“The History of Ideas in Twentieth-Century Latin America”—The session “The History of Ideas in Twentieth-Century Latin America” was chaired by Charles A. Hale (University of Iowa). The following papers were given: “Five Keys to Latin American Thought and Expression Since 1920,” by Richard M. Morse (The Wilson Center, Smithsonian Institution); “Science and Ideology in Latin America, 1920-1980,” by Thomas F. Glick (Boston University); “Economic Ideas and Ideologies in Contemporary Latin America,” by Joseph L. Love, Jr. (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana). Laura Mues de Schrenk (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) commented. Morse could not participate; his paper was read by Jeffrey D. Needell (The Wilson Center). All three papers were synopses or drafts of published or forthcoming chapters in the final volumes of the Cambridge History of Latin America.
Comparing ideas emanating from São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City, Morse identified “five moments” since 1920: (1) vanguardism (modernism in São Paulo), characterized by a cognitive assault on the contradictions of modernity; (2) the national-character essayists of the 1930s, such as Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Samuel Ramos, and Gilberto Freyre; (3) precision, consistency, and hemispheric generalization, mainly in the 1940s (a “moment” stimulated by the arrival of Spanish republican refugees, especially in Mexico, which saw the ascendancy of existentialism and phenomenology); (4) the development of professional social science, combining North American methods and the rise of Marxist ideology; and (5) the “marvelous realism” of the novelists since the 1960s. Morse identified a resulting tension between the last two in contemporary thought: the social scientists see dependence as the key to Latin American experience, while the realists see intransigence and resistance by societies to the imperatives of Western rationalism, capitalism, and political management. He suggested that this tension represents a latent split in Latin American intellectual endeavor since 1760, which has now become public.
Glick explored the interrelations of science and ideology in physics and mathematics in twentieth-century Latin America, noting that discussion and evaluation of the place of science in society preceded the development of scientific institutions and science policy. Glick focused first on the reception of relativity in various countries, noting that it found adherents on both the political right and left. The same was true with the development of nuclear physics, particularly in Argentina. An extreme case of the entanglement of pure science and political ideology arose in Argentina in 1978, when the new math was condemned as dangerous by the military junta. Glick next turned to the dependentista critique of basic, as opposed to applied, research, citing the example of Venezuela in the 1970s. Glick concluded that the entanglement of science and ideology in contemporary Latin America supports the view that there is no value-free science, though the pathological antiscientism of the extreme right tends to suggest a congruence between the scientific ethos and political democracy.
Love treated the relationship between economic theory and policy since 1930, focusing particularly on the origins and development of the doctrines of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) and subsequent “dependency theory.” He noted at the outset that the central issue addressed by theory and ideology was industrialization, and he identified the early advocates of industry as the industrialists themselves, particularly in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. He accorded particular significance to the influence of Mihail Manoilescu, the Romanian economist and ideologue of corporatism, especially in Brazil. The paper next treated at length the career of Raúl Prehisch, the founder of ECLA, and his “center-periphery” thesis pertaining to Latin American underdevelopment. Love also dealt with the ideas of Celso Furtado and other structuralists, and emphasized the natural transition from the ECLA advocacy of industrialization to the development of dependency theory. Love concluded with a discussion of dependency theory, ranging from the ideas of Fernando Henrique Cardoso to those of André Gunder Frank, noting its uniqueness among “Latin American ideas” for its international influence.
Mues de Schrenk’s comment raised philosophical issues, pertaining particularly to Love’s paper, and questioned the meaning of terms such as “dependency,” “development,” and “underdevelopment.” She also suggested, in relation to Glick’s paper, that science could be and was used as a tool in the search for national identity.
C. A. H.
“Food Politics”—“Food Politics” was chaired by Enrique Mayer (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana), and featured three papers: “Food and Colonial Politics: An Overview,” by John C. Super (West Virginia University), “Twentieth-Century Food Policies in Chile,” by Thomas C. Wright (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), and “The Widening Chasm: Diet and Class,” by Vincent Peloso (Howard University).
