Transnational Perspectives On The Conquest And Colonization Of Latin America

Ranging geographically from Tierra del Fuego to California and the Caribbean, and historically from early European sightings and the utopian projects of would-be colonizers to the present-day cultural politics of migrant communities and international relations, this volume presents a rich variety of case studies and scholarly perspectives on the interplay of diverse cultures in the Americas since the European conquest. Subjects covered include documentary and archaeological evidence of cultural interaction, the collection of native artifacts and the role of museums in the interpretation of indigenous traditions, the cultural impact of Christian missions and the representation of indigenous cultures in writings addressed to European readers, the development of Latin American artistic traditions and the incorporation of motifs from European classical antiquity into modern popular culture, the contribution of Afro-descendants to the cultural mix of Latin America and the erasure of the Hispanic heritage from cultural perceptions of California since the nineteenth century. By offering accessible and well-illustrated accounts of a wide range of particular cases, the volume aims to stimulate thinking about historical and methodological issues, which can be exploited in a teaching context as well as in the furtherance of research projects in a comparative and transnational framework.

In the seventeenth century, Catalina de Erauso, at age sixteen a renegade Basque nun, escaped from her convent and traveled to the New World, eventually reaching Peru. She became an outlaw and a crossdresser with a price on her head. Yet she ended her days absolved by both the King of Spain and the Pope, the latter of whom granted her permission to dress as a man for the remainder of her life. The Nun Ensign passed her final years guarding silver shipments on the Mexico City-Veracruz highway. The life of the Nun Ensign highlights not just her extraordinary life but also the opportunities seized by women in colonial Latin America. This book profiles the Nun Ensign and nine other women of colonial Latin America, offering an alternate method for understanding the region and its history. The ten figures span different ethnic, geographic, occupational, and class backgrounds. Through their stories, the reader comes away with an enriched understanding of colonial Latin American history.

Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas opens a window onto classical receptions across the Hispanophone, Lusophone, Francophone and Anglophone Americas during the early modern period, examining classical reception as a phenomenon in transhemispheric perspective for the first

This rich interdisciplinary collection of essays advocates and models a hemispheric approach to the study of the Americas. Taken together, the essays examine North and South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific as a broad region transcending both national boundaries and the dichotomy between North and South. In the volume’s substantial introduction, the editors, an anthropologist and a historian, explain the need to move beyond the paradigm of U.S. American Studies and Latin American Studies as two distinct fields. They point out the Cold War origins of area studies, and they note how many of the Americas’ most significant social formations have spanned borders if not continents: diverse and complex indigenous societies, European conquest and colonization, African slavery, Enlightenment-based independence movements, mass immigrations, and neoliberal economies. Scholars of literature, ethnic studies, and regional studies as well as of anthropology and history, the contributors focus on the Americas as a broadly conceived geographic, political, and cultural formation. Among the essays are explorations of the varied histories of African Americans’ presence in Mexican and Chicano communities, the different racial and class meanings that the Colombian musical genre cumbia assumes as it is absorbed across national borders, and the contrasting visions of anticolonial struggle embodied in the writings of two literary giants and national heroes: José Martí of Cuba and José Rizal of the Philippines. One contributor shows how a pidgin-language mixture of Japanese, Hawaiian, and English allowed second-generation Japanese immigrants to critique Hawaii’s plantation labor system as well as Japanese hierarchies of gender, generation, and race. Another examines the troubled history of U.S. gay and lesbian solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. Building on and moving beyond previous scholarship, this collection illuminates the productive intellectual and political lines of inquiry opened by a focus on the Americas. Contributors. Rachel Adams, Victor Bascara, John D. Blanco, Alyosha Goldstein, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, Ian Lekus, Caroline F. Levander, Susan Y. Najita, Rebecca Schreiber, Sandhya Shukla, Harilaos Stecopoulos, Michelle Stephens, Heidi Tinsman, Nick Turse, Rob Wilson

This volume explores several notable themes related to the economy in Latin America and offers insightful historical perspectives to understand national, regional, and global issues in the continent since the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. The collected essays focus on economic crises, the relationship of growth models to society and politics, the fluctuations of local economies, and regional protests. Other aspects of consideration in this area include the evolution of integrated regional trading blocs, the informal economy, and the destruction of the productive potential that has had a serious social, cultural, and environmental impact. The volume refuses to impose a traditional and uncritical linear historical narrative onto the reader and instead proposes an alternative interpretation of the past and its relation to the present.

This book reviews the recent evolutions of cities in the world according to entirely revised theoretical fundamentals of urban systems. It relies on a vision of cities sharing common dynamic features as co-evolving entities in complex systems. Systems of cities that are interdependent in their evolutions are characterized in the context of that dynamics. They are identified on various geographical scales—worldwide, regional, or national. Each system exhibits peculiarities that are related to its demographic, economic, and geopolitical history, and that are underlined by the systematic comparison of continental and regional urban systems, following a common template throughout the book. Multi-scale urban processes, whether local (one city), or within national systems (systems of cities), or linked to the expansion of transnational networks (towards global urban systems) throughout the world over the period 1950–2010 are deeply analyzed in 16 chapters. This global overview challenges urban governance for designing policies facing globalization and the subsequent ecological transition. The answers, which emerge from the diversity of situations in the world, add some reflections on and recommendations to the “urban system framework” proposed in the Habitat III agenda.

The Global Perspective of Urban Labor in Mexico City, 1910–1929 examines the global entanglement of the Mexican labor movement during the Mexican Revolution. It describes how global influences made their entry into labor culture through the cinema, the theater, and labor festivals as well as into the development of consumption patterns and advertisement. It further shows how the young labor movement constituted its discourse and invented its tradition at meetings and in the columns of newspapers. The local conditions constitute the framework for the examination of Mexican labor’s perspectives on and engagement with contemporary events of global significance. Thereby, this book demonstrates how workers turned to the global context in search of guidance and role models, embracing global developments and narratives. It also reveals the differentiations from this context in order to create a unique local identity. This approach allows new perspectives on the role of a neglected revolutionary actor and on the influence of global developments in a revolution that has been predominantly interpreted from a national point of view. It shows the way global ideas were brought to life in the framework of revolutionary Mexico City – providing new insights into the grand-narratives of Globalization and Revolution.

This book surveys the impact of the Monroe Doctrine on United States relations with Latin America, with a particular focus on the Caribbean Basin, since its proclamation in 1823. It explores the historical role of the Monroe Doctrine as the instrument to foreclose future European colonial adventures in the American hemisphere and to exclude from it any political system(s) deemed to be incompatible with the American political tradition. Modeste examines the elastic interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine to justify American territorial expansion and imperial ambitions, premised on a strategic question – the power controlling the Latin American/Caribbean trade routes and Sea Lines of Communication. Fundamental to the narrative is the linkage of the tenets of the Monroe Doctrine to contemporary local/regional crises where governments have applied extraordinary, extra-constitutional measures to exercise control or achieve political ends, mechanisms of peaceful conflict resolution failures, and subversive elements that use unorthodox methods to threaten the integrity of the state. Modeste also traces the transformation of the Monroe Doctrine from a unilateral policy declaration to a multilateral compact for the collective defence of the hemisphere.