas entomo-dendros was
the Peruvian equivalent of Abraham Trembleys polyp. In short, Llanos Zapatas Memorias should be read sympathetically as holding a key to interpreting Perus enlightened
modernity. But how to read Llano Zapatas Eptome?
The Eptome is a rather traditional text that, unlike the Memorias, appears entirely
lacking in epistemological self-awareness. The purpose of the Eptome is not to sift reliable from unreliable accounts, nor is it to offer a cameralist, statistical narrative of the
Peruvian past. Eptome is simply a summary of key events during the administration of
every Peruvian ruler from Manco Capac to the viceroy Manuel de Amat. The novelty
of the text lies in the events Llano Zapata considers key. His narrative of the Incas relies
completely on easily available colonial chroniclers. His accounts of the viceroys, however, break new ground because Llano Zapata focuses on the expeditions to the Amazon
and the South Sea they promoted, as well as the pirates that were confronted. Llano
Zapata thus brings to bear new Dutch, French, and English sources. The text also offers
various accounts of autos-da-f and viceregal entries. Unlike the Memorias, the Eptome
often confuses Lima for Peru. Be that as it may, both the Memorias and the Eptome are
extraordinarily rich sources now finally available for colonial historians to explore and
digest.
jorge caizares-esguerra, University of Texas at Austin

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-011
584
HAHR / August
Colonial Period
Brbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. By david j. weber.
Western American Series. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Illustrations.
Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xviii, 466 pp. Cloth, $35.00.
David Weber spent the first three decades of his career transforming himself into the
master synthesizer of Spanish and Mexican history in southwestern North America.
In Brbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment, however, he casts a
rigorous comparative gaze across two continents, examining the strategies employed by
Spains Bourbon reformers to confront the independent Indian nations that contained
Spanish expansion from the Argentine pampas to the Great Plains.
John Lynchs review of Webers The Spanish Frontier in North America inspired this
massive undertaking. Lynch gently chided Weber for failing to compare and contrast
Spains northern frontier with its frontiers in Central and South America (p. xiii). Weber
rose to the challenge and began more than a decade of research in Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. As his enormous bibliography and exhaustive endnotes reveal, Weber has mastered both the Spanish- and English-language literature
produced by scholars in at least seven modern American nations. He focuses on familiar
groups like the Araucanians and Apaches but brings understudied groups such as the
Seris of Sonora or the Miskitos of Nicaragua into the mix as well. The result is a sweeping synthesis on a hemispheric scale.
Despite such scope, Weber carefully defines what Brbaros is and is not. As an
anthropologist, I would have liked more information on the Indians themselves, even
if such reconstructions have to be filtered through the haze of linguistic and cultural
assumptions of non-Indians (p. 17). But Weber eschews such speculative ventures. I
cannot illuminate Indian societies from within or confidently explain events or processes
from the manifold cultural and material perspectives of a great variety of Native peoples,
some of whom comprehended reality in ways quite foreign to the Western rationalism
that has shaped my own thinking, he observes (p. 17). Brbaros is narrative, not ethnohistory. It focuses more on the record-keeping observers than on the observed (p. 17).
As in his earlier books, Weber also avoids sweeping generalizations or grand theories. He takes great pains to point out the contradictions in Bourbon policies, the shifting regional geopolitics that made uniform policy impossible to develop, much less
implement, and the pragmatism that often superseded ideals on the edges of Spains
vast American empire. Negotiating frontiers in the late colonial period was not an
experiment in Enlightenment governance. Bourbon officials fought both offensive and
defensive wars. They bribed, traded, and forged lasting pacts with some groups while
attempting to conquer or obliterate others. It was power, then, more than the power of
ideas, that had determined how enlightenment Spaniards would treat savages, Weber
observes at the end of his book. Ideas may have the power to shape policy, but power
also shapes ideas (p. 278).
Book Reviews / Colonial Period
585
Nonetheless, Bourbon policies represented at least a partial break with Habsburg

precedents. Trade, not religious conversion, became the preferred method of incorporating independent Indian groups into the Spanish orbit, if not the Spanish Empire. Bourbon reformers often borrowed from French and English imperial models, ignoringor
surprisingly ignorant ofearlier Spanish policies in the New World. Spanish de facto
recognition of Araucanian independence in the seventeenth century, when the Bo-Bo
River became the southern border of Spanish Chile, did not inform Spanish alliances
with Creeks, Cherokees, and Choctaws in southeastern North America during the late
colonial period. Similar strategies developed independently in response to Indian power
and not in response to the lessons of the past.
One of Webers more fascinating themes is the shifting cultural line between giftgiving and bribery. Among kin-based societies like the Comanches, The bestowing of
gifts, which increased the status of the giver, often established an alliance or a familial relationshipa fictive kinship, and the receipt of gifts came with the obligation
of reciprocity, even among kin (p. 191). Even when independent Indians demanded
Spanish gifts as a form of tribute, the fiction that such gifts were voluntary had to be
maintained. As Weber points out, Form was as important as substance (p. 191). And
substance often changed as gifts crossed cultural boundaries into Indian societies. As
a result, some Indians invested European material symbols like medals and flags with
the power to bring good or evil and trade goods such as beads and mirrors with such
spiritual weight that their owners took them to the grave (p. 192).
Patrilineal Spaniards often framed such exchanges in terms of the father-child bond.
To matrilineal Indian groups, however, such bonds may have held very different meanings; fathers were not authority figures, but kind and loving relatives to whom children
owed no special obligations (p. 215). Even though Weber is not an ethnohistorian, his
work continues to be informed by ethnohistorical and anthropological research.
Brbaros continues several of Webers stylistic conventions as well. Weber rarely
clutters his text with the individual names of scholars; he lets endnotes bear that freight.
There is also a heightened tautness and muscularity to his prose. Such economy is one
reason Brbaros covers so much ground and yet never overwhelms the reader with unnecessary verbiage or detail. It is a monumental tour de force that moves with the speed of
an express train. Readers can jump on board confident that Brbaros represents the best
of contemporary scholarship from two continents, in two languages, judiciously assimilated and evaluated by a synthesizer at the top of his game.
thomas e. sheridan, University of Arizona

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-012
586
HAHR / August
Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion: Social Control on Spains North American Frontiers.
Edited by jess f. de la teja and ross frank. Foreword by david j. weber.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography.
Index. xxi, 338 pp. Paper, $24.95.
Many years ago I wrote an essay entitled Sons (and Grandsons) of Bolton examining recent trends in borderlands historiography. The volume under review demonstrates
that Mexican borderlands research is not only in a post-Boltonian, but even in a postWeberian stage. From the editors to the contributors to the author of the foreword,
many familiar names abound: De la Teja, Frank, Weber, Jos Cuello, Cynthia Radding,
Jane Landers, Susan Deeds, Tom Sheridan et al. This excellent volume gathers together
11 explorations of how, and how well, the Spanish crown controlled its distant northern
frontier in the face of a penny-pinching colonial bureaucracy, hostile indigenous peoples,
and ever-increasing encroachment by foreign powers.
Far from a reiteration of the Boltonian presidio and mission paradigm, the essays
reflect a new level of sophistication in exploring how social control was exercised, how
it was linked to constructions of social identity, and how indigenous and European conceptions or misperceptions of one another played a central role across time and space
on the frontier. Each is solidly rooted in archival research, and the authors frequently
refer to each others work, reflecting a close-knit community of scholars who have been
exchanging ideas for a long time. In fact, the genesis for this volume was a conference
co-sponsored by Southern Methodist University, home of the dean of the new borderlands history, David J. Weber.
De la Tejas introduction sets the theme: social control as a broad concept encompassing the myriad ways in which a society attempts to maintain order by persuading,
coercing, or educating individuals to accept and behave according to the principles and
valuesnorms that the Spanish, in this case, sought to impose (p. xiii). Alfredo
Jimnez opens the collection with Who Controls the King? an essay that reviews the
intricate combination of royal authority, power and responsibility, mutual rights and
obligations, doggish loyalty and fervent obedience to the king, confidence in God and
the throne, and the freedom to demand, complain, and defend oneself (p. 6). In separate
chapters, Gilbert Din and Jane Landers examine Spanish military, economic, and social
diplomacy in Louisiana and Florida, where powerful colonial neighbors (France and
Britain) and the presence of disparate native groups, as well as African and Afromestizo
populations, both free and chattel, made for a particularly complex ethnic stew. Along the
same lines is Franks essay, They Conceal a Malice Most Refined: Controlling Social
and Ethnic Mobility in Late Colonial New Mexico. Here the malice is represented by
the economic activities of New Mexicos vecinos, who consistently trade and treat with
the Apache, Comanche, and Ute tribes in defiance of regulations. The authorities were
also trying to exercise a gentle control over a restive Pueblo population, ever mindful of
the Great Revolt of 1688, as well as keeping Franciscan power in check.
Delving deeper into the question of social control is Susan Deeds, whose essay deals
587
with gender, power, and magic in Nueva Vizcaya. The tale of Antonia, the mulatta
slave who masqueraded as a man, is a story of freedom not only from legal bonds of
slavery, but also from the gendered bonds of patriarchy in a frontier province (p. 95).
Deeds uses historical work on womens roles in Latin American society, in conjunction
with Inquisition and Jesuit records, to reconstruct a case of witchcraft, love sorcery,
clerical temptation, and social deviance in the seventeenth century.
Juliana Barr, in Beyond Their Control: Spaniards in Native Texas, inverts the
usual historical perspective by pointing out that it was the Spanish who stumbled into
already-existing networks of trade, warfare, and alliance: In seeking to understand
negotiations of power in Texas, it is essential to recognize that Texas was a core of native
political economies, a core within which Spaniards were often the subjects or potential
subjects of native institutions of social control (p. 152). Cynthia Radding explores the
central, ongoing tension between reduccin, a policy of congregating Sonoran peoples
into nucleated villages for tax, labor, and evangelization purposes, and dispersion to scattered rancheras, as well as the struggle between colonialism and traditional cacique patterns of rule. Radding examines the role of the mission cabildo as both an instrument of
social control and a vehicle for resistance.
Jos Cuello looks at how the system of castas operated as a form of social control through the creation of racialized hierarchies, expanding the old Magnus Mrner
models into greater depth in a frontier context. Geographical particularity is reflected
by the essays of Cecilia Sheridan, Patricia Osante, and Jim Sandos, who examine how
social control was exercised, respectively, in the northeast, Nuevo Santander, and mission society in Alta California.
While too specialized for the general reader, scholars knowledgeable in frontier
historiography will appreciate the scrupulous primary and secondary research, as well as
the depth of sophistication that these essays bring to what is becoming the post postBoltonian school of borderlands history.
peter stern, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-013
588
HAHR / August
The Mbius Strip: A Spatial History of Colonial Society in Guerrero, Mexico.

By jonathan d. amith. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Maps. Tables.
Figures. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xvii, 661 pp. Cloth, $75.00.
One of the things you notice in talking to Latin Americanist historians about the work
of celebrity biogeographer Jared Diamond is their almost visceral reaction to his twodimensional view of history, particularly evident in the wildly successful Guns, Germs,
and Steel (W. W. Norton, 1997). As a colleague observed, He doesnt understand that
Latin American history plays out in three dimensions, not two, and this allusion to John
V. Murras notion of verticality could easily have been extended to n-dimensions. If you
keep that in mind, Jonathan Amiths ambitious and impressive account of the historical
geography and ecology of the Iguala Valley in central Guerrero falls into place, down to
the enigmatic title. Perhaps one should add that Amiths argument is neither Diamonds
nor Murras, despite the fact some historical geographers in Mexico, such as Bernardo
Garca Martnez, have observed that portions of Guerrero bear more than a passing
resemblance to Murras well-known theory of ecological niches.
The agricultural potential of the Iguala Valley, Amith observes, diminishes as one
travels south because average rainfall declines while temperature rises. Consequently,
population densities were higher in the north; this, combined with the proximity of markets in Taxco, Cuernavaca, and Mexico City, drove up relative land rents in the north. By
1750, this process had reached something of equilibrium, and with it, effected a transition from ranching to agriculture. As elsewhere in New Spain, the potential profitability
of the grain trade attracted investment and further commercialization. At the same time,
the absence of investment and markets in south-central Guerrero made for bifurcated
patterns of development into northern and southern regions . . . between the increasingly
impoverished south-central jurisdictions of Tixtla and Chilapa and the richer Taxco and
Iguala jurisdictions to the north (pp. 68, 257). This divergence precipitated a complex
series of struggles between colonists, indigenous village authorities, migrant peasants,
and the colonial authorities that exacerbated, rather than mitigated, regional economic
disparities. The late-colonial cacao boom between Guayaquil and New Spain through
the port of Acapulco, for example, only served to increase the demand for mules and
muleteers from the Iguala Valley and had important spillovers into the salt and cotton
trades as well. Even well-intentioned policies, such as the establishment of the famous
spinning school at Tixtla under the subdelegate Juan Antonio de Rivas, could not withstand the effects of outmigration to the Iguala Valley and came to naught. Throughout
Amiths account, there is a continuing emphasis on native agency and on place making
and place breaking as something more than mere reaction to an alteration in relative
prices. The analysis is firmly based on impressive archival research, much of it in previously neglected materials. Indeed, it is difficult not to admire a study in which even
the activity of itinerant merchants is analyzed down to the level of individual journeys
between such places as Tenancingo, Acapulco, and Tepecuacilco.
The novelty of Amiths effort lies in his argument that southern Guerreros unique
589
system of exchange was not organized around a dominant market center but instead
consisted of a series of loosely articulated small markets strung together by petty trade
in specialized production and endless webs of credit and debt, or a model of exchange
over multiple sites of acquisition and sale (pp. 360, 361). It suggests, albeit from a generally conventional anthropological perspective, that there is something wrong the
neoclassical model that views exchange and arbitrage as essentially identical. Of course,
there have been other efforts to bring such a perspective to colonial Mexico, particularly
Enrique Semos Historia del capitalismo en Mxico (Ediciones Era, 1973), which gets a footnote but deserves better. The question is, and always has been, whether market incentives alone were sufficient to organize commercial activity in New Spain, as Stanley Stein
pointed out over a generation ago. You dont necessarily qualify as, God forbid, a Marxist
for asking. Despite what our colleagues in economics believe, the answer isnt written in
the axioms. As Woodrow Borah astutely observed, cotton was a tributary good before
the arrival of the Spaniards because that was the only efficient way of bringing it to the
highlands to be woven, especially in a world of nontrivial transportation costs and ethnic
subjugation.
Somewhere out there, a historically sophisticated economic history of colonial
Mexico remains to be written. When it is, one suspects that books such as Amithsand
others like itwill finally give us a new economic history worthy of the name.
richard j. salvucci, Trinity University