Super showed that shortages and insufficiencies were not problems in colonial times. The introduction of European foods blended with local food resources. Indians readily accepted grains such as wheat and barley, barnyard animals, and cattle. Meat became an important part of Latin American diets. Settlers incorporated Indian foods, though European preferences and eating habits were maintained and reinforced distinctions between classes. Selective pressures diminished the importance of some indigenous foods, while manioc, maize, and potatoes continued to be important staples, along with rice and European grains. Everyone gained from this blending of foods. Long-term famine, food shortages, and hunger were not problems that affected populations of Spanish and Portuguese colonies during the first three centuries after conquest. Throughout the colonial and early republican periods, topics addressed by food policies had more to do with distribution than with production. Much of the regulation and agitation that existed in Latin American cities determined the incomes, economic space, and activity patterns of the lower urban classes who were engaged in food-related trades.
Wright’s paper added another dimension of the discussion that has constantly influenced food policies since cities were established. Provisioning problems that caused food shortages occurred occasionally in twentieth-century Chile, setting a pattern of urban unrest that forced authorities to intervene. Effective urban agitation, at first against scarcities but more often about the rising cost of food, has been a constant in Latin America. Urban unrest, or the threat of it, has been the catalyst to action for policy makers, and food served as an early issue around which the masses have mobilized.
Peloso described the nineteenth-century pattern of regional and class diets of Lima and other regions of Peru. The rich ate magnificently. The poorer segments also ate abundantly and well, varying their meals with seasonally available fruits and with foods specific to fiestas that marked the ritual calendar. The highland Indian diet was blander and more monotonous, but still nutritious. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, there were signs of coming difficulties. Rising prices were forcing the lower classes to curtail variety in their diet and to complain about low wages. Periodic shortages of specific staples led to discussions about the great proportions of land devoted to export production of sugar and cotton at the expense of food production. Moreover, laborers on these plantations ate meagerly and complained constantly, particularly the Chinese indentured laborers. The mid-1800s mark the beginning of the breakdown of the system that had, by and large, served the colonies well for such a long time. Latin America’s twin causes of hunger, insufficient food production and incomes too low for poor families to eat, were beginning to make their appearance.
Mayer commented on the larger context of food policies. Since cities were and are the seats of colonial power, elite residence, capital accumulation, and political agitation, cities have always favored themselves in terms of food politics. Early on, the colonial system set the urban bias of agricultural policies. Broadly sketched, it has the following elements: 1) price controls in the interests of the urban consumers rather than the producer; 2) the preference, in general, to favor lower prices for foods over higher wages as a consistent policy that ensured some kind of income stability to urban poor, but at the expense of rural producers; 3) the relative tendency of city authorities to buckle under urban pressures to enact favorable urban food policies, in contrast to a readiness and fierce will to repress rural unrest and mobilization; 4) incentives used rarely to induce producers to increase output in the countryside, and, if so, going mostly to organized lobbies of privileged producers in special areas or in unusual circumstances. The existing urban bias has also been used since the 1930s as an incentive toward industrialization, on the assumption that a cheap urban industrial labor force would provide the basis of Latin America’s economic development—to be supported by the agricultural sector.
In broad terms, and with the exception of export production, food policies have not encouraged the development of a prosperous farmer class, technological innovation, or expansion of productivity for a very long period of time in Latin America. When compared to wealth accumulated in export agricultural production, food production lor local use rarely has made anybody wealthy. Yet, surprisingly, these policies nevertheless worked well for a long time.
E. M.
“Conquest, Religion, and Revolt: Spaniards and Indians in the Andes and the Borderlands”—The session “Conquest, Religion, and Revolt: Spaniards and Indians in the Andes and the Borderlands” met on December 29, 1986. Richard C. Trexler (State University of New York, Binghamton) chaired the session. Sabine G. MacCormack (Stanford University) spoke on “Pachacuti: Miracles, Punishments and Last Judgment. Visionary Past and Prophetic Future in Early Colonial Peru.” Ramón A. Gutiérrez (University of California, San Diego) presented a talk on “Visionaries, Ecstatic Rapture, and Death: A Reexamination of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt.”
In her paper, MacCormack sought to define an Andean notion of “turns” or “revolts” in history, which in her view conflated notions separate in the European mind: miraculous events, divine punishments, and divine judgments. That notion of “paehacuti” allowed the Incas both to incorporate the Spanish conquest into an Andean mental framework, and to imagine a revolt in which the Iberians might again be excluded from Andean history. Gutiérrez likewise showed how the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico incorporated Spanish groups and behavior into their own cosmological and social notions, so as to preserve the potential for revolt. Trexler’s comments emphasized the authors’ firm grasp of European intellectual traditions and their theoretical sophistication. The session was attended by perhaps 50 persons, and the discussion was very lively.
