kathryn burns is an assistant professor of history at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1993, and her recent publications include “Nuns, Kurakas, and Credit: The Spiritual Economy of Seventeenth-Century Cuzco” (Colonial Latin American Review 6, 1997). Her book, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in spring 1999.
steven palmer earned his doctorate degree from Columbia University (1990). He has studied nationalism, social policy, and public health in Central America and recently taught at the Universidad de Costa Rica (1995–96). Currently he is a writer and performer with The Great Eastern, a program on the radio service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
gladys rojas is a graduate student in history at the Universidad de Costa Rica and a professor at the Colegio Superior de Señoritas. Her master’s thesis is on community-state struggles over the enactment and enforcement of nineteenth-century Costa Rican laws pertaining to the environment. She is now active in trying to preserve the Colegio Superior de Señoritas’ rich archive, which is currently threatened by budget cuts and bureaucratic indifference.
barry carr teaches Latin American history at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. His interests are in the agrarian and labor history of twentieth-century Mexico and Cuba, and the history of the Left. His books include El movimiento obrero y la politica en Mexico 1910-1929 (1981), Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (1992), and The Latin American Left: From the Fall of Allende to Perestroika (1993). He is currently completing a book on the history of work and workers in the Cuban sugar industry.