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-014
Historia de un cosmopolita: Jos Mara de Lanz y la fundacin de la Ingeniera de Caminos en

Espaa y Amrica. By manuel lucena giraldo. Coleccin ciencias, humanidades
e ingeniera. Madrid: Colegio de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos, 2005.
Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. 266 pp. Paper.
Manuel Lucena Giraldos book explores the eventful life and career of Jos Mara de
Lanz, military man, scientist, professor, imperial bureaucrat, and creole patriot. Of the
eighteenth-century enlightened Spanish scientists who are considered the founders of
modern science and technology in the Hispanic American world, Jos Mara de Lanz is
perhaps the least known. Lucena Giraldo hopes to shed light on the content and transcendence of Jos Mara de Lanzs scientific and technological writings and discoveries,
as well as his contribution to the establishment of academic and research institutions in
the Hispanic world. Going beyond the sometimes limited scope of the biographic genre,
this book provides a case study of the social and cultural history of the Enlightenment
in the Spanish Americas. It offers information on themes such as the sociology of the
Spanish imperial administration; the history of creole education, ideology, and culture;
the history of modern science; and the history of the transfer of technological knowledge
in the Atlantic world during the revolutionary age.
The experience of Jos Mara de Lanz illustrates, for instance, the cosmopolitan
590
HAHR / August
nature of the creole elites education, with elementary studies in their place of birth completed by a prolonged and intense period of formation in Europe. Following that pattern,
Jos Mara de Lanz was born in Campeche, New Spain, and attended institutions such as
the Seminario de Vergara in the Spanish Basque country, where he acquired a solid background in the latest scientific and technological knowledge, along with the traditional
curriculum in religion and the humanities. After the seminar years, de Lanz entered the
exclusive Real Academia de Guardamarinas de Cdiz, which launched his brilliant career
in the Spanish Royal Navy. He served as an officer and became a part of the eighteenthcentury military community involved in the promotion of scientific knowledge and the
culture of the Enlightenment. During these early years as an enlightened naval officer,
Jos Mara de Lanz collaborated in a variety of research projects, the most important
being the elaboration of the Atlas Martimo de Espaa.
Everything in the early professional years of our protagonist pointed toward a prosperous career in the service of the Spanish imperial administrationuntil he was sent
to Paris in 1789 on a mission of technological espionage. There, his life underwent a
substantial change that transformed him into an international scientist, a renegade, an
exile, an admirer of and collaborator with Napoleon, and a future activist for the independence of Spanish America.
Lucena Giraldo constructs Lanzs scientific and political biography by gathering
an impressive array of information from diverse European and American archives and
librariesan admirable piece of puzzle solving that constitutes one of the main merits
of the book. The author tracks Lanzs early scholarship in the field of differential and
integral calculus, analyzes his contributions to the field of cartography and cadastral
geography in France during the revolutionary years, and describes his cooperation with
Agustn de Betancourt, which produced his two most noteworthy legacies: the publication of the innovative and popular work on applied mechanics, Ensayo sobre la composicin
de las mquinas, and the design and implementation of a curriculum for the career of civil
engineering that established that profession in Spain (Ingeniero de Canales y Caminos).
The study concludes with a chapter on Lanzs return to Latin America in 1822, where
he lent his scientific skills and political and administrative experience to the process of
nation building in Gran Colombia.
Historia de un cosmopolita is a good example of the progress made in the historiography of science and technology in Latin America during the last two decades. As the
author points out at the beginning, in Latin America the field is still at an early stage, less
advanced than in Europe and the United States. One of the tasks to be tackled, according to the author, is the location, description, and evaluation of the contributions made
by the members of the scientific community (p. 17). There is no doubt that this book
constitutes a notable contribution in that direction.
jesus cruz, University of Delaware

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-015
591
Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima.
By bianca premo. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Figures. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiii,
350 pp. Cloth, $59.95. Paper $24.95.
Bianca Premos engaging and important study of childhood as it was both lived and
imagined in colonial Lima (p. 2) operates on two levels: it is both a history of actual
children and childhood, and it is about generational relations as a metaphor of colonial
rule. According to Premo, these two threads of inquiry are entangled, for the social history of children . . . cannot be separated from . . . the overarching political ideology that
bound colonial subjects to the Spanish Father King (p. 15).
Premos study yields a number of interesting empirical findings. Amid ideologies
of racial and corporate separateness, households were characterized by striking caste
diversity (p. 50). Indeed, domestic realities diverged widely from the ideal typical
patriarchal family insofar as nonpatriarchsincluding widows, wet nurses, and artisansroutinely performed the everyday work of rearing the citys children. Premo suggests that families who did not conform to the prescriptive model tended to experience
the brunt of legal intervention into domestic matters. She also describes how the citys
nunneries and foundling home were important sites of social reproduction, marked by
many of the same dynamics of race and gender as households themselves.
A temporal window of 170 years (1650 to 1820) allows Premo to discern changes
in legal discourse and practice over time. By the late eighteenth century, the courts
were taking a greater interest in unpropertied children, and the reach of secular judicial
authority was growing. The terms of legal disputes concerning children also changed, as
arguments about emotion, education, economic investment, and social control eclipsed
older invocations of patriarchal right. This welter of change adds up to what Premo
terms the new politics of the child. Ultimately, it heralded a growing valorization of
childhood such that by the end of the century, even slave children were considered children first and foremost, and only secondarily slaves. How these legal changes reflected
or catalyzed changes in social practice is less clear.
Minority is a concept key to the analysis. Premo argues that minority in the colonial context was a multivalent legal category that was tightly bound up with other
categories that had little to do with actual biological age, such as miserables, orphans,
and the unprotected (p. 20, 6). It included not only children, but also Amerindians,
who were perpetual legal minors. Thus, age . . . combined with other social markers to
form a complex of statuses and identities for colonial adults and children alike (p. 6).
Another category that is scrutinized is patriarchy. Premo makes a compelling case that
patriarchy is best treated as contemporaries understood it, in the aggregate, as a concept
capturing the ideological affinity between the social and legal infantilization of slave
adults and the subordination of children to elders, of wives to husbands, and of colonized
to colonizer (p. 10). In this analysis, patriarchy transcends gender even as it captures
592
HAHR / August
how gender was bound up with other social and legal relations of power, including those
between generations.
Part of Premos analytic project is to show how poor and relatively powerless colonials were agents, rather than mere objects, of law and politics. Ordinary litigants appropriated philosophical discourse to their own ends, and new ideas introduced from on
high created opportunities for claims-making among subalterns. The argument is well
taken, but given that much recent legal and political history has focused on discursive
interchanges between elite and popular sectors, it is not altogether unexpected. The
argument also rests on a key methodological assumption: that court declarations and
their conceptual frameworks may be attributed primarily to litigants, rather than to lawyers and scribes. Premo makes this assumption explicit, and indeed her sources suggest
it may sometimes be warranted (as one anecdote on pp. 78 suggests). But one wonders whether it is always or even consistently the discursive universe of litigants that is
conveyed in the judicial record; if it is not, then the extent to which everyday Limeos
exercised agency through legal argumentation is perhaps overstated.
These objections notwithstanding, this book has many strengths. Chief among
them is the formidable amount of archival research that undergirds it. An indefatigable
researcher, Premo draws on census, notarial, and institutional records, and above all
on judicial cases from civil and ecclesiastical courts. Historians of childhood frequently
lament the patchy presence of young people in the archives. Premos tireless archival pursuit suggests that information is abundant, but locating it may require methodological
resourcefulness. An example is the invocation of reverential fear by individuals seeking
to annul marriage and ecclesiastical vows. Petitioners sometimes claimed they had been
pressured by fear of their elders, a scenario that according to canon law impeded free will
and abrogated sacramental vows. Premo examines how litigants couched claims of reverential fear, and what the courts made of them, to reconstruct social and legal attitudes
toward generational and gender authority (some of the elders whom petitioners claimed
to fear were female). Finally, underlying the prodigious research is a keen historical
imagination. The author clearly became absorbed in the world narrated in her sources,
and the account is leavened by her empathy for the individuals she encountered there.
This book is of great interest to historians of children and family. The author has
elucidated practices surrounding childrearing and the meanings that accrued to childhood in a colonial context. But its relevance extends beyond this specialized readership.
Premo has made a compelling case for what parents and children, childhood, minority,
and generation have to do with the operation of power in a colonial society in general. In
this sense, Children of the Father King is an original interpretation of colonialism and its
social and political dynamics.
nara milanich, Barnard College

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-016
593
Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 15001600. By alida c. metcalf.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. xiv, 375 pp. Paper, $22.95.
Alida Metcalf offers an important revisionist interpretation in this highly readable study
of Portugals struggle to found a New World colony. The book begins and ends with
an anecdote about Margarida, an Indian woman who helped Bahian plantation owners
subdue members of her own ethnic group, the aggressive Aimor. A baptized resident of
a prominent settlers estate, Margarida persuaded her kinsmen to abandon their violent
resistance and enter colonial society under the tutelage of Jesuit missionaries. Because
of her language, her mobility, and her understanding of two opposing cultures, writes
Metcalf, this woman became the go-between who made possible peaceful encounters
between two previously hostile groups (pp. 12). In the tradition of more famous native
intermediaries like Doa Malinche, who aided Corts, the youth Felipe who served as
interpreter for Pizarro, or Pocahontas and Sacagawea, who played critical roles in the
colonization of North America, the conduct of this Aimor woman testifies to the ubiquitous presence of cultural negotiators in the early Americas.
The author argues convincingly that actors traditionally cast in bit parts as historical curiosities should occupy center stage if we are to understand how the Portuguese
laid claim to Brazil over the course of the sixteenth century. Ordinary sailors, penal
exiles, and Norman interpreters; indigenous concubines and their children; native orators, shamans, and wandering prophets: these individuals acted as go-betweens, cultural
brokers who connected colonizers with the colonized in countless complex daily interactions. Third-party participants in virtually all colonial encounters, they moved with
surprising agility between Portuguese and indigenous domains, belying conventional
depictions of a dyadic collision between two irreconcilable worlds. Several Tupi women,
for instance, helped their Portuguese husbands rise to the status of chiefs within native
polities. Other natives fostered various forms of communication and exchange. This
fluidity across racial and ethnic lines helps explain why highly pronounced economic
exploitation continued to coexist . . . with a degree of cultural tolerance in the colony of
Brazil (p. 274).
The emphasis on what Metcalf terms cultural arbitration, as opposed to mediationbecause the dynamic ultimately redounded to the advantage of the Portuguesesheds light onto two additional groups, the first commonly emphasized by historians, the second less so. After Jesuits arrived in the colony in 1549, they quickly became,
according to the author, some of the most powerful go-betweens of the sixteenth century (p. 90). Although they sought to break the bonds between native converts and
their tribal practices, to achieve this they generally rejected the use of force in favor of
persuasionteaching, preaching, and discussion in native languages or through translators, conducted in mission villages geographically separated from settler enclaves. Metcalf recognizes the gap between missionary intentions and their outcome. In the most
sustained analysis yet published of the spread of epidemic disease in sixteenth-century
594
HAHR / August
Brazil, she devotes a chapter to describing the biological destruction wrought by Jesuits
and others who moved easily from one sphere to the other.
An ever-expanding population of mamelucosbackwoodsmen of mixed Amerindian and European ancestrywere equally dexterous occupants of this cultural middle
ground. Unpublished Inquisition records, which Metcalf employs along with Jesuit
archival material and diverse published sources, reveal the importance of the mamelucos, particularly in Bahias developing sugar export economy. Rivals of the Jesuits, they
rose to prominence after disease decimated the coastal native population. Operating in
the interior of the colony, they coaxed Indians out of the forests, away from the missionaries, and onto the plantations to augment the enslaved labor force. The mameluco
go-between became a chameleon in the wilderness, adapting to, and insinuating himself
in, each new situation, Metcalf writes (p. 249). Their most controversial role linked
them to indigenous santidades (sanctities), native messianic movements that combined
Tupinamb, Roman Catholic, and possibly central African practices in resistance to Portuguese colonialism during the second half of the century. Participating in rituals associated with these movements, mamelucos ran afoul of the Inquisition, accused, among
other transgressions, of heresy, idolatry, and sins of the flesh, including polygamy, conduct that was an outgrowth of their cultural hybridity.
Metcalfs argument goes a long way toward clarifying the importance of all of these
actors to the colonial project. At times, however, her go-between concept loses value by
becoming too encompassing, as when she applies it to Heitor Furtado de Mendona,
Brazils first inquisitor, whom she describes as a go-between acting as the principal
mediator between sinful individuals and God (p. 236). The concept sometimes seems
ill-suited even to the Jesuits, who supported a vicious military campaign against unconquered Indians conducted by Governor Mem de S in the 1550s. Likewise, if the outcome of mameluco activity was ultimately the supply of Indian slave labor, it is hard to
accept that persuasion, the defining characteristic of cultural intermediaries in Metcalfs
formulation, can be understood as antithetical to violence. A solution lies in theorizing the two as a continuum: violence is negotiation by other means, to modify Carl
von Clausewitz. If certain individuals and their actions strain against the model, it is a
testament to Metcalfs contribution that her study will surely prompt scholars to explore
these tensions. She has provided a powerful narrative of Brazils first centuryprobably
the best now available in Englishthat will speak both to specialists and students new
to the study of Portuguese America.
hal langfur, SUNY Buffalo