R. C. T.
“Historical Perspectives on Latin American Foreign Indebtedness”— Charles Lipson (University of Chicago) chaired the session on “Historical Perspectives on Latin American Foreign Indebtedness,” featuring papers by Michael Monteon (University of California, San Diego), Barbara Stallings (Un iversity of Wisconsin, Madison), and Paul Drake (University of California, San Diego). The three papers formed a tightly integrated group dealing with U. S. lendings to Latin America in the 1920s and 1970s and repayments problems in the 1930s and 1980s. Drake, in a chapter from his forthcoming book on Edwin Walter Kemmerer, analyzed Kemmerer’s consulting missions to Andean governments in the 1920s. In each country, the “Money Doctor” recommended new laws and institutions, including adherence to the gold standard and the establishment of central banking—recommendations that were quickly adopted and that led, as predicted, to capital inflows. These recommendations, which Drake compared to recent advice from the International Monetary Fund, won substantial support from urban elites, both economic and governmental. Monteón’s paper dealt with subsequent defaults on these foreign loans, particularly in Chile, Brazil, and Mexico, and with the divergent responses among lending countries. According to Monteón, “What began as a ‘debt crisis’ in 1930-31 became an exchange crisis and then a long-term series of negotiations over the structure of trade.” There has been no such transformation in the debate over modern debt, and few explicit links have been made between trade and finance. The reason, according to Monteón, is that no modern government has stepped forward, as did France and Germany in the 1930s, to play the role of spoiler. Stallings’s paper also offered explicit comparisons between earlier lending and modern debt problems. She summarized the extensive literature on nineteenth-century British portfolio investment, and compared it with U.S. lending in the 1920s and 1970s. While noting crucial differences in both the supply and demand for credit in the 1920s and 1970s, she also stressed the cyclical character of all modern lending and the importance of regressive shifts in income distribution as a source of net savings for foreign loans.
C. L.
“Populism in Brazil: A Reassessment and Look into the Future”—The session on “Populism in Brazil: A Reassessment and Look into the Future” was chaired by Thomas Skidmore (University of Wisconsin). John French (Utah State University, Logan) presented a paper on “The Rise of Adhemarista Populism in São Paulo,” and Michael Conniff (University of New Mexico) presented one entitled “Toward a Collective Biography: Seven Leading Populist Politicians.” Unforeseen circumstances prevented two invited Brazilian scholars from participating.
John French analyzed the electoral politics surrounding the election of Adhemar de Barros to the governorship of São Paulo in January 1947. The postwar years had seen a burst of Communist party activity after its strict repression during the 1937-45 dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas. The Communists had sufficient electoral strength to attract Adhemar into an electoral alliance. Adhemar won, but only months later the Communists were driven from politics in a wave of repression coordinated by the federal government. French emphasized how Adhemar continued to cultivate the left as he built the base for his personalistic party which has come to be seen as a prime case of “populism.” French stressed the pragmatic, short-term tactics Adhemar used to maintain the cross-class base for his electoral victories. Much can be learned, in French’s view, from careful study of the give and take of urban polities in Brazil’s industrial heartland.
Michael Conniff presented a progress report on his research into six leading populists. By comparing the six to two control groups (one consisting of three other prominent politicians and the other group a sample of 250 politicians from that era), Conniff had discovered that the populists: (1) entered politics ten years earlier than their cohort; (2) were all born in rural areas and most had spent their youth there; (3) had no military training, as against a third of the sample which did; (4) graduated from professional faculties in years when few other graduates were entering politics. The populists’ political style was characterized by: (1) turning politics into a public drama; (2) concentration on big-city politics; and (3) lack of any strong party allegiance. Conniff considered it an open question whether recent Brazilian politics have brought back the populists, especially in the elections of Jânio Quadros, Leonel Brizola, and Miguel Arraes. Conniff emphasized the tentative nature of his results, which he expected to refine during his upcoming six months of research in Brazil.
