Conference on Latin American History Awards 1995
Distinguished Service Award
John Jay TePaske
Herbert E. Bolton Memorial Prize
Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico, Cambridge University Press, 1994
Honorable Mention: R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720, University of Wisconsin Press, 1994
Honorable Mention: David McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 1760-1940, Stanford University Press, 1994
Howard Cline Memorial Prize
David Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660-1880, University of Nebraska Press, 1994
Honorable Mention: John Manuel Monteiro, Negros da terra: indios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1994
Conference on Latin American History Prize
Lauren Derby, “Haitians, Magic, and Money: Raza and Society in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands, 1900-1937,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36:3, July 1994
Honorable Mention: Rebecca Scott, “Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of Cane: Cuba, Brazil, and Louisiana After Emancipation,” American Historical Review 99:1, February 1994
James A. Robertson Prize
Marc Edelman and Mitchell A. Seligson, “Land Inequality: A Comparison of Census Data and Property Records in Twentieth-Century Southern Costa Rica,” HAHR 74:3, August 1994
Honorable Mention: Karen Vieira Powers, “The Battle for Bodies and Souls in the Colonial North Andes: Intraecclesiastical Struggles and the Politics of Migration,” HAHR 75:1, February 1995
Lydia Cabrera Award
Joseph Carroll Dorsey, Hamilton College, “Troubled Tao: Self, Otherness, and Dissidence Among Chinese Workers in Nineteenth-Century Cuba”
Tibesar Prize
B. J. Barickman, “ ‘Tame Indians,’ ‘Wild Heathens,’ and Settlers in Southern Bahia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” The Americas 51:3, January 1995
James R. Scobie Memorial Award
Jadwiga Pieper, Rutgers University, “The Politics of Fertility Regulation in Chile”
Session Reports
Beyond Indians and the State: Hegemony, Negotiation, Coercion, and State Formation in Guatemala’s Western Highlands
This panel provided a provocative cross-section of work being done in Guatemala on the interconnected issues of regionalism, nationbuilding, and identity. The breadth and depth of the presentations on these phenomena marked a new florescence in a field that other Latin Americanists often consider peripheral. The panelists covered a range of topics, from the formation of the region of “Los Altos” in the eighteenth century to the contrasting trajectories of distinct regions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All the papers, however, called for a regional or subnational perspective as a corrective to the tradition of historia capitaleña, which has so dominated the reconstruction of the nation’s past.
In a series of short papers on works in progress, each panelist explored how centrifugal and centripetal forces affected the Guatemalan state across time. Jorge Arturo Taracena (University of Costa Rica, San José) presented a synthetic overview of the formation of “Los Altos” in western Guatemala as a self-conscious region in opposition to the national state centered in Guatemala City. Jorge González Alzate (Grinnell College), in his paper, explored similar themes from his recently completed dissertation on the topic, with an emphasis on the rise of the region in the century before the Liberal revolt of 1871, which marked the region’s conquest of the nation-state.
Gregory Grandin (Yale University) charted the effects of these transformations on the indigenous elites of Quetzaltenango and discussed some of the theoretical and historiographical implications of his work. Finally, Todd Little-Siebold (Lewis and Clark College) brought a comparative regional perspective to the panel by comparing the trajectories of the nation’s Occidente and Oriente. From this vantage point he argued that the Liberals who ruled Guatemala from 1871 to 1945 failed to construct an effective state apparatus, and political change was still heavily conditioned by local and regional factors even at midcentury.
The able questions of the chair, Gilbert M. Joseph (Yale University), enriched the dialogue among the panelists and provoked discussion from the audience. His insightful comments on the issues of state formation from a Mexicanist’s perspective helped provide a broad discussion of the theoretical issues involved in this cluster of papers.
Todd Little-Siebold
Body, Sex, Mind: The Language of Mental Health in Argentina from Lombroso to Freud
This panel, chaired by Lyman L. Johnson (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), attracted an audience of more than 20. María Gabriela Nouzeilles of Duke University’s Department of Romance Studies offered a stimulating commentary that led to a lively discussion among panel members and the audience.
Kristin Ruggiero (Harvard University), in her paper, “Misdirected Passions in Late Nineteenth-Century Argentina,” analyzed the discourse on “misdirected” human passions as revealed in criminal dossiers. She suggested that passion played an important role in the construction of the state. The goal of finding a way to accommodate natural passions in a scientific, rational state project achieved a special significance in a new, postcolonial country such as Argentina. The effort to define amorphous concepts such as passion formed part of the hegemonic, “nationist” project of the Argentine state. Argentina’s study of passion, occurring as it did in a country molded by massive European immigration, gave a unique perspective to the international scientific, secular discourse on the emotions. Ruggiero concluded that the state’s involvement with emotive concepts such as passion helped create a more intrusive state with expanded powers of social control.
Fernando Monge (Harvard University) spoke on “Prostitutes in the Social Parade in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Port Cities,” discussing the meaning and function of prostitution in the process of constructing the social order of Buenos Aires. He found striking continuity in the way prostitution was considered by elites and, indeed, the whole society during this period. The role of prostitution in Buenos Aires and in Argentine society did change, but an archaic pattern of social relations continued to affect prostitution in Porteño society. At the beginning of the twentieth century, economic and demographic developments concealed a rather traditional moral order rooted in the colonial experience. Monge argued that municipal authorities, judicial and police officers, and the gente decente increasingly justified their responses to prostitution with reference to the theories of Lombroso and Freud, but that actual policies tended to confirm the social beliefs of elite and governing groups.
The final paper was presented by Lila Caimari (Mercy College), “Whose Criminals Are These? Church, State, and Patronatos and the Rehabilitation of Female Convicts (Buenos Aires, 1890-1970).” She asserted that turn-of-the-century Argentine political leaders were deeply influenced by new scientific ideas about the origin and treatment of criminality developed by the Italian positivist school of criminology. Enforcement of new principles, such as individualized penalties and the use of work in rehabilitation, was rather uneven. From 1890 to as late as 1970, female convicts were sent to prisons controlled by a religious order that was not associated with those new approaches.