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-017
Book Reviews / National Period
595
National Period
Aldabonazo: Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 19521958: A Participants
Account. By armando hart dvalos. New York: Pathfinder Press, 2004. Map.
Photographs. Plates. Glossary. Index. 387 pp. Paper, $25.00.
The historiography of the Cuban Revolution has focused on a variety of trends and
tendencies. Cuban publications concerning the struggle against the regime of Fulgencio Batista (195258)whether waged by clandestine guerrillas or by Cubans
in exilehave represented this process in terms that depict the period as essentially
heroic. In the literature on the guerrilla campaign, the greatest emphasis has been on
key moments in this type of struggle taking place in the cities, and to a lesser extent on
the activities of members of the July 26 Revolutionary Movement (MR-26-7) in exile, the
University Students Federation (FEU), and the radical student activists of the Directorio Revolucionario 13 de Marzo, fundamental organizations that led the insurrectionary
revolutionary movement during this period.
Within contemporary debate, the alternative tendency has been to depict the period
of national rebellion using the memoirs of principal protagonists: among others, important political and military actors and, increasingly, through somewhat autobiographical
studies focused on Fidel Castro. This forms the context for this book, narrated by one of
the representatives of the underground urban movement, who not only participated in
the founding of the revolutionary movement that came to power in 1959 but also lived
through the events he helped to create and formed part of the leadership of that revolutionary movement. The author reconstructs the events he lived through using his own
memories with the help of documentary sources.
This book differs from others in that the author, in bringing his experience to life,
offers at the same time a political landscape of the generational conflict reflected in different revolutionary styles, rooted in the Party of the Cuban People (Orthodox) of Eduardo Chibs, whose thesis, which forms the conclusion of the books epilogue, functions
as a call to arms. One of these revolutionary stylesthe one that the author originally
subscribed towas the movement headed by Dr. Rafael Garca Brcena, organizer of
the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR). The MNR employed a different strategy than the revolutionary movement that later evolved into the July 26 Movement,
headed by Fidel Castro. It is from this lens that he narrates the various events in which
he participated between 1955 and 1959, in the urban underground, in the Sierra Maestra, during political imprisonment, and finally the taking of power. In these settings,
stemming from the main action, the fundamental emphasis was on tasks in the capital
and the eastern provinces, particularly the activities of the leadership of the MR-26-7
in Santiago de Cuba, as well as the interrelationship with the Sierra Maestra campaign.
Virtually absent is any mention of actions in the western and central provinces, a gap
that is beginning to be addressed by the historiography.
Other thematic emphases concern the rebellion within the University of Havana,
596
HAHR / August
the assault on the Moncada barracks, and other relevant events and characters. The
book contains more than one hundred pages of important documents, other first-person
accounts, and photographs.
The narrative presents the big picture of the major role played by leaders during
the stages and missions that the author participated in: the organization of a national
network, the Asamblea del PPC (0) and its influence on the structure of the MR-26-7,
the support for a general strike in 1958 in support of the Granma expeditionary force,
and the insurrectionary uprising in the provinces, as well as the incarceration of political
prisoners.
The book sheds light on the historiographical debate over the strategy of the general strike and armed insurrection. Certain passages and documents contribute to the
analysis and evaluation of concepts concerning strategies, tactics, methods of struggle,
and mentalities, one example of which is expressed in the correspondence between Faustino Prez and the author, especially in the so-called concept of the mountains and
the plains, as well as references to patriotic and anti-imperialist thought shown in the
documents.
Hart Dvalos provides scholars of Cuba a wealth of information with which to stimulate future research. His book will also be of value for students and the general public
interested in contemporary Latin America.
gladys marel garca prez, Unin de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC)

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-018
The Imagined Island: History, Identity, and Utopia in Hispaniola.

By pedro l. san miguel. Translated by jane ramrez. Latin America in
Translation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Illustrations.
Notes. Bibliography. Index. x, 194 pp. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $22.50.
In The Imagined Island, Pedro San Miguel establishes a number of purposes for the five
essays that constitute the volume. One is to extend and apply theories that reveal the
fictional narratives with which historiographies are constructed. Flowing from that, the
author analyzes historical visions of the colonial period. The third involves a sustained
critique of the works of seven authors: Antonio Snchez-Valverde, Pedro Francisco
Bon, Jos Gabriel Garca, Manuel Arturo Pea-Batlle, Joaquien Balaguer, Juan Bosch,
and Jean Price-Mars (the last, a Haitian, is the only one not from the Dominican Republic). The dominant concern of the first four essays involves a critical examination of
writings about the relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and how the
narrative, fictional frameworks of these authors produce the contrasts drawn between
the two halves of Hispaniola. The critique focuses on Dominican constructions of Haiti
as a black other and the Dominican Republic as fundamentally white, Spanish, European, and civilized. In his analyses, San Miguel covers a vast range of literature, focusing
primarily on historical texts, with limited discussions of novels, essays, and ethnogra-
597
phies. The research that produced this volume is so considerable that the notes and index
together constitute one-third of this otherwise slim work. The author very effectively
fuses a history of ideas approach with critical, constructionist, and postmodern reinterpretations of the act of writing history.
San Miguels own narrative framework is rooted in theories of historiographies as
narratives and as confirming scriptures, a stance shaped especially by the works of Michel
de Certeau and Hayden White, as well as E. H. Carr, Benedict Anderson, Clifford
Geertz, George Marcus, and Dick Cushman. The analysis that results closely resembles
the ethnography as fiction critique elaborated by James Clifford. The emphasis here is
on discourses of the real being joined to the practices of fiction. San Miguel does not
engage in detailed empirical descriptions and assessments but instead seeks to highlight
the ways that historical narratives permeate collective life, become dogma, and are tied
to state power. By stressing canonical texts, the effects of power in organizing historys
memory, and the ways that identities are codified in accordance with the reigning utopias
of those in power, he produces a strong view of hegemonic discourses and narratives.
He does not address any criticisms of the constructionist approach, leaving his analysis
as a kind of uncontested truth that transcends the narrative fictions he deconstructs.
Without empirical counterweights, his argument too often rests on suggestions and
assertions.
Given San Miguels approach to power and historiography and his focus on the
works of men of letters, there is little mention of heterodox historiographies. Indeed,
the title may be misleadingly broad: this is a study of neither all utopias in the island, nor
all identities, nor the broad range of historical discourses, nor, even all the island, for the
most part, given the emphasis on the Dominican half. Much of the book is worked out in
black-and-white termsthe abominable construction of Haiti as an African contaminant, a perennial savage Other, producing the basis for a contrasting Dominican identity
that denies the societys own African roots. From this vantage point, the work fits in with
a current emphasis in Puerto Rican studies (San Miguel is himself based at the University of Puerto Rico) that emphasizes hegemonic, historical denials of African identity.
Although it is not mentioned, it is interesting that San Miguel accepts, like the authors
he critiques, the narrative of indigenous obliteration: the real Dominican world is thus
an Afro-Dominican one, and his concept of mestizaje is limited to mixing between black
and white. As a result, the Tano are barely mentioned in passing. Unfortunately, while
San Miguel mentions some Dominican popular cultural views of Haitians, these appear
only briefly in the text, and Haitians themselves appear as a relatively static background,
apart from Jean Price-Mars. The first two chapters overlap considerably, with instances
of quotes and whole paragraphs being repeated. This suggests that the papers were not
adequately revised to appear together in the same volume. The final chapter, on Juan
Bosch, deviates considerably from the other three that are focused on Hispanism, antiHaitianism, and relations between the two halves of the island. Without any form of
conclusion, the book ends quite abruptly.
Despite these criticisms, the volume will still be of significant interest to gradu-
598
HAHR / August
ate students in history and Latin American and Caribbean studies. For more advanced
historians of the region, there will be little that is not already familiar, either in terms of
theory, methodology, or history. The volume is written in a very fluid, accessible style,
and the translation has clearly done a great service to the Spanish-language original. All
told, San Miguel offers us a necessary and fairly refreshing companion to any study of
the history of the Dominican Republic and to broader considerations of the writing of
history itself.
maximilian c. forte, Concordia UniversityMontreal

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-019
Penuria sin fin: Historia de los impuestos en Mxico, siglos XVIIIXX.

Edited by luis aboites aguilar and luis juregui. Historia econmica. Mexico
City: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. Jos Mara Luis Mora, 2005. Tables. Figures.
Appendixes. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. 310 pp. Paper.
Some books have covers that live up to the high quality of the contents, and this is one. I
wont describe it herebuy the book and enjoy both cover and contentbut suffice to
say that this particular image of a Mexican eagle and bloodletting from the body politic
offers a compelling metaphor for Mexicos fiscal history. This collection of essays is more
than simply a history of taxes in Mexico. It examines what Enrique Krauze and others
have recently identified as one of the two fundamental challenges facing the political
system.
The long story, briefly told, is not terribly surprising. Independent Mexico was born
fiscally poor, and except for some happy but brief respites, penury has endured ever since,
as most attempts at significant fiscal reform have failed. The tax history of Mexico, the
editors conclude in understatement, has not been particularly brilliant. This volume of
seven essays (by Carlos Marichal, Luis Juregui, Mara Jos Rhi Sausi Garavito, Graciela Mrquez, Luz Mara Uhthoff L., Luis Aboites Aguilar, and Marcos Chvez M.)
traces Mexicos fiscal history from the Bourbon reforms to the present. The authors are
primarily interested in taxes: the structure of Mexicos tax system, the struggle between
state and central governments for jurisdiction over revenue sources, state capacity to
both levy and collect tax revenue, and major efforts at fiscal reform. Each chapter pre
sents a short version of the authors ongoing research.
It was Mexicos particular misfortune to achieve independence on the heels of a
golden age of tax collection. Although the Bourbon reforms impact on economic activity
has recently been questioned, Spains colonial administration dramatically improved its
ability to collect revenue from New Spains economy. Independence, however, severely
disrupted the economic and administrative basis for revenue collection. State governments and regional authorities claimed prime sources for themselves, capital flight was
high and immeasurable, and for over half a century the central state failed to ease its
uncertain dependence on customs revenue. The treasury was constantly bankrupt and
599
in hock to a small group of domestic lenders, the agiotistas. The consequences of the
politics of penury are well known.
Between 1869 and 1890, finance ministers Matas Romero and others achieved
wide-ranging fiscal reforms, an accomplishment made possible largely by a rising tide of
Atlantic commerce that brought new opportunities for investors in the Mexican economy. But economic growth and balanced budgets from 1890 to 1910 obscured a continued failure to alter the underlying fiscal structure and capacity of the Mexican state.
The chapters here argue for a significant continuity for the period 18691940: fiscal centralization, reliance on customs and stamp tax revenues, and a continued inability
to capture more than a tenth of the national economy. That continuity was broken after
1940, when the stamp tax was abolished and the income tax rapidly became Mexicos single largest source of revenue. Nevertheless, centralization and fiscal weakness continued
to characterize the system. Most Mexicans, and especially most of those with substantial
resources, paid little or nothing in direct taxes. By the 1970s, the consequence of the
Mexican states low capacity to capture revenue had become all too evident. For decades,
foreign borrowing had filled the gap between expenditures and revenue, and the inauguration of the (regressive) IVA value-added tax in 1980 was not enough to change this.
Little has changed today, as the last three presidential administrations have either failed
to aggressively address this fiscal crisis or failed to see reform proposals survive legislative politics. Without major fiscal reform and a stronger capacity to capture revenue
(besides oil profits and debt), it will be difficult for future administrations to address
Mexicos most pressing social concerns, including deep social inequalities, a weak education system, a criminal-justice crisis, and looming environmental challenges.
This book provides an excellent and accessible overview of the history of the Mexican tax system over the last 250 years, effectively synthesizing, and in some cases deepening, the excellent recent work of Mexican scholars. Indeed, the countrys fiscal history
has been a hot field over the last two decades, strange as that might sound to the historical profession north of the border. What this book does not provideas the editors
admit at the outsetis sustained attention to the social and cultural history of taxation.
If some recent reforms have brought much of Mexicos system in line with international
norms, it is nevertheless still incapable of capturing a sufficient share of revenue to sustain effective policy reform. This suggests that evasion has long played a significant role,
but whether the explanation for this lies in cultural values or in an institutional inability
to effectively sanction nonpayment awaits further research.
Editors Luis Aboites Aguilar and Luis Juregui argue for an explicitly pragmatic,
policy-based purpose for this volume: history in the service of society. Since the late
1980s, the Mexican state has pursued an ambitious reform agenda. The pace of these
reforms, however, has stalled under Vicente Foxs administration, in part due to political
stalemate and in part due to a weakening consensus about the benefits of the neoliberal
agenda. Moreover, large pieces of the states administrative capacity have yet to see significant reform, especially the justice and revenue systems. Total tax revenues as a percentage of GDP are still only about half of the average for member states of the OECD
600
HAHR / August
(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), little different than in the
late nineteenth century. This book explains how the roots of current political challenges
lie deeply embedded in the nations history. Todays policymakers might take some consolation from this book but should also emerge all the more motivated to achieve fiscal
reform, aiming for equity as well as efficiency objectives.
edward beatty, University of Notre Dame

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-020
Actores, espacios y debates en la historia de la esfera pblica en la ciudad de Mxico.