Skidmore offered a brief commentary, in the absence of the announced commentator. He stressed that the return of democratic politics in Brazil has made the past patterns of populism highly relevant again. As both papers demonstrated, our understanding of Brazilian politics will undoubtedly be deepened by research in a field too often underestimated—electoral behavior. This is especially true for working-class voters, whose electoral preferences were so important in São Paulo in 1946-47 and equally important in the careers of the politicians being studied by Conniff.
The audience of 30 posed a number of questions, leading to a lively discussion.
T. E. S.
“The Hispanic World in the Early Modern Period: In Memory of Charles Gibson”—The session “The Hispanic World in the Early Modern Period: In Memory of Charles Gibson” met on December 30, 1986. An attentive audience of perhaps 150 was present. James Lockhart (University of California, Los Angeles), in “Charles Gibson, the Ethnohistorian,” pointed to a long development from Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century to The Aztecs under Spanish Rule as a progression from a Spanish-centered view to an Indian-centered one. Gibson’s work has been seminal for later studies of the hacienda, labor, Indian society, and Indian town government. The ingredient added since is study of documents in Nahuatl. Rebecca Scott (University of Michigan), in “Stress and Resilience in Relations of Subordination: Extending the Logie of The Aztecs under Spanish Rule,” indicated that the method is universal and gave the absorption of freed slaves into free society as a particularly apt ease. William Christian, an independent scholar living in Spain, in “Reflections on Charles Gibson’s Work on Spain,” maintained that although the project encountered many difficulties and was interrupted by death, a number of articles were published on limited local themes. Gibson’s success in research was due to a favorable family heritage, his college education, and careful taking of notes.
Discussion by the audience was marked by a lengthy and cogent series of comments by William Taylor (University of Virginia) and by the intervention of the chairman, Woodrow Borah (University of California, Berkeley). Emphasis emerged through the discussion on the influence of Gibson’s teachers, Gilbert and Kubler, for the latter of whom Gibson served as field assistant for Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century, and on Gibson’s relation to the school of the Annales. Since Gibson read widely in European history as an undergraduate, he almost certainly became conversant with the ideas of the founders of the school.
W. B.
COMMITTEE REPORTS
Committee on Colonial Studies—Lyman Johnson presided over the Committee on Colonial Studies; Asunción Lavrin was the secretary and recorder; and Dauril Alden spoke on “Basta, Basta; Reflections on Time Spent in the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu.”
As the title of his talk suggested, Alden shared with his audience a retrospective look on the travails and successes of his comprehensive study of the Society of Jesus in the Portuguese Empire, 1541-1808. Noting that he has shifted from being a “colonialist” to an “imperialist,” Alden explained this change as motivated by three key reasons: his awareness that “by mideighteenth century the Portuguese government considered the activities of the Society of Jesus to be its most critical imperial problem”; the interconnection of all the overseas components of the Jesuit enterprises; and the relevance of their enterprises within Portugal to their activities abroad. This triple-tiered justification led him to engage in a study which will result in a global two-volume work, one volume of which is nearly finished.
Alden summarized the intriguing history of the Archivum Romanum since its inception as a repository for the first materials related to the Society of Jesus up to the present. The archival moves, threats to its materials, losses of manuscripts, and eventual consolidation as the ultimate repository of Jesuitic history supplied the background for a discussion of the insights provided by its holdings. Of special interest for this project were the papers of the five Assistancies, including that of Portugal; materials on the operating scope of the society; and the collections directly related to the history of the order, especially works written by Jesuits themselves. These materials have allowed Alden to write on themes such as an extensive prosopographic treatment of the personnel of the society in the Portuguese empire; their financial network of bequests and acquisitions, the management of Jesuit estates, and their imperial interconnections; and a diachronic treatment of the conflicts between the society and the Portuguese crown. The Societatis Iesu materials furnished key details on a number of subthemes, such as disputes among Jesuit houses in the four continents; Jesuit preoccupation with their public image and the nature of their assumed “revolutionary” ideas; and empirical data on diet and cost of foodstuffs, to name a few. This description of the breadth of the sources and their manifold historical research potential informed the audience of the wealth of materials that may be of use for future projects. It also explained the weariness of Alden, who, after a decade and a half of work on the Jesuits, felt that he had earned the friendly pat of St. Ignatius Loyola on his shoulder, with the admonition of a “Basta, basta”: enough of that and back to writing the second volume.