Caimari argued that official perceptions of female offenders and their rehabilitation remained deeply influenced by traditional assumptions about gender, crime, and work, despite the government’s well-known zeal for secularization and anticlerical attitude. Those assumptions were demonstrated by the state’s reluctance to make convicted women serve out their prison sentences, by its refusal to spend more than a token amount of money on female prisons, and by the lack of interest in enforcing work discipline. Only in the 1970s, when the populations of these prisons shifted from poor domestic workers accused of petty theft to a wave of young women accused of subversive political activism, were female correctional institutions placed under the control of the state.
Lyman L. Johnson
Citizenship and Deviance in Latin America
The papers presented at this session represented some of the exciting new work currently being done on the history of crime in Latin America. Chair Robert Buffington (St. John’s University) gave a brief presentation, “Interrogating Criminological Discourse,” which addressed some of the controversy surrounding discourse analysis as a legitimate tool for historical investigation and suggested some methods to moderate as well as broaden its usefulness to scholars studying the history of crime.
The other panelists addressed these issues in specific historical contexts. Ricardo D. Salvatore (Universidad Torcuato di Tella), in his paper, “Against Property and Against the State: The Crimes of Poor ‘Paisanos’ in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires,” argued that the Argentine countryside during the Rosas years was more peaceful than previously supposed; local officials dealt with most crimes informally. He also provided insights into the state’s role in criminalizing behavior for its own ends (to provide troops for the army) and in defining criminal types.
Pablo Piccato (University of Texas, Austin), in “Mexico City Criminals: Between Social Engineering and Popular Culture,” explored how prisoners manipulated the “subjectivities” imposed by prison officials to suit their own interests, especially after the Revolution. Carlos Aguirre (University of Minnesota), in “Changing Images of Crime and Criminals in Modern Lima,” examined the impact of scientific criminology on elite Peruvian attitudes toward Indian criminality. He argued that in spite of a racist legacy, most Peruvian criminologists favored an environmental explanation for criminal behavior that favored social over biological causes.
Katherine Bliss (University of Chicago), in “Prostitutes and Mothers: Gender and Citizenship in Post-Revolutionary Mexico,” investigated how Mexico City prostitutes turned revolutionary, pro-family rhetoric on its head: they argued, as mothers and as informal protectors of mothers (providing an outlet for husbands who kept their wives at home), for their own rights as revolutionary citizens. The audience seemed very receptive to the panel, asked penetrating questions, and offered numerous helpful suggestions and correctives.
Robert Buffington
Citizenship and Popular Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America: Colombian Perspectives
Gary Long (Methodist College) spoke on “Radical Artisans in Latin America: The Case of Colombia in the 1930s,” examining the links between partisan Liberal identity (as evidenced by participation in past civil wars) and radical ideology and politics (in particular, a commitment to what Long called “producer republicanism”) among Colombian workers —particularly artisans, a group of enduring importance in Colombian history. Workers invoked, with some success (especially between 1930 and 1936), their Liberal credentials to direct the incipient transformation of their party into something more attuned to their class interests.
Mary Roldan (Cornell University) spoke on “Inversion, Transgression, and Contagion: Citizenship, Nation, and the Body Politic in Colombia, 1900-1930.” Critically appropriating Foucault and others, Roldan dissected two influential essays by elite Antioqueños: Tulio Ospina’s “Protocolo hispanoamericano de urbanidad y el buen tono and Argemira Sánchez Libro del ciudadano.” Both texts, Roldan argued, corporealize society and its tensions —to be resolved through simple (and largely aesthetic) hygiene for Ospina; by a more thoroughgoing “medical” therapy for Sánchez. Roldan saw further evidence of ongoing “pathologization and regulation of the body” as social control strategy in the language and substance of late-1930s revisions to the national criminal code.
The commentator, Charles W. Bergquist (University of Washington), praised both papers for their fresh insights into the period and pointed out their compatibility despite divergent theoretical underpinnings. In Long’s paper, Bergquist called attention to the (probably fatal) tensions inherent in “producer republicanism.” He also pointed out the apparent ease with which reactionary Liberals (led by Eduardo Santos) reversed the gains of Liberal workers after 1936. Partisan mystique and solidarity, he implied, might be debilitating as well as empowering in the pursuit of class interests.
For Roldan’s paper, Bergquist suggested that the “body as trope” might have deeper roots in Colombian history (back to the civil wars of the 1800s, at least) rather than being an overdetermined product of capitalist development, as suggested by the theorists Roldan cited. He also questioned whether working people —of the sort analyzed, and ultimately “pathologized,” in this discourse —bought into it. Then followed a brief but lively round of questions and observations from the 25 audience members.
Richard Stoller
Divergent Paths to Ethnic and Social Mobility in Northern New Spain
An interested audience of 23 attended this early morning session, which was chaired by Charles Cutter (Purdue University). Susan M. Deeds (Northern Arizona University) drew from her extensive ongoing research and explored in her paper two distinct modes of cultural transformation among the Acaxees, Xiximes, Conchos, Tepehuanes, and Tarahumaras of Nueva Vizcaya during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A number of variables —degree and timing of population decline, proximity to Spanish settlement, demands for labor, and others—helped determine the two paths of cultural reconfiguration. One of these paths led to racial or cultural mestizaje for the first three groups. The other path, exemplified best in the Tarahumaras, led away from the Hispanic world, toward “ethnogenesis”—the creation of a new identity that “effectively developed a counterhegemonic code or ideology,” which in turn reinforced this cultural distance.
The presentation by José Cuello (Wayne State University), lavishly illustrated with graphs and tables, centered on the question of racial passing (or racial drift and variability) in late eighteenth-century Saltillo. Cuello analyzed in detail three late colonial censuses and found considerable racial variability and drift, usually at two stages in life. For Cuello, the most significant (though frequently overlooked) form of drift occurred during infancy, in the “practice of incorporating tertiary populations into the primary racial groups.” The second form involved “social passing in adulthood from an established identity to a new one.” Insisting that Saltillo “was governed by a well-ordered set of racial values driven by the social primacy of the Spanish identity,” Cuello concluded that the sistema de castas, “rather than being in a state of disintegration, was functioning vigorously” at the end of the colonial period.
