As all eyes turned on Central America in the early 1980s, it became clear that much of the history of these countries, essential to making sense of the contemporary crisis, had yet to be written. During the 1980s, concerned graduate students in North American universities began to focus on the small, heretofore “unimportant” nations of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, bringing to bear broader analytical questions about how popular groups shaped state formation and the expansion of the coffee, banana and sugar economies. This book presents a sampling of exciting new research authored by this younger generation based on hard slogging through local and national archives and on oral history. The results are often surprising: the articles poke holes in facile generalizations about the impact of agro-export economies, the forms and implications of foreign influence, and the nature of authoritarian regimes, among other subjects.
Through innovative, deeply researched case...