Twenty-five scholars listened to Alden’s presentation and questioned him on some of the methodological and interpretive consequences of his research, such as: the nature of the information in some printed sources, such as the Cartas Annas, as compared to other archival materials; the variety of languages required to deal with the Society’s archives; the possibility of new topics of research, and future revision of such important topics as the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Iberian nations and their colonial empires.
A. L.
Committee on Mexican Studies—Silvia Arrom (Indiana University) chaired the meeting, which was attended by a standing-room-only crowd of 40. The keynote speaker, John Coatsworth (University of Chicago), presented a provocative paper on “Mexican Economic Historiography.” Reviewing the last decade of publications and incorporating his new research, Coatsworth offered a bold overview of four centuries of Mexican economic performance. He argued that the gap between the Mexican and U.S. economies (whose productivity has remained at about 1 :8 since 1867) resulted not from imperialism and dependency in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but from declining productivity in the colonial and early independence periods. His study of per capita production sustains Woodrow Borah’s theory of the seventeenth-century depression and challenges the view of eighteenth-century progress, for even in the mining sector unit costs rose more than output. Coatsworth cautioned, however, that definitive conclusions require more research, and he called for collective investigations especially on prices, wages, and interest rates. The audience joined in a lively discussion, highlighted by comments from Borah and John TePaske, authors of milestone works in Mexican economic historiography.
S. M. A.
Caribe-Centro America Committee—In convening the meeting, Chairman Kenneth J. Grieb (University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh) called the attention of the members to the positive response to the Research Guide to Central America and the Caribbean, a joint committee project of which he served as editor-in-chief. He reported that the University of Wisconsin Press was pleased with initial sales of the volume, and reported positive responses. Grieb shared several reviews of the volume from library journals with the committee members.
John Patrick Bell (Indiana University, Fort Wayne) presented a paper entitled “The Costa Rican Revolutionary Junta and the Expunction of the Old Regime.” Discussing the origins of the junta, Bell focused on the conflicting aspirations of the various groups which participated in the 1948 revolution, noting a division among reformers, generally the supporters of José Figueres Ferrer and his Social Democratic party, and those wishing to return to the good old days, principally the supporters of Otilio Ulate Blanco and the National Union party. The reformers wished to bring about a real transformation in Costa Rican society, and hence emphasized the necessity of a temporary government with power to enact reform, while the supporters of President-Elect Ulate essentially sought to undo the changes of the regimes of Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia and Teodoro Picado, and return to the era of calm which had characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, it could be said that the followers of Figueres were mainly concerned with the leadership corruption of the old regime, while the followers of Ulate were concerned with the changes fostered by the preceding one. In this sense, the followers of Figueres sought to purge the leaders of the previous regime but to keep and carry on their program, while the followers of Ulate sought to purge the reforms. Given this split in the revolutionary movement, Bell emphasized the importance of the Figueres-Ulate pact, establishing the revolutionary junta and setting limits on its tenure. He stressed the changes brought about by the junta, focusing especially on the bank nationalization, the abolition of the army, and the establishment of special tribunals to prosecute members of the previous regime. He emphasized the procedure of the tribunals, in which, in effect, an individual once accused was compelled to prove his or her innocence. He observed that this process showed a degree of persecution and change in Costa Rica, and hence that there was indeed change even in a relatively moderate revolution.
Commenting on the paper, Richard V. Salisbury (Western Kentucky University) raised the question of just how revolutionary the Costa Rican upheaval was, citing various definitions of revolution and considering their appropriateness to the Costa Rican case. He suggested that the principal change was the elimination of the army, adding that in this process Costa Rica “destroyed a word,” since the police force which remained did indeed become a military establishment to some degree, and the army which it replaced was underequipped, undertrained, and very small in size. He suggested that the revolution in this sense was moderate, reflecting Costa Rican preferences. He noted that there were indeed real changes in Costa Rica resulting from the revolution, but that these were long-range changes in areas such as health care delivery which drastically changed the standards of health in the country. An extensive discussion followed, with members of the audience reacting to the paper and the commentary, and exchanging viewpoints with Bell and Salisbury. All agreed on the importance of the Costa Rican revolution as a field of study, and its utility in comparative study of other revolutions in Latin America.
K. J. G.