Cynthia Radding (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) skillfully and accurately highlighted the major points of the two presentations and posed several questions designed to move the debate forward. The first of these dealt with the notion of calidad. She urged that, in addition to race and class, we consider property (wealth) in determining calidad and suggested that we examine “relational social networks,” as Douglas Cope has done for Mexico City, the better to understand the dynamics of colonial society. As a way to link the two presentations, Radding also brought up the concept of auterité, defining self and other, as a means of unraveling questions of identity, mobility, variability, and change.
The floor was then opened to the audience, and a beneficial exchange of views occupied the remainder of the allotted time. Mary Karasch pointed out that on the colonial Brazilian frontier, the term calidad was a descriptor for the higher bureaucracy. Cope questioned Cuello on the manner in which the racial labeling was done in Saltillo (how and by whom). Cuello responded that various officials compiled the data and that the enumerators often struggled with the ambiguities of racial categorization.
Leslie Offutt asked if Cuello was looking only at urban Saltillo or if he also had considered the rural areas. Cuello responded that he had considered both but that he had failed to distinguish an urban-rural dichotomy. Offut then asked whether Cuello had made any distinctions among the several barrios of the city, to which Cuello replied that he had not, but conceded that such an approach might be fruitful. Addressing the issue of “downward mobility,” Vincent Peloso asked why a census taker would downgrade someone’s calidad. Cuello answered that relatively few cases of this exist, but posited that identities were constantly being negotiated.
Finally, Jane Landers expressed her concerns over the use of the term ethnogenesis. What does it mean? Since virtually nothing is known about these groups before contact, how can one determine the degree of change under the colonial order? Susan Deeds agreed that we do not know much about the precontact period but pointed out that the “ethnogenesis” to which she referred clearly was the result of colonial duress, and that new “tribal” identities (such as the Tarahumaras’) were shaped through contacts with Spanish colonialism. Cynthia Radding further suggested nuances in how Spanish culture often forged an oppositional identity among indigenous groups.
Charles Cutter
Economic, Social, and Political Historiography of the Transition from Colonial to National Latin America
The panel participants included Richard J. Salvucci (Trinity University), Victor M. Uribe (Florida International University), and Susan M. Socolow (Emory University). The panel was chaired by Mark D. Szuchman (FIU), and comments were presented by Szuchman and Eric Van Young (University of California, San Diego).
Salvucci’s paper, “Continuity and Change in Latin American Economic History, 1780-1850, outlined the conceptual and methodological debates surrounding Latin America’s record in achieving export-led growth. Salvucci focused especially on the different results that emanate from two competing analytical frameworks: structural analysis, and the approach that looks into the market relationships between supply and demand in the realm of commodity goods. Salvucci characterized Latin America’s economy since the eighteenth century with the term Dutch disease. This is the condition that obtains, first, from growth in the export sector involving natural resources, and second, from the consequent growth in the supply of foreign exchange at rates that outstrip domestic demand for those goods. The result is a much higher demand for imports, now made cheaper by an overvalued currency. In the end, the higher exchange rate discourages other exports. Salvucci argued that “Dutch disease” represents an economic condition that crossed the boundaries between the colonial and the national eras, spanning the period from 1780 to 1850. Thus it was experienced in various periods of export-led growth, including the silver boom of late-eighteenth-century Mexico and the guano-led boom in Peru in the 1840s.
Unfortunately, these export booms were unable to transmit gains either to the wider economy or to the export sectors themselves. Finding the analytical framework of dependency models inadequate in explaining these processes, Salvucci argued on behalf of models oriented toward supply and demand relations and institutional factors, which he saw as having considerable potential for empirical findings in the areas of political risk, reduced capital formation, and lagging growth. The focus on terms of trade, by contrast, he considered incapable of providing sound explanations based on empirical data.
Victor Uribe’s presentation concentrated on recent Latin American historiography. His paper, “Continuities and Change in Latin American Political History, 1780–1850,” offered a wide-ranging view of the state of the literature. It opened with titles covering the colonial era and issues such as the bureaucracy and the colonial state, the Bourbon Reforms, and popular mobilization. For the postindependence period, the topics included the analyses of disaggregated power and instability, the nature of political leadership and institutional frameworks, nation building and electoral processes, and finally, political culture and identity.
Uribe noted the still-considerable weight given to the elites by scholars of Latin American politics who study this middle period linking the colonial and national eras. He called for transcending the formal bases of politics and the elite-centered nature of the traditional research, partly by assigning a greater role to the social conditions that underlay different Latin American regions. This would provide a greater understanding of the larger dimensions of Latin American politics. At the same time, recent scholarship on elections must be expanded; elections have been very fruitfully explored in the recent past, but only by a few scholars. Finally, Uribe pointed to the facile relationship with which historians equate nationbuilding and statebuilding. He noted that the studies that portray themselves as analyses of nationbuilding fail to take up the matters of political culture and constituencies, thereby ending up, in reality, as studies of statebuilding.
Susan Socolow, in her presentation, “Continuity and Change in Latin American Social History, 1780-1850,” also offered a critical overview of the recent literature. She focused on three issues: the periodization schema, as indicated by the theme of the panel; the recent works that have used this temporal framework; and the avenues for further research. The asserted cohesion of the century that spanned the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s, Socolow noted, reflects political developments in Western Europe, framed by the Enlightenment at the start and the revolutions of 1848 at the end. She therefore raised the question of how well this temporal framework fits the historical developments experienced in Latin America.
On a larger scale, Socolow brought up the issue of periodization in general. What frameworks does it serve? Whose viewpoints does it highlight? How valid does it remain from one generation of historians to another? Socolow suggested that the temporal framework of the panel itself reflected more the themes of scholarly conferences with papers that subsequently appeared in published proceedings. She pointed to problems with both the starting and ending points of the periodization, citing some recent publications. She observed that the period of the independence wars can offer much to explain Latin America’s historical processes, yet it has been neglected. Independence produced vital changes in society, including the secularization of values and an increased distance between the public and private spheres. Future research, Socolow urged, should take account of the centrality of the revolutionary experience in spawning or advancing important changes and creating discontinuities with the prerevolutionary era.