Edited by cristina sacristn and pablo piccato. Mexico City:
Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. Jos Mara Luis Mora, Instituto de Investigaciones
Histricas-UNAM, 2005. Map. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. 283 pp. Paper.
Every other year since 1995, the Seminario Internacional sobre la Experiencia Institucional en la Ciudad de Mxico has brought together historians who focus on Mexico City in the period from the Bourbon reforms to the revolution. Participants in the
fourth installment of the seminar, under the theme the public sphere in Mexico City,
generated this collection of essays. Ably edited by Cristina Sacristn and Pablo Piccato,
the book contains eight essays, plus a fine introduction by Piccato.
As one might expect from essays on this topic, the work of Jrgen Habermas looms
large, with mostly positive results. The introductory essay provides an important critical
evaluation of the potential and problems of transferring Habermass concepts to Mexico, bound as they are to their own specific time and place. Rather than create a simple
checklist to determine when, and if, Mexico developed a Habermasian bourgeois public
sphere, most of the authors use Habermas as a springboard to examine various aspects of
Mexico Citys changing interface between the public and the private, the social and the
political. In doing so, as Piccato notes, the authors owe an important intellectual debt to
Franois-Xavier Guerra and Annick Lemprire, as well as to Habermas.
This catholic approach results in contributions that range far and wide in time and
topic, though different authors often return to the common ground of the press, the
professions, and public space. The collection is bookended by an essay from Luis Fernando Granados on lingering aspects of Nahua political culture in the early nineteenth
century and one by Diane E. Davis on the evolution of urban-planning projects in the
citys historic center from 1910 to 1950. The other six essays are somewhat more concentrated temporally, though not topically. Elas J. Palti, much like Granados, focuses on the
conceptual level in his analysis of the displacement of a model of universal, objectively
attainable public opinion by competitive associational life (civil society) over the
course of the nineteenth century. Claudia Agostoni investigates the tensions between
media, public health, and medical doctors during the push to professionalize medicine at
the turn of the twentieth century. In one of the volumes more direct attempts to apply
Habermas to a Mexican case, Mara Jos Rhi Sausi Garavito tracks changing public
601
opinion of the juico de amparo (Mexicos equivalent of habeas corpus) over three decades,
beginning in 1861. Pablo Piccatos essay on the relationship between public opinion and
honor, filtered through the anguished lives of journalists, rounds out the essays on the
nineteenth century and offers a nuanced critique of the predominantly heroic view of the
eras journalism presented in Daniel Coso Villegass liberal master narrative, Historia
moderna de Mxico.
The final three essays focus on the twentieth century. Georg Leidenbergers study
of debates over Mexico Citys public transit system during the first half of the twentieth century is, like Sausis, an explicit effort to filter Habermasian concepts through a
Mexican lens. It is also the shortest essay in the collection, at just over 14 pages including
footnotes. Cristina Sacristn provides a much more detailed analysis of the development of psychiatry and the struggle to understand and treat mental illness. Sacristn
tracks a brief period (192933) in the history of Mexico Citys General Asylum, during
which government and health-care policy debates, wrapped in scandal, played out in
the capitals press and on its radios, strongly influencing outcomes. The aforementioned
essay by Diane E. Davis on urban planning completes the collection. Davis notes that
urban-planning projects provide an ideal venue for a critical analysis of the concept of
public sphere. As the author herself notes, this study of the articulation of struggles to
alter the meaning, or even the location, of the city center draws explicit connections
among physical, social, and economic space in ways implied but largely unexplored in
Habermass own work.
Like most collections, the essays here vary in quality, and some stretch to fit the
concept that ostensibly joins them. Nonetheless, this edited volume coheres better than
many and provides the reader with rewarding cases informed by sophisticated theoretical frameworks; as such, it can be recommended.
richard a. warren, Saint Josephs University

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-021
El Golfo de Mxico en la centuria decimonnica: Entornos geogrficos, formacin portuaria

y configuracin martima. By mario trujillo bolio. Mexico City: Centro de
Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologa Social / Miguel ngel Porra /
Cmara de Diputados LIX Legislatura, 2005. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables.
Appendix. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. 196 pp. Paper.
This books title emphasizes the three main topics that Mario Trujillo Bolio deals with
regarding the Gulf of Mexico in the nineteenth century: the configuration of the region
and the influence of the gulf within the continent, the history of the gulfs ports, and a
description of maritime economic activities. The author sets out to present a comprehensive view of the Gulf of Mexico based on the reconstruction of detailed histories of
the various ports and commercial activities, in the context of the technical advances and
the political changes that characterized this century. The book makes use of some of the
602
HAHR / August
general approaches the author has employed in previous works regarding the regional
configuration of this zone.
The first two of the books five chapters insist on understanding the Gulf of Mexico
as a regiondefined to include both the gulf coast and the coastal plainsand explore
the relationships between the regions main nodes and Mexicos most important population centers. Trujillo Bolio also defines some subsystems of this regional system, beginning with commercial activity and the consolidation of a river transportation system
during the colonial period, as well as railroad transportation in the nineteenth century.
Supported by a number of maps, the author discusses several subsystems, starting with
the main ports of Matamoros, Tampico, Veracruz, Campeche, and Progreso. In order
to establish the various levels of regional integration, Trujillo quotes Eric Van Youngs
contribution to Regin e historia en Mxico ( Instituto Mora, 1991): These [levels] allowed
the Gulf region to acquire a functional regionality based on primary exchanges (administration and taxes), secondary exchanges (nonperishable and luxury goods and flows of
capital), tertiary exchanges (consumption of perishable goods on a commercial level, and,
possibly, work mobility), and quaternary exchanges (consumption of perishable goods on
a small scale) (p. 24).
Chapter 3 describes the gulf coast, beginning with its geography and the river
basins that drain into the coastal zones of Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Tabasco, Campeche,
and Yucatn. Chapter 4 offers a detailed history of the development of approximately
20 ports, with a view toward their interrelationship with the rest of the region and with
both national and international economic activities. This large chapter addresses political instability, foreign interventions, and the consolidation of some of these ports during
the regime of Porfirio Daz. Trujillo sees the buildings constructed at the end of the
century as symbols of progress and of the search to emulate foreign models. This section is enriched with plans, maps, lithographs, and photographs that allow the reader to
compare differences in growth and importance among the various ports. Trujillo also
identifies the governments priorities for port modernization at the end of the nineteenth
century and the consequences of this for the social and economic life of the gulfs most
important ports.
The last chapter establishes links between ports along the gulf and those in the
Caribbean, the eastern United States, and Europe. This section points out critical
moments for central ports, like Veracruz, during the nineteenth-century foreign interventions and also minutely establishes the main links between the Mexican ports and
international navigation. The author identifies the most common routes of European and
American transatlantic navigation companies. This final section establishes the ports
gradual specialization in shipping or passenger facilities. With the increased complexity
of port activity, Trujillo underscores the drive to improve port infrastructure, especially
during the second half of the century, to meet the needs of technological advances in
navigation and the increase and diversification of goods.
The author illustrates this section with maps of navigation routes, as well as archival documents that show the kind and quantity of goods that arrived from abroad. These
allow readers not specialized in economic subjects to compare several specific phases
603
of inbound international trade during the course of the century. The illustrations and
engravings of American and European ports allow comparison with conditions in the
Mexican ports. Trujillo concludes with a discussion of the development of Mexicos navy
and of Mexican navigation companies, which he compares with the significant developments in international navigation.
These are indisputable contributions to regional historiography and to the understanding of the importance of the gulf coast, its main ports, and its interconnections with
the rest of Mexico and beyond. It also provides important clues toward understanding
nineteenth-century Mexican trade activity and the unquestionable changes in the international economy. However, after such a wide review of nineteenth-century regional and
port history, readers will yearn for a concluding chapter that would take up some of the
premises raised in the initial chapters and offer a final analysis. In particular, the ample
information regarding port history and commercial navigation in the last two chapters is
not linked with the theoretical-methodological sections in the preface and the first two
chapters. The author also should have offered an evaluation of the marked differences
in commercial activity and the predominance of certain ports during the nineteenth
century to complement his useful definition of the regional system and subsystems and
his hierarchy of the coasts ports. The rapid development and consolidation of ports like
Veracruz, Tampico, or Progreso was countered by the marginalization of other ports
and subregions. This important work of regional history would have been enriched by an
examination of such contrasts in the economic and social life of the gulf.
mario barbosa cruz, UAMCuajimalpa

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-022
The Ambivalent Revolution: Forging State and Nation in Chiapas, 19101945.

By stephen e. lewis. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxii, 283 pp. Paper, $24.95.
Chiapas has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention ever since the outbreak
of the Zapatista movement in 1994, much of it focused on the decade or so immediately
prior to the emergence of the masked Mayan rebels from the Lacandn rain forest. Far
less attention has been paid to the states history over the course of the twentieth century,
however, in spite of the ever-expanding literature on local and regional variations in
postrevolutionary state formation and its associated social impacts elsewhere in Mexico.
Stephen Lewiss Ambivalent Revolution, an analysis of Chiapass revolutionary and postrevolutionary experiences through the lens of the rural schoolhouse (p. xii), is thus a
welcome contribution to the historiography of twentieth-century Mexico.
The books main concern is the extent to which the federal government was able
to establish the institutions of the central state, carry out revolutionary reforms, and
create a shared sense of national identity in Chiapas over the course of the 1920s and
1930s. As was the case throughout rural Mexico, it was the federal Ministry of Public
Education (SEP) that played the lead role in efforts to construct a revolutionary state and
604
HAHR / August
nation in Chiapas, through its community development, anti-alcohol, anticlerical, indigenista, and socialist education campaigns and programs. Given the absence of a viable
federal government apparatus in Chiapas during this period, federal teachers took on
the everyday functions of the federal bureaucracy, acting as labor inspectors, union
organizers, immigration officials, anticlerical crusaders, health care workers, agrarian reformers, agronomists, and agents of Mexicanization (p. 85). In nearly all of their
efforts, the teachers were met with the concerted and sometimes violent opposition of
municipal authorities, labor contractors, alcohol merchants, ranchers, planters, and state
officials. The states geographic remoteness, historical ties to Guatemala, impoverished
and ethnically diverse population, lack of a liberal legacy, and longstanding resistance to
the presence of the federal government also presented challenges. All things considered,
it is remarkable that SEP teachers had any success at all in Chiapas, in or outside of the
classroom.
Lewis combines chronological and regional analysis in examining the impact of
successive federal education policies in the state. He concludes that SEP was most successful in state and nation building in the mestizo communities of Mariscal, the Grijala
River valley, and Soconusco. In these regions, teachers were able to link rural schooling
with agrarian and labor reforms, incorporating residents into the institutions of the state
(schools, unions, ejidos), instilling a sense of national identity, and creating a demand
for education as a right of citizenship. The outcome was quite different in the central
highlands, where Tzotzil and Tzeltal community members joined local elites in resisting
SEP initiatives. In spite of official rhetoric supporting bilingual education and celebrating cultural pluralism, most of the SEP teachers sent to the highlands were monolingual mestizos unable to communicate effectively with students and parents; neither they
nor their superiors found much of anything in indigenous cultures worth celebrating.
Thus, SEP enjoyed little or no success in indigenous communities where ethnic, historical, and usually linguistic differences impeded mutual understanding (p. 92), and
most highland Maya still considered the federal school an agent of cultural imposition
(p. 120), rather than as a right of citizenship or a vehicle of emancipation.
SEP programs did have an enduring, if unanticipated, legacy in the central highlands. Two decades of federal education and indigenista projects, Lewis writes, helped
train a generation of indigenous scribes who in later years would become the political
and economic caciques [bosses] of the highlands (p. xiii). Incorporated into the cacicazgo of Erasto Urbina, director of Chiapass Department of Indian Protection, these
bilingual scribes came to control their communities on behalf of the state and federal
governments, eventually driving much of their opposition into the Lacandn rain forest,
one of the strongholds of the Zapatistas. Lewis thus links SEPs policies in the 1920s
and 1930s to indigenous peasant rebellion in the 1990s and beyond, concluding that
the institutions of the Mexican revolution that preserved the social and political peace
elsewhere in the country either did not have the opportunity to develop in Chiapas or
were so thoroughly corrupted that they exacerbated problems instead of solving them
(p. xv).
605
Lewis is particularly strong when he discusses SEPs policies as implemented in

Chiapas and the relationships between SEP personnel, local elites, and state officials.
We learn less about the experiences and perspectives of the actual targets of SEP policiesthe students, parents, and other residents of the countryside. It isnt entirely clear
why Lewis chose the regions that he did for analysis, and the combination of regional
and chronological analysis leads, on occasion, to some confusion and repetition. But all
things considered, Ambivalent Revolution makes a significant contribution to our understanding of successes and failures of Cardenismo at the local and regional level, and of
the everyday processes of state formation in postrevolutionary Mexico more generally.
jennie purnell, Boston College

