Without exception the authors of comprehensive textbooks about Latin America now in print in English have written from the perspective of Spanish America. Although Brazil has not been neglected by Hispanist historians, most have approached her tentatively with a mixture of bemusement and condescension. How often have students been informed that Brazil had no printing press before 1808? How frequently has the “Brazilian case” been contrasted with the main stream of Spanish American history? For Bradford Bums, however, Brazil is no afterthought. As a Brazilianist he has ingeniously woven the Portuguese American experience into this engaging interpretative history.
To undertake an Aztecs to Allende history in only 235 pages requires nerve and imagination. Happily Professor Bums has both. He has made “the process of change from a traditional to a more modern society” the central theme. This choice has made it possible for him to explain the origins of colonial institutions, their growth, and their tenacious resistance in the face of pressures to modernize. “The huge estate, monoculture, rigid class structures, and other such inheritances from the sixteenth century have long since proved their resiliency and revealed their injustices and iniquities—and not least of all their inefficiency—but still they continue to exist, today often hidden beneath a deceiving veneer of modernity” (p. xii). It is an effective approach which helps tie together the complex strands of a half millenium of history. The theme also serves Professor Burns’s purpose to encourage U.S. policy makers to set aside their “paranoid obsession with communism” and to recognize that the struggle in Latin America is “between reformers and counterreformers” and not some extrapolation of the Cold War.
Professor Burns has managed the treatment of post-independence multinational histories through case studies which illuminate thematic problems. Early imperial Brazil, for example, is highlighted in the “Transfer and Legitimization of Power”; Uruguay under Batlie illustrates “The Middle Sectors in Politics”; and Guatemala under Arbenz and Bolivia’s MNR are used to demonstrate inconsistent U.S. responses to “The Revolutionary Option.”
Also in the text are mini-essays. The ones on nationalism and post World War II economic problems are gems of clarity. Women libbers and Black studies enthusiasts will find attention paid their interests. The most attractive stylistic enrichment in the narrative is Professor Burns’s skillful interweaving of statistics, social experiences, and literary trends. He has made extensive use of travellers’ accounts from Cieza de León to Kidder and Fletcher. There are, moreover, vivid descriptions of social conditions from writers like Graciliano Ramos (Barren Lives) and Oscar Lewis (A Death in the Sánchez Family).
The cognoscenti will find matters about which to quarrel. Some will note that Burns straddles the demographic controversy by estimating the 1492 population of the New World “between 15 million and 100 million.” Others will disagree with his glowing assessment of the institutionalized Mexican Revolution, only partly tempered by two sentences on current maldistribution of income. Still others will object that the discussion of change in so vast a region slips into the universal rhetoric of development. But the very provocation of debate which Burns’s interpretations will arouse should be a boon to instructors, students, and that mythological beast, the general reader.