Eric Van Young’s comments focused initially on the laudably wide range of scholarship the presenters covered and on the opportunities available for further research in the areas of economics, politics, and society in the period from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s. He then pointed out the need to analyze the pace and nature of the cultural transformations that developed, particularly among the common folk in the countryside. He cited examples in which the political beliefs of the Latin American masses were conditioned by a very different measure or sense of time than was the case with the more educated or elite segments, and the extent to which these differences affected the nature and development of politics into the nineteenth century.
Mark Szuchman’s comments centered on the essential need for periodization to remain a fundamental aspect of the historian’s task. He noted that in its function as an epistemological exercise, periodization serves to trigger concepts that drive researchers into detailed inspections of the historical forces that occasioned change, conflict, and accommodation. The main challenge to historians is to make sure that we have sound theoretical and empirical bases for framing the periods’ beginnings and ends.
Mark D. Szuchman
Famine and Famine Relief in Comparative Context
Two papers were presented at this panel, chaired by James Giblin (University of Iowa). The first was by Gregory H. Maddox (Texas Southern University) on “The Colonial State and Famine Relief: Tanganyika, 1916-1961.” Maddox gave an overview of efforts by the British colonial state to provide famine relief. He discussed changing conceptions of the causes of famine among colonial officials and concluded that although famine relief gradually became more effective, chronic malnutrition has succeeded famine as a widespread affliction among Tanzanians.
Robert H. Jackson (Texas Southern University) presented a paper titled “Famine and Famine Relief in Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1878-1910.” He concentrated on the demographic consequences of famine and also compared the provision of famine relief in rural and urban areas. Discussion from the floor considered why famine has received much more attention from historians in Africa than in Latin America. The discussion also considered how various comparative works on famine (such as that of A. Sen) could be applied in both the Tanzanian and the Bolivian instances.
James Giblin
Interdisciplinary Perspectives On Nation-State Legitimacy and Militarism in Chile, 1890-1994
The panel included M. Elisa Fernández (University of Miami) and Lessie Jo Frazier (University of Michigan), presenters; Frederick Nunn (Portland State University), commentator; and Thomas C. Wright (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), chair.
Lessie Jo Frazier began with “State Violence on the Frontiers of Chilean National Memory: La Coruna, 1925,” a paper focusing on a major but little-remembered nitrate workers’ strike In Tarapacá. Frazier used the strike to explore the questions of how communities come to terms with experiences of extreme repression; how histories of such repression become incorporated, modified, or forgotten in both popular memory and mainstream history; and how violence in its various forms — repression, war, and daily life —affects state formation. This case study in the history of social memory offered an innovative way of understanding the interplay between local and national culture and politics, and suggested the value of greater dialogue between military and labor history.
M. Elisa Fernández presented “The Changing Role of the Chilean Military, A Case Study: The PUMA and Línea Recta Experience, 1952-1958,” which focused on the role of two military political movements during the second administration of Carlos lbáñez. Drawing on sensitive records of army service and courts martial and interviews with retired officers, the paper examined the formation of PUMA (Por un mañana mejor) and Línea Recta, the social and career patterns of their membership, their ideologies and programs, and their influence in the lbáñez administration. This case study demonstrated historians’ failure to appreciate how much the military was politicized between 1932 and 1973, and it suggested a linear connection between PUMA, Línea Recta, and the Pinochet dictatorship of 1973-90.
Frederick Nunn offered incisive critiques of the two papers, pointing out a possible connection between military service in the strife-ridden Chilean north and the Pinochet dictatorship’s attitudes and policies. He suggested ways to explore this and related themes. The audience then engaged the panel in a lively discussion.
Thomas C. Wright
Latin American Women on Film and in Literature
Barbara Weinstein (SUNY, Stony Brook) placed the 1968 Cuban film Lucia (directed by Humberto Solas) in the context of the Cuban Revolution and women’s studies. As a relatively early film on women and history, she argued, it presents the three “Lucias” apparently to illustrate the relationship between class and nation more than the role of women in Cuban history. Despite this flaw from a contemporary feminist perspective, the film provides ample opportunity to examine and discuss women in Cuban history and thus makes a good classroom tool.
Donald Stevens (Drexel University) examined Maria Luisa Bemberg’s film Camila (1984) as a vivid window into the society of Rosas’ Argentina. Bemberg’s Camila may be more active and autonomous than the original woman on whom the story is based, given that the director’s feminism colored the portrayal of the protagonist. Still, Stevens concluded that the film accurately portrays issues related to patriarchy, the church, and the Rosas caudillo system, especially because the patriarchal system triumphs over the more “modern” and activist Camila.
James Henderson (Coastal Carolina University) concluded the presentations with a discussion of a Brazilian film based on the Jorge Amado novel Gabriela (1983). This film provides a window onto elite mentality, economic change, and bourgeois attitudes toward progress and gender relations in the early nineteenth-century cacao region of Ilhéus. Henderson found the film useful for illuminating these themes; but students should be advised, he cautioned, that the exuberant treatment of sex and nudity may offend some feminists and some naive students.
Judith Ewell (College of William and Mary) commended the quality of the three papers and added that teachers using such films in the classroom could also encourage students to analyze the films as they might any written historical sources. Who was the director and what was the context for making the film? Did the film receive financial subsidies, or did it have to achieve a commercial success? Did the director intend the film to comment on the historical context or on a contemporary situation? For example, did Bemberg have her eyes fixed exclusively on the Rosas era, or did she also intend a comment on the Argentine dictatorships of the 1970s? A lively discussion ensued on these and other issues.
Judith Ewell
The View from the “Interior”: State Formation and the Provinces in Argentina
One of the most important challenges to modern Argentine historiographers is to pry ourselves away from Buenos Aires. Since its inception, historical writing on Argentina has fanned outward from the port. All three papers on this panel redressed this problem, in many ways following developments elsewhere in Latin American historiography.