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-023
Political Culture and Institutional Development in Costa Rica and Nicaragua: World-Making
in the Tropics. By consuelo cruz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Notes. Index. xvii, 281 pp. Cloth, $80.00.
This is a smart and gracefully written work that historians of Central America may
find both fascinating and troubling. The latest contribution to a small wave of works
by political scientists and sociologists (such as Deborah Yashar and James Mahoney)
that treat Central America as a historians laboratory for controlled comparisons, Cruzs
book attempts to reshape social-scientific debates about political culture, while at the
same time providing a fine-grained analysis of Costa Ricas and Nicaraguas postconquest
trajectories.
At the risk of simplifying too much, Cruz argues that political culture is not just a
system of values (as often viewed by U.S. political scientists) but rather a more complex
force shaped by actors construction of identity-based narratives that in turn give rise
to practices of normative scheming in a field of imaginable possibilities (p. 265).
Rhetorical politics, including contending historiographical traditions, may reveal how
normative realism is constructed and how some memories are eclipsed or, alternatively,
become the accepted past. Political and economic development depends not on any particular sequencing of processes, but rather on the creation of effective institutions for
arbitrating differences.
Cruz seeks to explain distinct political outcomes in two adjacent republics with
shared histories. Costa Ricas model democracy and Nicaraguas extensive experience
with authoritarianism and civil conflict do indeed make a striking contrast, paradise
and hell on earth, as the subtitle of one chapter puts it. Cruz believes that the roots of
difference go back at least to the conquest. The conquest of what became central Costa
Rica occurred after the 1542 enactment of the New Laws banning Indian slavery, permitting elites to form a claim to Manichean righteousness that differentiated them
from the less-virtuous conquistadores who had massacred and enslaved native peoples
just to the north in Nicaragua. Independence, for Cruz, was another crucial moment in
defining national differences. Costa Ricans, she says, showed an early propensity to com-
606
HAHR / August
promise: agreeing, for example, to an itinerant capital that would periodically move
to accommodate competing cities. Nicaraguans, on the other hand, already manifested
tendencies toward political fragmentation among rival regions and clans.
The Thirty Years Regime in Nicaragua (185793) was, according to Cruz, a sort
of political golden age in which adversaries agreed to play by the rules of the game and
laid the bases for republican institutions. Although Conservatives dominated, they did so
while collaborating with Liberals and implementing Liberal-style export promotion and
state-building policies, even leading some to claim that their country was the Switzerland of Central America (p. 181), an appellation later applied, albeit usually ironically,
to Costa Rica. The Conservative Republics demise occurred in part because localist
tendencies in the executive branch broke down a fragile balance between antagonistic
regional elites. One appealing feature of this book is its copious quotations from the
declarations and writings of key actorsmaterials that amply illustrate the overheated
discourse that has long characterized political contention in Nicaragua. In the case of
the Conservative Republic, the regime that had successfully regulated deeply rooted
Manichean thinking and practices succumbed because it ultimately failed to reshape
the language and culture of politics sufficiently.
The 1948 civil war and its aftermath occupy a central place in Cruzs interpretation
of Costa Rica, comparable to her emphasis on the Conservative Republic in Nicaragua.
Regimes, she says, derive solidity and popular recognition from both substantive legitimation, the building of effective institutions that serve the citizenry, and electoral
legitimation, based on the certainty, again assured through impeccable institutions,
that elections are clean. Nicaragua managed to conciliate both legitimation principles
during the Conservative Republic, but not after, while Costa Rica has been able to do
so since 1948 through the creation of a fourth governmental branch charged with super
vising elections.
The sections that deal with Nicaragua are often stronger than those on Costa Rica,
perhaps because the author hails from a prominent family of Nicaraguan politicians and
intellectuals who were involved in many of the recent events and who analyzed many
of the remote ones. She asserts, for example, that in colonial Costa Rica the separation of the races and the elites social and political exclusionary practices were arguably
the strictest on the isthmus (p. 36), a claim that most historians of the region would
find dubious. More problematic than the occasional blooper, however, is the notion that
Costa Rica and Nicaragua were in some sense nations with distinct identities prior to
independence and immediately following. Historians such as Vctor Hugo Acua have
shown that the term nacin was used to refer to all of Central America, and not to its erstwhile provinces, until fairly late in the nineteenth century. Cruz has many fascinating
observations about the significant role of nationalist historiographies in framing nationbuilding projects, but she seems surprisingly insensitive to the implications of this for her
own research. Her claims about the early emergence of Costa Rican exceptionalism rely
heavily on documents reprinted in anthologies by historians (such as Carlos Melndez)
who argued for national particularism. At times, Cruz makes use of venerable secondary
607
sources, such as Lesly Byrd Simpsons work on colonial land tenure, but seems unaware
of more recent and geographically relevant works on the same themes (such as those
by Claudia Quirs or Elizabeth Fonseca). The book contains detailed footnotes but no
bibliography, which is a pity, since it complicates any overview of the evidentiary basis of
a complex and often novel argument in a narrative that, despite occasional shortcomings,
nonetheless contains many gems.
marc edelman, Hunter College and the Graduate Center,

City University of New York
doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-024
Order against Progress: Government, Foreign Investment, and Railroads in Brazil,

18541913. By william summerhill. Social Science History. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003. Maps. Tables. Figures. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index.
xv, 297 pp. Cloth, $62.95.
The spread of railroads revolutionized the world economy in the midnineteenth century, changing temporal and spatial concepts, work relationships, and businesses, among
many other important aspects of life. They have compelled the interest of researchers
for this reason. Although there is much research on the impact of railroads in advanced
economies, fewer studies have looked at the influence of rail transit on the pace of growth
in less-developed regions. Summerhills book tackles this question, examining the tardy
development of railroads in nineteenth-century Brazil as the key obstacle to the countrys economic growth during that century. More specifically, the author proposes to
evaluate (i) the direct impact of railroads on Brazils economy, (ii) the consequences of
the heavy involvement of the Brazilian government as promoter, regulator, and owner,
(iii) the consequences of foreign investment in the Brazilian railroad sector, and (iv) the
role played by railroads in the course of long-term change in Brazils economy.
The book is divided into six chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. The
narrative of these chapters is analytical, rather than chronological, and asks: what was
the role of the railroads in increasing Brazils economic output? How did the resulting
economic growth raise standards of living over the long run? How did the introduction
of modern technology in leading sectors affect long-term sustained growth and rising
standards of living in relatively poor economies? What are the railroads consequences
for human well-being?
Summerhill shows that rail transits most important direct contribution was its
short-term impact on the economy. Railroads expanded the pace and scope of economic
activity in the country by lowering the cost of freight and passenger transportation and
by integrating product and labor markets, which improved inter- and intraregional terms
of trade. Furthermore, the author estimates that the lower cost of transport boosted
Brazils GDP by 8 to 13 percent by 1913. These gains are greater than those observed in
countries like the United States, England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
608
HAHR / August
The heavy involvement of government as promoter, regulator, and owner of railroads in Brazil was critical in guaranteeing the level of investment needed to build them.
Although government regulation and ownership reduced efficiency, it helped attract
investments, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, because the government provided dividend guarantees for outside investors, as well as investing directly in
certain railroad ventures. These policies helped remove long-standing obstacles to capital formation in Brazil, due to the countrys thin financial markets. The Brazilian government also established tight control over rail transit rates, which guaranteed that the
fruits of cheap transport reached the regions and sectors that sought reduced shipping
costs. Heavy state involvement also gave Brazil access to foreign capital, which accounted
for a significant portion of early railroad investment. Numerous railroad companies,
including early major lines, were constructed and operated by British companies funded
directly in London. Due to a thin and fragmented capital market in Brazil, access to
both debt and equity finance in Britain proved indispensable to the expansion of Brazils
railroad sector. Brazil was the single largest Latin American recipient of foreign capital
(mainly British) in the late part of the nineteenth century, and railroad was the main
beneficiary. The importance of foreign capital was thus indispensable to the long-term
expansion of the Brazilian railroad sector.
Although the rise of motor vehicles diminished the relevance of direct gains from
rail transport in the twentieth century, railroads still went far in laying the groundwork
for Brazils growth in that time span. Between 1900 and 1980 Brazil was one of the
fast-growing economy economies in the Western world, and no other country in the
Americas rivaled its performance.
The books approach derives from new economic history, reflected in its theoryderived economic models, explicit counterfactuals, quantitative evidence, and statistical
analysis. Using this approach, the author was able to estimate the contribution of railroads to Brazils economic performance between 1854 and 1913. This is the books most
important contribution: using modern quantitative techniques to measure the reduction
in the real cost of overland shipment and the profound and pervasive impact of this
improvement on the Brazilian economy wherever commerce involved transport over
considerable distances.
Order against Progress sheds new light on the debate about the role of railroads in
nineteenth-century Brazil. The authors results are solidly grounded in a variety of documentary evidence, despite the scarcity of documents for the earlier periods.
srgio de oliveira birchal, Chief Economist of the Federation

of the Industries of the State of Minas Gerais
doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-025
609
From Fanatics to Folk: Brazilian Millenarianism and Popular Culture.

By patricia r. pessar. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Photographs. Maps.
Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 273 pp. Cloth, $79.95. Paper, $22.95.
In this intriguing study of a little-known lay Catholic movement in the Brazilian Northeast, anthropologist Patricia R. Pessar argues persuasively about the durability of millenarianism in the age of globalization. Pessar tells the tale of the Pedro Batista Movement,
which settled in the backlands (serto) community of Santa Brgida, Bahia, in 1945 and
remained active more than half a century later, despite the death of its founder in 1967.
She uses both historical research and her experiences as participant-observer during two
extended field stays in the 1970s and 1990s. These contacts deepened her intimacy with
the subject and enabled her to make conclusions about change and continuity that would
not have been possible on the basis of a single visit.
She was struck by the continuity of millenarianism, despite abundant change.
Although Santa Brgida experienced the effects of a variety of political systems, from
oligarchy to democracy, and saw its economy rise and fall with the weather, and even
though the movement lost both its founding leader and his successor, the religious content of millenarianism remained substantially the same. She criticizes the literature on
the phenomenon for neglecting to seriously analyze its religious content, tending instead
to characterize believers as fanatics, revolutionaries, or folk caught in a time warp. By
digging into the history of millenarianism, researching the roots of Batistas movement,
participating in rituals, and gaining the confidence of adherents, Pessar demonstrates
the persistence of this form of popular culture.
Continuity is found in seemingly contradictory behaviors, as believers adapt to
changing circumstances while clinging to their faith. Initially, Batista negotiated with
the local political boss, offering adherents political allegiance in exchange for a handsoff approach to the groups religious practices. Later followers imitated the founders
pragmatism. For example, the faithful generally accepted contemporary pressures to
rescue the Batista movement as a unique tradition to be showcased for the benefit of
a municipal development project centered on religious tourism. In the meantime, they
fought to control how it would be displayed. Followers reasserted their fundamental
beliefs and resisted commodifying their spiritual practices. A core group called Os Penitentes defended the movements beliefs to the point of defacing photographic images on
tourist posters that revealed their ritual practices. Whether new generations will remain
as fervent is questionable, Pessar admits, but millenarianism continues to inspire resistance and political protest (p. 223).
The account of Batistas life before arriving in Bahia, though interesting in its
speculations, lacks historical rigor, since it depends excessively on an unflattering newspaper article from 1942 and a few hagiographic commemorative accounts produced by
followers. The historical and contextual chapters suffer from inadequate examination
of the varied literature on Brazils more famous millenarian movements: Canudos, the
Contestado, and Juazerio. And one cannot discuss rural popular movements in Brazil
610
HAHR / August
without mentioning the landless laborers movements of today. Although these contemporary agrarian rebels (p. 224) only appear on the final page of the final chapter,
Pessar makes a striking if indirect contribution to the subject. The literature generally
argues that popular peasant mobilizations include all revolts from Tupi uprisings to the
Contestado. But Pessar questions such grand narratives with her detailed examination
of the Batistia movement. She demonstrates how Batistas peasant followers succeeded
in creating large, prosperous collective farms by collaborating with both traditional and
official power structures. Although a combination of official corruption, inadequate
investment, aging leadership, and drought eventually brought decay, the movements
agrarian project was exceedingly successful for a generation. In this regard, Pessar creates a strong argument against lumping all these movements together.
The book is thoroughly engaging when it takes an ethnographic perspective, both
in the participant-observer accounts and the analytic discussions concerning the application of cultural theories woven throughout the book. In the last two chapters, the voice
shifts from omniscient researcher to first-person participant to useful effect. As local
authorities seek to capitalize on the towns millenarian past, Pessar describes how she
became both a useful resource and potential commodity due to the added value of the
foreign gaze and her potentially useful international connections. Invited to promote the
religious tourism venture, she became an object of her own study, as well as chronicler of
embarrassing confrontations. As the story unfolds, one is inspired to visit Santa Brgida
to both see its sitesBatistas house, a museum, sculptures, a municipal theater, a mass
at the local parishand witness the tensions and contradictions she describes.
Unfortunately, readers of From Fanatics to Folk will encounter numerous redundancies, confusing citations, and annoying inconsistencies that could easily have been corrected by a more attentive copyeditor.
cliff welch, Grand Valley State University