David Rock (University of California, Santa Barbara) presented a portion of a larger project on the origins of the state in Argentina and Uruguay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dealing with civil wars in the provinces in the 1860s and 1870s. In seeking to break down conventional binary schemes (modern versus traditional, liberal versus conservative, barbarism versus civilization), Rock attempted to typologize different provincial regimes along two grid lines: a spectrum of pastoral or agrarian societies and an ethnic spectrum, whether mestizo or indigenous. Finding that the combination of mestizo and pastoral societies was most inclined to resist centralist statebuilding efforts, Rock offered an alternative frame-work. Accordingly, liberalism was not necessarily the ideological patrimony of elites, nor were rural folk antistatist. He applied this approach particularly to the cases of La Rioja and Entre Ríos.
Gustavo Paz (Emory University) presented a section of his dissertation in progress on agrarian society in the Puna of Jujuy and south of Bolivia. Looking closely at developments in particular communities, Paz revealed local societies in constant turmoil, largely over the status of landed property and an emerging system of labor recruitment for estates. Not unlike processes unfolding elsewhere in Latin America in the nineteenth century, grievances intensified when indigenous landholding patterns faced pressure from outside market and nonmarket forces. What makes this at all “Argentine”? Paz showed that the social and economic cleavages were inflected with political meanings. Peasants could exploit spaces opened up by conflicts within the local elite and between local state builders and national elites based in Buenos Aires. As a result, the consolidation of the Argentine state in the provinces depended much more on local alignments than heretofore has been appreciated.
Ariel de la Fuente (State University of New York, Stony Brook) presented a chapter of a dissertation on La Rioja and the social origins of the Montonera in the 1850s and 1860s. His paper focused principally on the local elite, stressing that unitarianism was not a political force restricted to Buenos Aires, and that the state formation process could not be reduced to resolving personalist and factionalist disputes. The province was divided internally along ideological lines, and these ideologies had material messages and consequences. Much of the local-level discord stemmed from the propertied sectors’ quest for a reliable, stable, and effective administration (especially for police and court powers) capable of creating and enforcing social relations appropriate for a new model of development.
All three papers addressed gaping holes in Argentine historiography and provoked a lively debate. Two particular issues dominated the discussion. First, what were the legacies of Rosas and Urquiza in ideological terms? Second, how were the provinces affected socially and economically by the long-term reordering of the region after the downfall of the viceroyalty?
Jeremy Adelman
Committee Reports
Andean Studies
Originally titled “Recent Research on the Twentieth Century,” the Andean Studies panel was justly renamed “Malaria, Liberalism, and Maoism.” The three papers demonstrated the innovative research being conducted on the modern period in the Andes, research characterized by multidisciplinary perspectives and rigorous empirical work. Because of a family emergency, Ann Zulawski (Smith College), the cochair, could not attend.
Marcos Cueto (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos) contributed “The Cultural and Social Dimensions of Malaria in Peru, 1900-1950.” Last-minute complications prevented him from attending the conference, so the cochair, Charles Walker (University of California, Davis), read his paper. While presenting a detailed analysis of the medical and social history of the disease, Cueto emphasized how the spread of malaria codified geographic and racial distinctions in Peru. Because malaria does not develop in the highlands, Andean migrants to the coast and the jungle are particularly susceptible. Many authorities and other observers therefore associated the disease with Andean people, some even contending that it was an indication of “Indians’ ” weakness. Cueto examined the spread and containment of malaria in light of mass migration, urbanization, and other central twentieth-century phenomena.
In “History, Property, and Race: The Cacique Movement in Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1914-1932,” Laura Gotkowitz (University of Chicago) analyzed how Indian leaders interpreted and utilized the late nineteenth-century liberal reforms. In a period of massive communal land expropriations, leading caciques turned the explicitly anti-Indian liberal platform on its head, redefining it in unique ways to defend their communities’ and, in some cases, their own interests. While showing the multiple meanings of liberalism, best understood from the standpoint of local and regional society, Gotkowitz also highlighted the complex history of the land struggles leading up to the 1952 revolution.
Iván Hinojosa (University of Chicago) probed the rise of Shining Path and the current crisis of the Left in Peru by examining the history of the Communist Party after the death of José Carlos Mariátegui in 1930. In “Marxism, Stalinism, and Maoism,” he outlined how Stalinist tendencies jettisoned Mariátegui’s focus on the specific nature of Peruvian society, particularly questions regarding the Indian population. Hinojosa demonstrated that incessant infighting and predominant authoritarian tendencies in the Communist Party and its offshoots —processes usually associated with the 1960s —have a long history in Peru, one that helped shape the rise and fall of Shining Path and the critical situation of its leftist opponents.
Orin Starn (Duke University) noted a number of positive traits shared by these papers. All ran against the grain of the customary narrative of republican history, looking at overlooked, even quirky topics and rethinking traditional ones. Starn commended them for analyzing both elite groups and the lower classes and approaching questions of identity. After commenting on each paper specifically, Starn pointed out how these papers addressed key questions in social theory. They considered multiple geographic spheres, linking not only the local, regional, and national but also the transnational, and returned to the issue of tradition and modernity in the Andes. He underscored the benefits for anthropologists of reading history and, more subtly, encouraged historians to read anthropology.
The audience participated with questions and comments until the CLAH cocktail party beckoned.
Charles Walker
Borderlands
Twenty-seven people attended the first formal meeting of the Borderlands Committee, the newest of CLAH’s regional committees. It was chaired by David J. Weber (Southern Methodist University).
Amy Turner Bushnell (Johns Hopkins University and the College of Charleston) presented a provocative paper, “Enlarging the Borderlands: A New Paradigm for the Hispanic Peripheries.” She urged that we extend the definition of the Borderlands beyond the traditional North American setting to consider borderlands throughout the hemisphere. In studying this enlarged borderlands, she suggested that we look beyond what she called the “paradigm of power” (which emphasizes elites and privileges the nation-state) and the “paradigm of the victim” (which she sees as the inversion of the paradigm of power). Arguing that those paradigms suffer from several liabilities, including reductionism, she urged that we employ “the paradigm of negotiation” to explain borderlands processes. She went on to suggest two types of borderlands, internal and external, and to categorize external frontiers in ways that might assist comparison (for example, as strategic or nonstrategic).
Bushnell’s call for an enlarged borderlands provoked considerable discussion and met a warm reception. Indeed, some of those in attendance represented areas beyond the traditional North American Borderlands and were predisposed to the idea of an enlarged borderlands. Our enthusiasm for the comparative study of borderlands or peripheries was tempered by warnings about the difficulty of doing comparative research and the need to connect peripheries to core areas to make their stories intelligible.
The quality and quantity of work historians are doing on borderlands (also known by other labels, such as frontiers, peripheries, margins, and fringes) suggests that these areas are no longer regarded as intellectually marginal.
David J. Weber
Brazilian Studies
The session was titled “Is There a New Political History of Brazil?” As chairperson, Barbara Weinstein (State University of New York, Stony Brook) introduced the theme by discussing, first, the decline of political history and the “history of ideas” in the 1970s as scholars turned to social history and social-science methods. This, Weinstein argued, reflected disenchantment with political history’s emphasis on the activities and ideas of a small circle of elite white males. Growing interest in the history of Brazilian women and people of color initially meant a shift toward social history because of these groups’ apparent exclusion from the political sphere. More recently, the field of Brazilian history has begun to feel the influence of cultural studies, the “linguistic turn,” and gender analysis, and these influences have generated new interest in political history. Indeed, some of the same concerns for including groups beyond elite white males that moved scholars to reject the “old” political history have prompted them to redefine the political sphere and expand our notion of political actors.
The emergence of gender as a useful category of analysis has been especially salutary for the field; it has meant a dramatic redefinition of the political sphere, and it has moved scholars to consider how gender figures in the political process, even when women are apparently “absent.” The two papers for this session are excellent examples of how gender analysis can expand our notion of politics in Brazil.
Speaking on “Gender and the Politics of Abolitionism in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1879-1884,” Roger Kittleson (Northwestern University) discussed the abolition movement’s failure to redefine the role of women in provincial politics. Kittleson began by describing the bitter partisan conflicts provoked by the slavery question (or more precisely, the question of how to go about abolishing slavery). Intense political competition, together with the radicalizing influence of the provincial republicans, threatened to prevent a compromise that would protect elite interests. In response, Kittleson argued, the emancipation movement “discursively shifted abolition out of the realm of hard partisan politics.” Emancipation became, instead, a social and moral issue.
This shift away from partisan politics allowed, furthermore, for a “feminization” of abolitionism. According to Kittleson, in the period from 1883 to 1884, antislavery agitation almost always appealed to sentiment and sympathy rather than to partisan affiliations. Antislavery arguments also expressed growing concern over the corrupting influence of slavery on elite families, and elite women in particular. In this context it became “acceptable” for women to participate in the abolitionist movement and to enter new public spaces —but only once the movement had been removed from the arena of partisan politics. Thus, Kittleson concluded, women’s entrance into the public sphere in Porto Alegre “did not open the floodgates to women’s subversion of gender roles in the social hierarchy,” but rather “ended up supporting the dominant position of elite men.”
In the second presentation, Susan Besse (City College of New York) discussed “Gender and Politics in Industrializing Brazil.” Besse traced the transformation of her own research, initially on middle-class women in industrializing Sao Paulo, from a study of “women’s history” to an analysis of the construction and redefinition of gender roles, especially during the 1920s and 1930s. Once Besse had begun her research, she unearthed (to her surprise) a remarkable quantity of publications, mainly by male professionals and politicians, expressing their anxiety and concern about gender roles and about the impact of modernity on marriage and the family in Brazil. These concerns led, for example, to a campaign against wife-killing that agitated for legal and social reform from the 1910s through the Vargas era.
This movement (which attracted very little attention from historians before Besse) was dominated by elite men and middle-class professionals who regarded “crimes of passion” as incompatible with modern, compassionate marriages as well as an affront to the authority of the state. Besse argued that the objectives of such campaigns, as well as the policies of the Vargas era, were to “modernize gender roles and “restructure patriarchy” without producing any significant changes in gender hierarchies. Those few women who did openly challenge the gender norms of that era typically suffered economic hardship and social marginalization.
The audience then served as commentators. Several people (both men and women) discussed their own experiences with changing gender roles and sexual attitudes in Brazil. It was suggested that Brazilian men do not operate within the rigid codes of machismo that characterize other Latin American societies. But Besse and other members of the audience questioned this image of Brazilian gender relations, noting that such “liberality” has often proved quite superficial and has served to mask rigid norms of appropriate female behavior. There was general agreement, however, that recent decades have seen significant changes in the professional, sexual, and political status of women. In regard to Kittleson’s presentation, the question was raised as to whether Porto Alegre presented an exceptional case. While we think of the abolitionist movement in Sao Paulo as focusing on economic problems and labor-supply issues, further research may uncover many of the same tendencies and concerns about gender as were manifested in the Riograndense context.
Barbara Weinstein
Caribe-Centroamerica Studies
About 25 people attended this meeting and discussed the question of splitting the Caribe-Centroamerica Committee into separate Caribbean and Central American sections. The group reached a consensus to form separate committees on a trial basis and then proceeded to nominate officers for the new committees. The Caribbeanists nominated Louis A. Pérez, Jr. (University of North Carolina) as chair and Barbara A. Tenenbaum (Hispanic Division, Library of Congress) as secretary of the Caribbeanist Committee. The Central Americanists nominated Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr. (Tulane University) as chair and David J. McCreery (Georgia State University) as secretary of the Central America Committee. The CLAH Secretariat should send out a mail ballot with these nominations with the next newsletter. These ballots should also permit write-in votes for anyone not wishing to vote for the official nominees. These officers will serve for two years.
Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr.
Chile-Río de la Plata Studies
The session, chaired by Joel Horowitz (Saint Bonaventure University), focused on different aspects of the military regimes of Chile and Argentina during the 1970s. Approximately 15 people attended the meeting, which featured three papers.