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-026
The Plebeian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State,
18201850. By cecilia mndez. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvi, 343 pp. Cloth,
$84.95. Paper, $23.95.
This book contributes substantially to our understanding of peasant political participation in state formation in Latin America. Cecilia Mndez studies a period marked by
war, from the conflicts between monarchist and patriot militias (181030) to the decades
of harsh confrontation between liberal and conservative caudillos over the definition
of the character of the republican state (183050). It provides a detailed account of the
impact of war in Huanta, a region at the crossroads of important commercial networks,
where haciendas were gradually losing ground to growing peasant control over commercial agriculture and the coca-leaf economy.
611
Mndez adds to recent scholarship that sees war as a factor that opens up opportunities for subordinated actors to engage in politics, that fosters organization, and that
renews popular leadership. War, she shows, is embedded in existing social networks,
while also leading to substantial innovations. To uphold her thesis, Mndez presents
historical sources that show that the apparently conservative identification of southcentral highlands peasants and petty merchants with the monarchist ideal was a strategy
to achieve recognition at a moment of state foundation. These monarchist militias eventually transformed into a guerrilla group that was able to negotiate with liberal caudillos
the conditions for their integration into the new body politic.
In fact, the dynamics of military organization pushed even creole hacendados to
assume new political responsibilities. A growing plebeian peasantry without political
representation, together with the long crisis of indigenous leadership and the contradictions of the late colonial period, was addressed by a new plebeian leadership that replaced
the ethnic nobility, introducing a vision that included racial equality and interclass alliances. Creole elites were integrated into this popular movement and had to agree to
establish better labor conditions on the haciendas.
In this context, the formation of Antonio Huachaca as a leader is remarkable. Mndez explores his social origins as a muleteer in detail, reconstructing his relations with
hacienda peasants, his experience on the margins of mestizaje, and the decisions he made
in constructing regional hegemony. The book delves into Machacas speeches, letters,
and testimonies and explores his political strategies, such as the confiscation of tithes
and the use of the coca-leaf economy to finance rebellion. Huachaca and the rebels began
as monarchist militias fighting against the enforcement of tithes and later negotiated
demands for decolonization and citizenship. Machaca successfully pressured the caudil
los to recognize the political legitimacy of the militias as members of the national army
and established the foundation of popular liberalism in Peru.
Mndezs approach to rural caudillismo refreshes a literature that has emphasized
the urban side of politics. More than a coercive integration of the population into a
structured military apparatus, the author describes a dialogue between peasant guerillaswho proved versatile, autonomous, and able to develop their own agendasand a
state that needed popular support and integrated popular demands while formatting a
national military. As the author argues, the state didnt suppress insurgency, but rather
rechanneled it.
In this context, Mndez discusses the opposition of Huachacas troops to caudil
los such as Bolivar and Gamarra, who represented a state that reserved the right to
impose colonial tributes over peasant society. Alternatively, peasants supported Luis Jos
Obregoso (1834) and the project of the Peru-Bolivia confederation conceived by caudillo
Andrs de Santa Cruz (183435). Santa Cruz had gained peasant support because he
promised to facilitate the integration of the highland provinces internal market.
This book challenges a historiographical narrative about Peru that suggests that the
peasant population was demobilized and excluded from politics after the failure of the
great Indian insurrection of the 1780s. It can be read in dialogue with other attempts to
612
HAHR / August
trace the relation between the internal crisis of the cacicazgo and the empowerment of
the community that supported the formation of new forms of leadership: for instance,
Sinclair Thomsons study of Tpac Katari in La Paz. Yet the characteristics of Huanta
make this book particularly relevant for comparisons to the northern Andes, Quito, and
New Granada, where mobility and mestizaje transformed the ethnic identification of the
lower classes, and plebeian leadership proved crucial both in the age of revolution and in
the later popular alliances with political liberalism.
The book definitively contributes to a new political history of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it should be read as a complement, and not as simply a rejoinder, to
the dominant historiography that has emphasized the difficulties of constructing hegemony and overcoming regional and racial exclusion in Peru. Mndez successfully shows
the existence of a liberal foundation of the Peruvian state. Yet it is also true that the
weakness of the central state with respect to the dominant regional classes eventually
resulted in the formation of more-authoritarian alliances, particularly during the formation of the oligarchic state after the 1850s guano boom.
Nevertheless, Mndezs focus on this early period of state formation, and her historical reconstruction of the Peruvian liberal tradition, provide elements for a more
dynamic reading of the political system, one in which the oligarchic state no longer
appears as the natural result of the lack of participation of other classes but as an effect
of an unequal competition. In fact, the formation of democratic tendencies in the 1930s,
the particular character of the Peruvian military, the relevance of indigenista ideology,
and the resistance of this regions peasantry to Senderista violence can also be better
understood after reading this book.
valeria coronel, New York University

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-027
The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds: The Prison Experience, 18501935.
By carlos a. aguirre. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Photographs.
Illustrations. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi, 310 pp. Cloth, $79.95.
Paper, $22.95.
In the last decade, historians have shown increasing interest in prisons as the subject
of critical inquiry. This scholarship has sought to understand the greater dimensions
of social control, the difficulties in wholly translating Western institutional models to
Latin American societies, and the ways in which the criminal-justice and penitentiary
systems have reflected states exclusionary practices based on class, ethnicity, race, and
gender. More broadly then, much of this new research has looked at power and the way
it has functioned in the postcolonial world. Carlos Aguirres work here is no exception.
However, what is exceptional is the innovative perspective that Aguirre takes in examining the world within four of Perus prisons: the Lima penitentiary El Panptico, the
penal colony El Frontn, the Carcl de Guadelupe, and the Carcl Central de Varones.
613
He seeks to uphold a subaltern view, one from inside the prison walls, that reveals a tenuous and often improvised relationship between both common and political prisoners,
prison officials, wardens, criminologists, and doctors, as well as the families, cronies,
coworkers, neighbors, and friends on the outside. We learn that one cannot draw the line
between the two worlds so distinctly: in many ways, life in the Lima prisons was a reflection of the forms of clientelism and hierarchy that characterized Peruvian society, a point
made most elegantly in Aguirres analysis of inmate loyalty to political leaders outside
the prison during the Augusto Legua regime. But Aguirre contends that prisoners were
also at odds with the system of patronage and used alternative vocabulariesfrom the
language of human rights to the language of tattoosto express themselves.
Breaking the book into three parts, Aguirre first introduces some of the key
elements related to prison reform encapsulated in the debates between legalistic and
increasingly medicalized notions of criminality. Criminological theories, no matter their
lack of rigorous research or consensus, enjoyed tremendous cachet among Leguista
policymakers, who translated these scientific studies of crime into legal and penal codes
and guides on prison management. The second part takes a closer look at the prison
experience, revealing the contradictory nature of rehabilitation and reform. On the one
hand, the state sought to implement the strategies that famed Peruvian eugenicist Carlos
Enrique Paz Soldn designed to inculcate morality, a commitment to hard work, and
good citizenship, while the simultaneous neglect and abuse of inmates was commonplace. Relating the horrors of solitary confinement known as la sepultura in El Frontn,
Aguirre observes how violence seemed endemic to the penitentiary; in it, a true regime
of terror reigned (p. 106). The author concludes that despite the attempts by the modernizing Peruvian state to make the prison a model of discipline and order, that customary order was built not according to prison design but through personal negotiation,
bribery, and resistance, creating a more porous boundary between inmates and prison
authorities. In this sense, Aguirre suggests that the idea of authority can be imagined
as a floating concept that could be invoked by prison employees, wardens, and inmates,
each exerting their leverage over one another in ways that mirrored the racial, spatial,
and gendered notions of patronage in society. This idea is best exemplified by the small
group of caporalesindividuals drawn from the convict population to assist in prison
administrationwho at times held certain authority over prison officials by virtue of
their special knowledge of the prisons inner workings.
The authors examination of inmate correspondence, particularly the prisoners
sketches included in the final chapter, offers a valuable perspective on political prisoners,
prison administration, and inmate abuse. The extensive documentation and compilation of arrest records for the period of his study, as well as the tables on the number
of inmates, painstakingly broken down by categories of age, race, regional origin, and
occupation, are illuminating and indispensable data for scholars working in criminality
or labor history.
Aguirres work reaffirms just how important it is that we study the institutions
inhabited by subalterns in order to understand the mechanisms of authoritarian rule. His
614
HAHR / August
research suggests new ways to see how power is exercised through contestation, solidarity, ambivalence, andas often is the case in Perus prisonsthrough acts of violence.
shari orisich, University of Maryland

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-028
El futuro del pasado: Las coordenadas de la configuracin de los Andes.

By heraclio bonilla. Lima: Editorial del Pedaggico San Marcos, Instituto de
Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, 2005. Illustrations. Map. Tables. Figures. Notes.
Bibliography. Index. 1261 pp. Paper. Two volumes.
Heraclio Bonilla is one of the most respected, if controversial, Peruvian historians of
recent times. His work was crucial in overcoming the old nationalistic current in historiography that dominated until the late 1960s, and since the 1980s he has been subject
to greater critique than possibly any other Peruvianist historian. First he was blamed
for not giving sufficient weight to Perus regions or the Indians, then the new cultural
historiography denounced his structuralist view of history. Finally, the new political historiography criticized his lack of attention to politics and the political system. It could
be said that, even today, historians define their position by the extent to which they differentiate their own work from Bonillas theoretical framework.
The Fondo Editorial del Pedaggico San Marcos and the Instituto de Ciencias y
Humanidades have now republished 63 of Bonillas articles that were until now dispersed
throughout a number of small journals of limited availibility. Although the two volumes
do not cover all of Bonillas work, they provide a good overview of his principal topics
of research. The book is divided into seven parts. In the first, we find articles with general interpretations of large-scale issues, such as The Andean Region as Situation and
Problem or The Past and the Present in the Andes. The second part brings together
Bonillas classic studies of Peruvian dependency in the nineteenth century, most of which
were written in the 1970s. The third part demonstrates that Bonilla has paid more attention to colonial history in recent years, while still retaining his dependentista outlook.
The fourth part concentrates on a topic strongly associated with Bonilla in the 1970s:
the Peruvian nation, especially in relation to the Indians. The wide range of dates on the
articles show that Bonilla never abandoned this issue. The fifth part focuses on the rural
question; most of these articles date from the 1970s, and here one notes a loss of interest
in the topic of the countryside in later work. The sixth part concerns the state, again with
heavy interest in the role of Indians in Andean societies.
The last section is entitled The Conclusion, but as the three contributions are
from 2000, 1994, and 1984, the present they describe is already some years old. Most
of the articles are either about Peru or about general Andean history, with Peru as a
primary example. Nevertheless, the collection shows that Bonilla has begun to publish
quite a few articles on Colombia (where he now lives) over the last ten years.
This is not the place to repeat or describe all the shortcomings of Bonillas work.
615
These two volumes show that, in reality, all his writings are a form of sociological history: he is less interested in empirical detail than in the big picture. While it has always
been easy to find empirical evidence to contradict his theses, Bonillas interpretations
still help us to conjure up an image of the Andean past, even if they are not as factual as Bonilla would believe. His interpretations have been especially important for
nineteenth-century Peruvian historiography, and this book gives us the opportunity to
read his polemical contributions to some of the most important debates concerning this
epoch.
The first I would like to mention concerns Peruvian independence. In contrast to
the old patriotic historiography, Bonilla uses two arguments to support the thesis that
independence was introduced into Peru from outside. First, he rejects the thesis that
indigenous rebellions in Peru were elements of, or precursors to, the wars of independence. Moreover, according to Bonilla, the Indians did not fight for creole independence,
but rather for social revolution and for changes within the colonial system. Three articles
in the third part develop this argument, although unfortunately there is no article in the
collection that returns to the second argument. Together with Karen Spalding, Bonilla
defended the thesis that Peruvian creoles did not want to abolish Spanish rule.
Another important debate concerns the dependent character of the Peruvian economy. Bonilla takes pains to demonstrate the importance of foreign trade; in his opinion,
it was this that determined the formation of the Peruvian nation-state, the rise of the
coastal upper class, and the shape of many of the most significant nineteenth-century
changes in Peru. The last debate I would like to mention here concerns the Indians
sense of national identity. According to Bonilla, the Indians of nineteenth-century Peru
had no concept of the Peruvian nation in itself, and thus their participation in the war
with Chile should be interpreted as an indigenous rebellion with indigenous goals. The
Peruvian nation as a community of all the people living within the countrys boundaries
is an illusion, Bonilla says. The wealthy coastal dwellers were integrated into the international economy and not at all interested in the development of the Peruvian nation,
while the Indians of the Andes did not even have a definition of what such an entity
would constitute.
Bonilla has presented us with a critical historiography throughout his career, which
may be one more reason why his vision remains both fascinating and destined to fall
under the revisionist ax.
ulrich muecke, Georg-August University of Gttingen