Margaret Power (University of Illinois, Chicago) titled her presentation “What’s Love Got to Do with It: Pinochet and the Women’s Movement in Chile.” Power explored why the military regime of General Pinochet was able to mobilize significant support among women. Many more women than men supported Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite. She hypothesized that two major factors were involved: the regime’s appeals to the family, and many women’s desire to reestablish order. The regime also mobilized support through the creation of a fairly wide network of volunteer organizations. Power also noted that the Right had a tradition of support from women.
The other two papers looked at Argentina. Lisa Cox (University of Texas, Austin) spoke on “Workers and the Argentine Process of National Reorganization, 1976-1983.” Cox explored strike activity during the military regime, arguing that there was a great deal more of it than is normally thought. She divided the proceso into three periods: the period of extreme repression, 1976-78; the easing of repression and internal conflict among the unions, 1978-82; and the collapse of the regime after the defeat in the Malvinas, 1982-83. Cox argued that the large number of strikes that occurred was caused primarily by pressure from the rank and file and intense union factionalism. Union groups competed with each other for support and therefore struck. Ironically, repression also helped, by producing new groups of union leaders.
Maria Cecilia Cangiano (State University of New York, Stony Brook) discussed “The Memory of Politics: The Sixties, the ‘Dirty War,’ and the Working Class in Argentina.” She looked at the steelworkers of Villa Constitución, a city in the industrial belt between Buenos Aires and Rosario, and how the memory of the repression of their independent labor organization in January 1975 still shapes these workers’ attitudes toward politics and union involvement. The leadership that dominated the local union in 1975 does so again, but its attitudes and actions have been shaped by the memory of past repression. The rank and file now equates politics with repression; the leaders, because of their experience in prison, have a much more complex vision. In prison they found their past actions reaffirmed, but they have revised their combative strategies.
Joan Supplee (Baylor University) offered comments that tied the three papers together and also pointed out some key differences in the Chilean and Argentine experiences. The floor was then thrown open for discussion, and a lively intellectual interchange ensued, generally focusing on why the Chilean military regime solicited and successfully gained active support from certain sectors of the population, especially groups of women, while in Argentina no similar attempt was made. Some agreement emerged that one cause for this dichotomy was the very different relationship between the state and civil society in the two countries.
Joel Horowitz
Colonial Studies
The Committee welcomed Lance Grahn (Marquette University) as the new secretary. Chair John F. Schwaller (University of Montana and the Academy of American Franciscan History) called for volunteers for the office of secretary to commence in January 1997. In accordance with the practices of the committee, Schwaller will cease to serve as chair after the 1997 AHA annual meeting and will be replaced by Secretary Grahn. At that point a new secretary must be inaugurated.
The main activity of the meeting was the presentation of two scholarly papers, by Ron Morgan (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Stafford Poole (independent scholar, Los Angeles). A third paper, to be presented by Alejandro Garcia Rivera (Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley), was canceled when Dr. Rivera was unable to attend the session. Lamentably, Dr. Poole was also absent from the meeting because of emergency surgery, but Schwaller read his paper.
Poole’s paper, “Hagiography and Pious Legends at the Service of Ideology: The Case of Our Lady of Guadalupe,” explored the uses of the legend of the apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe from its initial publication in the early seventeenth century to the modern era. Like the hagiographies of many saints, this legend has been used to further many causes; but even from its earliest publication, the apparition story seems to have had no impact on the natives. The Nahuatl account of the apparitions played no role in the evangelization of the natives, as no copies are known to have existed until a full century after the conquest. Instead, the earliest interpretations of the legend emphasized the role of the Mexican creoles, and this was rooted in the version of the earliest spokesman for the apparition cause, the creole priest Miguel Sánchez.
Guadalupe was a devotion for “those born in this land”; that is, the creoles. Although the natives were included in part of this vision, it was the creoles for whom the story had the greatest attraction. The role of Guadalupe in creole aspirations became apparent in 1810, when Miguel Hidalgo adopted Guadalupe as the symbol of his revolt. Subsequent Mexican governments, of all political leanings, likewise embraced the image. Even Benito Juárez confirmed the feast day of December 12 as a national holiday. The coronation of the image in 1895 was as political as religious. More recently, advocates of liberation theology have appropriated the image. It is seen as a powerful symbol of Mexican nationalism. Many of the ideologies it has been employed to serve are clearly contradictory. As a result, Guadalupe is a classic example of the use and distortion of a pious legend.
Morgan’s presentation was titled “Religious Biography as Social Critique in Colonial New Spain: The Case of Sebastián de Aparicio (d. 1600).’’ Although extensive research has been conducted on the “spiritual conquest” of Mexico, little effort has been directed toward understanding the religious life of the Spanish colonists. The study of hagiography, the lives of the saints, is a means of addressing this lacuna. Much of what we know of Sebastián de Aparicio is based on the hagiographies of him written after his death. These come from three principal sources. Lie. Bartolomé Sánchez Parejo, a layman and physician, produced an account in 1628-29. Bartolomé de Letona, a Franciscan, compiled a compendium of the official investigation into Aparicios sainthood in 1662. Diego de Leyba, also a Franciscan, further developed themes of the official investigation in his work, published in 1687.
Sánchez Parejo used his biography as a social critique, illustrating what he perceived to be the social and religious ills of his day. He extols Aparicios poverty and humility at the expense of the religious community of the day. Letonas work is much shorter, and it was written with the single-minded end of synthesizing the lengthy material accumulated in the process of canonizing Aparicio; it serves as a guide to the longer work. Leyba’s book responds specifically to a decree of Pope Urban VIII that localities should not establish cults before the official canonization of saints. Leyba therefore wrote a lengthy work to demonstrate Aparicios saintly qualities while demonstrating that local authorities had gone out of their way to discourage his popular veneration. Consequently, the pieces by Letona and Leyba focus more on details imposed by the canonization process. It is the work of Sánchez Parejo that offers a glimpse into the religious life of the colonists. It comes from the perspective of a pious layman, who uses his work as a vehicle of social criticism.
Commentary on the papers was provided by Sarah Cline (University of California, Santa Barbara). A question-and-answer period followed with participation from the audience.
John Frederick Schwaller
Gran Colombian Studies
The Gran Colombia Committee met on Thursday afternoon —unfortunately, most of the GC crowd had not yet arrived. The ten or so audience members, however, were treated to two interesting papers and a learned commentary.
Rebecca Earle (University of Warwick) spoke on “Lies, Rumour, and Disinformation in the New Granadan Independence Wars.” Earle pointed out that low literacy rates and minuscule editorial production and diffusion (compared even to Mexico) redounded to the benefit of oral transmission, with all that implied in terms of malleability. Questions from the audience addressed, among other things, the gendering of gossip as a female activity— for which there is some evidence during the independence period. Joshua Rosenthal (Columbia University) spoke on “La Salina de Chita in the Early Republican Period,” providing an overview of the salt-producing corner of Boyacá during a period of both continuity and change in fiscal structures, production techniques, and political-ideological contexts. The perennial issue of local versus outsider control of land and the labor process was much in evidence.
The commentator, Anthony McFarlane (University of Warwick), provided trenchant analyses and overall praise of both papers. McFarlane also briefly reported on the activities of AHILA, CLAH’s across-the-pond opposite number. The low turnout made a full business meeting impossible. GC members will receive a mailing about elections to replace the current team, whose two-year term has expired.
Richard Stoller
Mexican Studies
The Mexican Studies Committee session was attended by 25 people and chaired by Susan M. Deeds (Northern Arizona University), who announced that Susan Deans-Smith and Richard Boyer will take over for the next two years as chair and secretary of the committee. In a roundtable discussion, six scholars who have recently completed Ph.D.’s or are working on their theses examined the topic “Colonial Mexican History in the Wake of Postcolonial Criticism: Trends in Dissertation Research.”
Brief sketches of their projects and heuristic frameworks revealed how they have been influenced by postcolonial theoretical criticism and methodologies derived from other disciplines. A shared concern for the analysis of power, agency, hegemony, resistance, and popular culture is evident in the following outline of presenters and topics.
Pete Sigal (St. Cloud State University), colonial Yucatecan ideas of sexuality, gender, and the body (based heavily on the use of Maya-language materials).
John Crider (Tulane University), combining historical and anthropological methods to study the central Mexican Otomi colonial past.
María de la Luz Ayala (El Colegio de México), the appropriation and use of forest resources in New Spain.
Jane Mangan (Duke University), the relationship between female alcohol vendors and colonial authority in both Mexico and the Andes.
Martha Few (University of Arizona), women, ethnicity, and resistance in colonial Guatemala.
Pamela Voekel (University of Texas), shifts in political discourse in late colonial Mexico as they were reflected in the Bourbon campaign to create general cemeteries.
The discussion that followed focused on several common threads of this new research: the influence of subaltern studies and other theoretical approaches that examine hegemonic processes from the top down and the bottom up; the emphasis on contestation of identity and status; and concerns about textuality. Although some members of the audience were troubled by the apparent abandonment of more empirical approaches (economic or demographic, for example), most affirmed the value and utility of recent trends for recovering long-silent voices. They concurred that the field, as exemplified in the work of the newest generation of scholars, is benefiting from a judicious combination of postcolonial criticism, extradisciplinary approaches, new cultural and gender theories, and archival digging.
Susan M. Deeds
Population and Quantitative History
Approximately 30 Latin Americanists attended the annual meeting of ComPAQH. During the brief business portion of the meeting, the committee chair, Donald Stevens (Drexel University), reported on the committee’s continuing activities. Robert McCaa (University of Minnesota), editor of the Latin American Population History Bulletin, expects to have the next issue completed soon. Richard Garner (Penn State), editor of the Latin American Economic History Newsletter, reports that the periodical will now be distributed via the Internet (http://cac.psu.edu/rlg7/hist/proj/laehn.html). Garner has noticed an increase in communications from readers and suggests that the LAEHN may be attracting greater interest now that readers look for it when they have time to read and think about it, rather than losing a paper copy of it in one of the amorphous piles we all have on our desks.
The committee welcomed two invited speakers on the subject “Recent Research in Argentine Economic History.” Lyman L. Johnson (University of North Carolina, Charlotte) titled his remarks “Measuring Economic Performance in the Rosas Period.” Johnson began with a review of the economic historiography of the Rosas era and the problems and possibilities of using probate records to estimate the distribution of wealth. Based on his evidence for Buenos Aires Province, Johnson calculated a Gini coefficient of 0.63 in 1830. (By comparison, Alice Hansen Jones calculated 0.73 for the 13 North American colonies in the late eighteenth century.) By 1855, total wealth and population had both increased dramatically in the province of Buenos Aires, and the distribution of wealth was more unequal. The Gini coefficient rose to 0.78. Although the mean deflated wealth increased 4.7 times in the period, the distribution was more concentrated than before. Johnson compared his data to distributions of wealth in parts of North America and concluded that economic growth during the Rosas era was neither slow nor stagnant, and that it actually prepared the region for later prosperity.
Robert Gallman (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) reported on his research with Lance E. Davis (California Institute of Technology) in a paper titled “Savings, Investment, and Argentine Economic Growth, 1875-1914.” This research is part of a larger project comparing capital flows and domestic financial intermediation in Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the United States. After discussing how the estimates were made and checked, Gallman presented the following conclusions. First, the value of investments in improving land was small. Second, Argentina had the smallest investment rate among the countries studied but experienced the highest rate of growth. Gallman explained the apparent anomaly in terms of the structure of the capital stock and the capital-output ratio. Gallman and Davis believe that the explanation lies in the differences in the development of financial intermediation.
A general discussion followed with questions and comments from Mark Szuchman, Mark Wasserman, Vera Blinn Reber, Cynthia Radding, John J. TePaske, Christine Ehrick, Thomas L. Whigham, Michael Conniff, Jayne Spenser, Donald Stevens, and Steven Usselman.
Donald Stevens