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-029
616
HAHR / August
The Shield of the Weak: Feminism and the State in Uruguay, 19031933.
By christine ehrick. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 282 pp. Cloth, $39.95.
A century after he became president of Uruguay and initiated its transformation into
South Americas first welfare state, Jose Batlle y Ordez remains a towering figure. Yet,
increasingly historians have recognized that Batlles reforms had their limitssocial,
geographic, and gendered. It is the relationship of gender and feminism to the Batllista
state that is the central subject of Christine Ehricks illuminating book.
Ehrick draws on two phases of feminist scholarship on Latin America, combining
analysis of feminism and womens movements with a gendered understanding of state
formation. But she goes beyond her models in both methodology and interpretation.
Commendably, her analysis of feminist movements in Uruguay extends past its leadership. Ehrick has constructed a database of more than five hundred politically active
women of the era, which allows her to analyze their class, ethnic, and political characteristics. She compares their membership in different organizations and thus traces changes
in those organizations over the first three decades of the twentieth century. One surprising conclusion is that immigration does not explain the distinctive nature of Uruguayan
feminism, as most Uruguayan feminists were native-born.
For Ehrick, Uruguayan feminism had four distinguishing characteristics: it was
plural, it was partisan, it was shaped largely by local conditions, and it was influenced
by the Batllista state. Where earlier studies focused on Uruguays middle-class liberal
feminism, Ehrick stresses that there were several feminismssome of them elite and
conservative, others working class and socialist. She also argues that Uruguayan female
activists shared the intense political partisanship of the regions longest-lived two-party
system, one of the unique local political factors that set Uruguayan feminism apart from
its Latin American counterparts. Another was the Batllista state, whose links to many
liberal feministsteachers and professionalslent Uruguayan feminism a statist cast.
Ehrick departs from much recent feminist scholarship on the state. Instead of viewing the state-building process as the modernization of patriarchy, she argues that in
Uruguay it can be described instead as the modernization of paternalism. This more
flexible term allows her to analyze Uruguay as a stratified society of interlocking relationships and mutual obligations (p. 7); these unequal relationships are defined by class
and ethnicity, as well as by gender.
Batlles stance in favor of the practical interests of women (such as legalized divorce
and womens suffrage) and the readiness of the Batllista state to incorporate women,
including feminists, contributes to her characterization of the unique gendered nature
of the Uruguayan state-building process. As the titlea famous Batlle quotesuggests,
in Batlles model country, the state would act as the shield of the weak, a category that
included women, children, workers, and the poor. Clearly, Batlle was no feminist; but,
Ehrick argues, he favored policiesincluding compensationthat could help women
advance toward equality, culminating in Uruguays granting women full suffrage in
1932. Moreover, his support for womens education and social assistance, along with the
617
atmosphere of social experimentation and political innovation he created, encouraged

the participation of women and the incorporation of feminists. Ehrick has captured the
underlying ambiguity of Batllista Uruguay, and, to her credit, she refuses to settle for a
more simplistic interpretation.
Her reading of Uruguayan history reflects a comparable balance. She embraces
the current views of Uruguayan scholars: that Batlles reforms anticipated rather than
responded to the emergence of civil society and that civil society emerged instead
during the great antireformist reaction of 191629 that followed Batlles two presidencies. But she criticizes their omission of the role of women in this process, arguing
persuasively that Uruguayan feminismssome supportive of Batllista reforms, some
opposeddeveloped concurrently with the Batllista welfare state and that Uruguayan women took part in the debate and dialogue over reform and its limits (p. 7).
Her book begins earlier, with an exploration of Uruguayan feminisms between 1880
and 1915, whose divisions followed mutually reinforcing religious and political lines; she
follows with a discussion of Batllista ideology and a chapter on women, education, and
social assistance under Batlle.
The core of her research, however, is the three chapters on the main currents in
Uruguay feminism between 1916 and 1933: middle-class liberal feminism; elite, conservative Christian feminism; and working-class socialist feminism. These chapters
examine political parties such as the Socialists and Communists but are most interesting
when they explore civil-society organizations such as the elite, conservative Catholic
Ladies League and the liberal National Womens Council of Uruguay (CONAMU)
and Uruguayan Womens Suffrage Alliance (Alianza), secular middle-class organizations that marginalized poor and working-class women. None of these organizations
were mass movements, perhaps because their leaders embraced a condescending social
politics that figuratively placed them in the position of protective mothers to their less
fortunate poor daughters, while taking advantage of Batllista policies of inclusion to gain
access to higher education and develop their own feminist consciousness.
Shield of the Weak contributes to the history of Latin American feminism, offering
a complex view of the relationships between gender, feminism, Uruguayan politics, and
the Batllista state. Ehrick adds to our understanding of the formation of the Batllista
state and its reform project, stressing their gendered limits but underscoring as well
that they represented an advance for women, one that played a significant role in the
construction of Uruguayan feminism. Her balanced interpretation makes this book recommended reading for historians of gender and Latin America alike.
peter winn, Tufts University

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-030
618
HAHR / August
Paul Groussac: Un estratega intelectual. By paula bruno. Seccin de Obras de Historia.

Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Econmica de Argentina / Universidad de San Andrs,
2005. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. 262 pp. Paper.
Paul Groussac was a man of paradox. While he condemned the decadence of his native
France, in his adopted Argentina he never ceased invoking a privileged understanding of
things by virtue of being French. Having only a haphazard education and no university
diploma, he presented himself as a grand European intellectual specially suited to pass
judgment (usually negative) on Argentine and Spanish American culture. Although he
often proclaimed that a life of letters should remain free of politics, his success relied on
political appointments, including Inspector de los Colegios Nacionales, for which he
had no training and no credentials, and director for 43 years of the Argentine National
Library. Perhaps the biggest paradox of all, however, was not Groussacs, but Argentinas.
How was he able to insert himself into the highest echelons of Argentine intellectual life,
and why did so many Argentines take him seriously? Could he back his pretensions with
real intellectual substance, despite his lack of visible qualifications? After all, Goussac left
a substantial oeuvre that includes several historical studies, near countless articles and
critical notes, a volume of poetry, and four novels. Or was there in Groussacs Argentina a masochistic strain that took perverse pleasure in the attentions of a Frenchman,
regardless of his insults and denigrations?
Into this discussion comes an engaging new intellectual biography that offers a
thorough overview of Groussacs considerable body of writingvirtually all of it now
forgotten, despite his prominence in Argentine intellectual circles for nearly 50 years.
Particularly important, Bruno skillfully reconstructs the increasingly sophisticated
world of Argentine letters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using
Groussac as a point of entry. Since Groussac returns to his subjects many times, Bruno
avoids writing a chronological biography that would have entailed considerable redundancy. The first chapter outlines the highlights of Groussacs life, giving a necessary
frame for what follows. She then dedicates three chapters respectively to his polemics,
his fiction and literary criticism, and his histories and historical criticism. The concluding chapter offers an overall evaluation of his work, as well as a remarkable confession:
despite all her research, Bruno really doesnt like Mr. Groussac that much.
Likeable or not, Groussac was a remarkable man. He arrived in Argentina in 1866,
an 18-year-old lad with little functional knowledge of Spanish. Four years later, he published his first article in the Revista Argentina. By the mid-1880s, he was a formidable and
feared presence in Argentine intellectual life and remained so until his death in 1929.
Bruno has apparently taken the time to read all of Groussacs work, and she provides a
useful synopsis of his major writings and ideasfew of which seem noteworthy at this
distance.
The more interesting story is her understanding of Groussac as an intellectual
strategist, by which she suggests that the transplanted Frenchman was primarily bent
on eliminating rivals (even dead ones), dominating all debates, and doling out access and
Book Reviews / International and Comparative
619
resources through his control of state-subsidized magazines like La Biblioteca and Anales
de la Biblioteca, in which he promoted allies, attacked enemies, and of course aggrandized
himself. Groussacs strategies of elimination meant persistent attack and constant belittlement, occasionally through faint praise, often through artfully crafted insults. In his
words, Sarmiento was not a versatile writer, much less a sage of the laboratory or archive,
and maybe not even a profound politician or superb orator; he is half a genius (p. 147).
He calls Bartolom Mitre an intellectual dictator (p. 97) and represents Ricardo Palma
as that leprous inheritor of the thoughtlessness and frivolity that Spanish America suffers from (p. 102). Dissenters responded, of course, but somehow Groussac, well into the
1900s, always seemed the loudest and the most visible. Eventually, people grew tired of
him. Although he retained his position at the National Library until his death, he died in
cranky isolation. His death, however, provoked encomia of all sorts about the passing of
el maestro and our French man of letters.
Bruno gives Groussac a fair hearing and provides an excellent summary of his ideas
and the context in which they were first aired. When she concludes, however, that his
extremely petulant and narcissistic attitude . . . turned him into a teacher without pupils,
or that there was a disproportion between his inflated expectations about his legacy and
how things actually turned out (p. 230), she not only offers a just appraisal of this rather
nasty man but also dismisses him in a fashion worthy of Groussac himself.
nicolas shumway, University of Texas at Austin

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-031
International and Comparative

Indian Wars of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, 18121900.
By bruce vandervort. Warfare and History. London: Routledge, 2006. Maps.
Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvii, 337 pp. Paper, $34.00.
With this book, Bruce Vandervort, professor of modern European and African history
at the Virginia Military Institute, turns his attention from Africa to the Western Hemisphere. He also broadens his approach into a multilayered comparative study that deftly
blends military, political, and cultural history. His prior monograph, Wars of Imperial
Conquest in Africa, 18301914 (Indiana Univ. Press, 1998), focused on European wars to
colonize Africa. He also edits the Journal of Military History.
Part 1 (chapters 14) lays out the sophisticated comparative framework for this
study of wars against native societies. Several characteristics set Vandervorts work
apart from, and above, most studies of military campaigns against native peoples. We
gain comparative insights into Canadian, U.S., and Mexican governmental policies and
military approaches. But he considers not only the tactics and strategies of the EuroAmerican powers but also those of the native forces. For example, he quotes George F.
G. Stanley, writing in 1936, on similarities between the fighting styles of the Boers and
620
HAHR / August
the Mtis (p. 225). We also learn a great deal about the equestrian fluid style of warfare of Plains Indians (p. 6) and the guerrilla tactics so successfully practiced by many
native groups. One of the most revealing sections of the book is chapter 2, which contrasts Indians ways of war with Euro-American views and approaches. The analysis
shows clearly that religion suffused every aspect of Indian life, war included (p. 66).
Vandervort provides a richly nuanced comparative analysis. Not only do we
find native versus European comparisons on a variety of topics, but also comparisons
of Canadian, U.S., and Mexican officer corps, training, and weaponry. He provides a
cogent critique of the inappropriateness of nineteenth-century U.S. military doctrine to
engage the irregular warfare they faced in the plains. The demise of Custers command
at the Little Big Horn also gets appropriate criticism: the result of others mistakes and
of the hubris and hunger for glory of their commander (p. 186). Vandervort adds global
comparisons of colonial wars against indigenous populations in Africa, New Zealand,
and Australia. This is a work of transnational history in the very best sense of the term.
The specific case studies are laid out chronologically in part 2 (chapters 510).
Vandervort begins with the Great Clearance of Creeks, Seminoles, and others east of
the Mississippi from 1815 through 1842. He then journeys south to examine Mexican
campaigns against the Yaqui and the Maya in Yucatn from 1821 to 1876. Chapter 7
returns to the United States, focusing on the suppression of Plains Indians from 1848
though 1877. Vandervort next examines the conquest of Apachera from 1860 to 1886,
considering both U.S. and Mexican strategies and actions. We then move north to the
Canadian prairies to analyze campaigns against the Mtis and the Cree. We then return
to Mexico and the continued repression and oppression of the Yaqui and Maya during
the Porfiriato. Organizationally, part 2 is not as explicitly comparative as part 1, but
readers will already have a good grasp of similarities and differences and thus can draw
their own comparisons.
We also find significant historiographical debate and revisionist arguments
throughout the book. Vandervort finds technological determinism to be only a partial explanation for the success of Western-style armies (p. 15). To explain the success
of government forces in the little wars that he examines, he posits as the crucial factors the resolution of internal conflicts and the subsequent consolidation of national
power in the white settler states (p. xvi). On the Mexican front, Vandervort makes a case
that, in Sonora, the much-maligned Rurales were given the job of tracking down and
rounding up dissident Yaquis and shipping them off to the henequen fields of Yucatn
(p. 230). The view that the U.S. Civil War offered a hiatus to Indians in the West he
dubs highly misleading (pp. 17071).
The author draws mainly upon the very large English-language literature available for North American military frontier history, but he also supplements with selected
sources in French and Spanish. Sixteen very good maps supplement the text, but, oddly,
the book includes no other illustrations. Devotees of comparative, military, and frontier
history will find this excellent study stimulating and informative. However, the clarity
621
of the arguments and of the writing renders the book accessible to student and general
audiences as well.
richard w. slatta, North Carolina State University

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-032
Presencia espaola en Puebla, siglos XVIXX. Edited by agustn grajales and

lilian illanes. Puebla, Mexico: Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades,
BUAP/Embajada de Espaa en Mxico, 2002. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps.
Tables. Notes. Bibliography. 339 pp. Paper.
This book contains 20 chapters that emerged from an academic conference on the Spanish presence in Puebla, held by the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades of
the Benemrita Universidad Autnoma de Puebla in 1995. All the chapters present a
broad panorama of a historical process that seems evident in the area of central Mexico.
The subject of foreigners in Mexico has been the source of important research, but this
research has been focused on describing the legislation and legal problems concerning
immigration; the case studies that do exist have typically focused on the presence of
foreigners in Mexico City. One of the most important contributions of this book is that
it digs into a problem that has received little attention: the presence of foreigners in the
Mexican countryside. Furthermore, it looks at a region of the countryside that is near
the capital city, an area located along the most important transportation route in New
Spain and that maintained this role during the republican period, therefore allowing us
to discover new possibilities for keeping foreigners in its reach.
The editors seek to touch on the entire time span of the presence of one group of
foreignersSpaniardsin the Puebla region, from the first settlers who came from
far-away Brihuega up through the fiasco of the retention of exiles from the Spanish Civil
War during the 1930s. This goal is important, because the contributions do succeed in
covering this span, but its clear there are gaps. These are not the fault of the book, but
rather prove that within the scholarship on foreigners in Puebla, there are gaps in the
research on certain periods.
Like all edited volumes, the topics and methodological approaches are varied. It is
evident that research on the colonial period is concentrated primarily on individualsin
general, merchants and successful military personnel who are portrayed in terms of the
power networks they established and the mobility they enjoyed, as much in the social
sense as in the spatial one. This is demonstrated in the lives of Diego de Anzures and the
conde de Orizaba. To this we can contrast the life of the family members of Luis Eraso
and of the famous poet Gutierre de Cetina. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
the studies pick up the topic of families or specific regional groups that came from Spain.
These topics, and the way they are researched, are a clear demonstration of the recent
approaches that have been used to study foreigners in Mexico. These approaches make it
possible to propose new research perspectives: for example, to study the life of workers,
622
HAHR / August
peasants, and small-scale merchants who did not meet with great success, or teachers
who were placed in educational institutions. The methodological proposals made in the
books contributions could be used to approach such topics.
From the first chapter to the last, we can see clearly the continuity across time of a
process such as the presence of Spaniards in Mexico, but we can also see evidence of the
difficulty in putting together an edited volume. That is, the contributions are uneven;
some texts offer preliminary approaches to a topic and others are the result of extended
research. Even though the editors attempted to unite the studies put forth, reading the
entire collection gives a sense of unevenness.
Reading this collection allows us to think about all the demands that life in the
countryside must have presented to foreigners who arrived in a country such as Mexico
in various points in its history. These are topics that have been little studied in Mexican
historiography. Reading these studies reveals a great deal of complexity and also the
limitations that exist within the study of foreigners in Mexico.
alexander betancourt-mendieta, Universidad Autnoma de San Luis Potos

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-033
Auslnder in Mexiko: Die Kolonien der deutschen und US-amerikanischen Einwanderer in

der mexikanischen Hauptstadt, 18901942. By silke nagel. Berliner LateinamerikaForschungen. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2005. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Appendixes. xii,
428 pp. Cloth.
Silke Nagel, in her book Auslnder in Mexiko: Die Kolonien der deutschen und US-amerikanischen Einwanderer in der mexikanischen Hauptstadt, 18901942, compares the develop
ment of German and U.S. communities in Mexico City between 1890 and 1942. Her
exhaustive research is based on sources from Mexico, the United States, and Germany.
In addition, the book provides 64 tables packed with social and economic data that further illuminate the developments of clubs, companies, and other social organizations.
The footnotes offer a wealth of additional information. The result is the best comparative microhistory of the U.S. and German collectivities and their role in Mexican history
during the Porfiriato, the Mexican Revolution, the interwar years, and World War II.
She begins with an extensive review of the existing literature, then describes the
historical and political environment within which these two foreign communities had
to exist. Next she presents a general history of immigration and Mexican immigration
laws. The core of the book then narrates the detailed microhistories in chronological,
comparative fashion.
To understand the development of the German community, Nagel points to the
importance of ethnic merchant houses. Across time, a second focal point remained the
German school. Discussions of curricula, enrollments, and expansion reflected social
and political changes in distant Germany. From the very beginning, most Germans
were intent on becoming a community within Mexico, and both Mexicans and Germans
insisted on seeing themselves as distinct ethnic groups.
623
In contrast, U.S. citizens did not want to constitute a recognizable community

inside Mexico and instead viewed themselves as a group of individuals pursuing separate
interests in the same location. This group of foreigners had little interest in being representative of events or administrations in Washington and was shaped more by religious
and charitable organizations. The result was much looser community ties and a more
varied history. Nevertheless, certain external events affected everybody. The Mexican Revolution threatened the safety of U.S. citizens and caused many to return to the
United States. In contrast, Germans could not withdraw easily. Instead, they remained
and became embroiled in manipulations between Mexican president Venusiano Carranza, German emperor Wilhelm II, and U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. A few even
took up arms. After World War I, U.S. citizens returned and revived their particular
pursuits, which centered on economic affairs as before. Soon, booming business financed
the growth of competing social clubs and churches.
In contrast, after the 1919 collapse of the German monarchy, the German community splintered into social groups that entered into lasting political rivalries. Once
again, the development of the German school and struggles over high-culture concepts
dominated events inside the community. The rise of fascism in Germany meant a reorganization of the community along Nazi guidelines from Berlin. The arrival of exiled
Germans and opposition from factions inside the community put further stress on the
group. Finally, President vila Camachos pro-U.S. leanings and Mexicos declaration
of war against the Third Reich created substantial economic damage and isolated the
immigrant community from its homeland. In contrast, vila Camachos prodemocracy
stance gave U.S. citizens a rallying point to gather around and a motivation to participate
in Mexican society and politics. Future research is needed to shed additional light on
U.S. artists and radical political groups in Mexico that did not participate in the mainstream culture of the Mexican capital.
This important contribution offers a comparative approach that takes the history of
ethnic groups in Mexico away from a focus on a single immigrant community. She also
demonstrates the richness of insights that can be drawn by examining a longer period
of time. Third, juxtaposing European and U.S. cultural values and communities helps
highlight the distinctiveness of each group. Nagels detailed investigation is the best
available history of the U.S. and German immigrant communities in Mexico. This work
will remain, for some time to come, the seminal text for scholars and students alike.
Hopefully, one day, it will be published in English.
friedrich schuler, Portland State University

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-034
624
HAHR / August
Native Insurgencies and the Genocidal Impulse in the Americas. By nicholas a. robins.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index.
x, 289 pp. Cloth, $39.95.
An old adage warns that those who live by the sword also perish by it. Nicholas Robins
takes these words to heart in his new comparative study of indigenous rebellions in the
Spanish colonial and postcolonial world. He compares New Mexicos Pueblo Revolt of
1680, the great Andean rebellions of the early 1780s, and the Caste War of Yucatn that
began in 1847. He argues that Hispanic genocide, or at least ethnocide, provoked violent
recoils. These responses achieved mixed results, forcing some reforms but just as often
bringing greater repression against the rebels and their ethnic kin. As Robins concludes,
While nothing can justify the murder of innocents, genocide can beget genocide
(p. 172).
Native Insurgencies operates through a mixture of anthropology, history, political
science, and sociological theory. Robins begins with an exploration of the term genocide, sorting through definitions that have emerged in both academic contexts and in
United Nations deliberations. In all three case studies, he traces the growing pressures
that colonialism brought to bear on indigenous peoples, the angry backlash with overtones of extermination, the recourse to millenarian belief as a way of galvanizing the
masses, the divisions and uncertain aims of indigenous leadership, and the influence
of the rebels internalization of Hispanic culture, either by long exposure or simply
as a matter of survival. The rebels millenarian dreams never came to pass, but their
campaigns against Spanish genocide did slow or even temporarily reverse deepening
patterns of colonial exploitation. Rebel leaders themselves fared poorly. New Mexicos
Pop became an indigenous version of the Spanish colonial administrators, the Andean
rebels all fell before the executioner, and Caste War leaders, too, often succumbed to a
system in which lieutenants advanced by assassinating their superiors. In all of this, the
book strongly calls to mind Michael Adass Prophets of Rebellion (Univ. of North Carolina
Press, 1979) transported to a Latin American context: cruelty begets cruelty, but messianic leadership and impossible religious promises are necessary to inspire a divided and
downtrodden people who lack organization, mass media, and legitimate political avenues
through which to express their grievances.
Robinss factual presentation is on its firmest footing when dealing with the subject of his own primary research: the late colonial Andean rebellions of Tpac Amaru,
Toms Katari, and their successors. Ably tracing the succession of leadership and the
ebb and flow of rebel success, Native Insurgencies presents a useful overview of the revolts
that rocked Bolivia and Peru two generations before independence. The material on
the Caste War is somewhat more uneven. I particularly regret seeing the repetition of
several long-standing myths concerning this latter conflict. First, there was no massive
alienation of church property that might have provoked the war; the Bourbons partial
liquidation of cofrada lands was water under the bridge by 1847. Even the liberal reformers of the 1850s found virtually no Yucatecan church-held property to confiscateonly
625
mortgages. Second, as fomenters of the war Robins resurrects the huites, supposedly a
group of eastern Maya who had little or no contact with Hispanic colonialism. In reality, this seldom-used term simply described individuals adept at working in the outback,
while the eastern villages in question had an all-too-extensive experience with militia
service, contraband smuggling, and Hispanic politics. Third, Hispanic core areas such as
Mrida and Campeche were never in any real danger. The idea that Maya rebels almost
drove Hispanics into the sea remains the most persistent myth concerning the war. Synthesis rests partly on the strength of the material synthesized, and the real source of
these distortions is Nelson Reed. Reed was no stickler either for research or for facts,
but the longevity of his book has made that textand its errorscanonical. I also have
some doubts about the trusty old explanation of Maya concepts of circular time as causal
agents. This may not be all that distinctive or critical, since almost all peoples employ
simultaneous concepts of linear and circular time: witness Christian eschatology.
Beyond these items stands the whole question of the concept and definition of genocide. Borrowing on the work of Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, Robins laments a tendency to deny genocide. This tendency, he argues, has been particularly strong in Latin
America. Colonialism of any sort is certainly to be decried. But was Hispanic colonialism
really a qualitative equivalent of the European Holocaust or the orchestrated massacre
of Rwandan Tutsis? After so many types of genocide have been introducedpolitical,
hegemonic, latent, and negligent, among othersthe terms significance grows a bit
vague. Debate over the semantics and gradations of cruelty will no doubt continue to
rage. Still, Robins succeeds in putting the questions of colonialism and violent backlash
before us. He is a talented synthesizer who has brought together three rebellions of different times and widely different cultures in order to identify important similarities.
Robins also writes clearly and logically, and when properly contextualized, the book will
certainly lend itself to classroom adoption. Native Insurgencies and the Genocidal Impulse in
the Americas makes us aware of the massive efforts on the part of the hemispheres native
peoples; while their movements perhaps fell short of the greater goal, they still presented
a serious challenge to both Spanish hegemony and human injustice.
terry rugeley, University of Oklahoma

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-035
626
HAHR / August
Integracin econmica latinoamericana: Proceso ALALC/ALADI, 19502000. 2 vols. By

gustavo magarios. Montevideo: Asociacin Latinoamericano de Integracin,
2005. Appendixes. Notes. ii, 569 pp. and iv, 479 pp. Paper, $29.50.
This two-volume work by Gustavo Magarios is the long-awaited history of efforts to
promote economic integration in Latin America. The author is one of the most significant participants in the effort to achieve that goal. He was Uruguays ambassador for
international commerce and integration, served as his governments delegate to GATT,
then was appointed as Montevideos director of negotiations with ALALC (Asociacin
Latinoamericana de Libre Comercio; the English acronym is LAFTA) and later became
the executive secretary of the organization. From 1973 to 1976 Magarios served as
Uruguays director general for foreign commerce and ambassador to the European commission from 1979 to 1984. His intimate knowledge of international trade issues makes
this an invaluable source for those interested in internationalism and the economic/
political integration of Latin America.
The book is not a memoir. It is a lengthy and detailed analytical narrative of the
movement for economic integration in Latin America over a 50-year period. Many
leaders in the region have promoted this effort as the principal mechanism for viable
development. The author refers to integration as the idea-force because of IberoAmericans many attempts to pursue this goal. He examines contemporary efforts
within the framework of the aftermath of World War II and the institutions designed to
promote globalization.
This study is primarily a history of the now-defunct ALALC and the Asociacin
Latinoamericana de Integracin (ALADI). Both institutions have played major roles in
promoting economic integration. The two volumes explain how groups hostile toward
the creation of a common market used and neglected these institutions.
Because both organizations were designed as technocratic agencies, this is a very
detailed history. The two volumes focus on efforts to promote regionalism via trade
concessions. Thus, it is a history of institutions and economic forces; the author does not
provide us with an in-depth examination of the key individuals in this drama. He does
not give any great attention to the politics of integration at the national level, save for
some discussion in chapter 7 regarding the acceptance of the Treaty of Montevideo in
1960. The preponderance of military governments in the 1960s and 1970s, which were
not amenable to the transparency needed for detailed study of individual actors, clearly
guided Magarioss decision to focus on institutions. At the same time, most democratic
governments abandoned a proactive stance on economic integration, preferring to delegate responsibilities to technocrats.
The book is not light reading. The first volume begins with a brief introduction to
the integration movement and then examines such problems as the balance of payments,
frustrated efforts to promote trading concessions, the role of central banks, the IMF, and
so on. The reader may be overwhelmed by the list of acronymsIDB, ECLA, GRAN,
MCCAand extensive discussion of sectoral lists, antidiscrimination, and lifeguard
627
clauses. The last policy designation was intended to allow states to renege on their tariffs
agreements if the economic health of the member state declined
Volume 2 focuses extensively on political dimensions while continuing to address
economic considerations. It examines three major issues: (1) the presidential summit held
at Punta del Este in April of 1967, (2) its aftermath as the second list of trading concessions floundered and hurled ALALC toward its demise, and (3) the rise of subregional
organizations, which Magarios identifies as detrimental to the entire integration movement. Both volumes examine the role of GATT, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the IMF.
Magarios emphasizes that the efforts of Latin Americans were strictly economic,
rather than political, due to their governments insistence on maintaining full sovereignty. He maintains that the organization failed because the Latin American member
states each sought special commercial privileges, and they were thus unable to orient
themselves toward a common policy on trade.
Magarioss magisterial study is based heavily on the many articles he wrote for El
Pas, one of Montevideos daily newspapers. His conclusions are always terse. The author
deftly illustrates the complexity of these exasperating tariffs negotiations. He demonstrates that agents of monopoly capitalism and the political class micromanaged Latin
American economies via manipulation of ALALC/LAFTA, impairing the integration
movement. Indeed, this study details the perils of micromanaged trade. Magarioss
work will serve historians as the magnum opus of the contemporary integration movement for decades to come.
salvador rivera, State University of New York

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-036

Hispanic American Historical Review 2007 Shumway 618 9

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hispanic American Historical Review 2007 Shumway 618 9

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hispanic American Historical Review

Published by Duke University Press