American Historical Association Session Summaries

Conference on Latin American History Awards 1999

lifetime achievement award

Dolores Moyano Martin, Library of Congress, for 28 years as editor of the Handbook of Latin American Studies

distinguished service award

Richard Greenleaf, Tulane University

herbert e. bolton memorial prize

Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940, University of Arizona Press, 1997

Honorable Mention: Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba, University of Nebraska Press, 1997

conference on latin american history prize

Adrian Bantjes, “Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Mexico: The Dechristianization Campaigns, 1929–1940,” MexicanStudies/Estudios Mexicanos 13, no. 1 (1997)

Honorable Mention: Andrés Guerrero, “The Construction of a Ventriloquist’s Image: Liberal Discourse and the ‘Miserable Indian Race’ in Late 19th-Century Ecuador,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29, pt. 3 (1997)

Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, “The Intersection of Rape and Marriage in Late-Colonial and Early-National Mexico,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 6, no. 4 (^I997)

JAMES A. ROBERTSON MEMORIAL PRIZE

Kathryn Burns, “Gender and the Politics of Mestizaje: The Convent of Santa Clara in Cuzco, Peru,” HAHR 78, no. 1 (1998)

Honorable Mention: Gladys Rojas Chaves and Steven Palmer, “Educating Señorita:

Teacher Training, Social Mobility, and the Birth of Costa Rican Feminism, 1885-1925,” HAHR 78, no. 1 (1998)

tibesar prize

Lila M. Caimari, “Whose Criminals Are These? Church, State, and Patronatos and the Rehabilitation of Female Convicts (Buenos Aires, 1890–1940),” The Americas 54, no. 2 (1997)

lewis hanke prize

S. Elizabeth Penry, Fordham University, “The People Are King: Modernity and Popular Sovereignty in Indigenous Rebellions of Colonial Peru”

Honorable Mention: Karen Racine, Valparaiso University, “Imagining Independence: London’s Spanish American Community (1790-1830)”

Honorable Mention: Marc Becker, Gettysburg College, “Indian Movements and the Left in Twentieth-Century Ecuador”

lydia cabrera award

Marikay McCabe, Columbia University, “Regulating Work, Legislating Gender: ‘Public Women’ in Nineteenth-Century Havana, Cuba”

M. Sherry Johnson, Florida International University, “The Majority Were Totally Destroyed: Natural Disasters and the Course of Cuban History, 1763-1804”

james r. scobie memorial award

Mauricio Damian Rivero, Brigham Young University, “The Words of God: Religious Texts and the Counter-Reformation in Spain and Spanish-America”

Award Histories and Criteria

Conference on Latin American History Distinguished Service Award

The Conference on Latin American History Award for Distinguished Service to the profession was established in 1969 by the General Committee and approved in 1971. The following guidelines are based upon the relevant CLAH bylaws:

Herbert Eugene Bolton Memorial Prize

The Herbert E. Bolton Prize, established in 1956, is awarded for the best book in English on any significant aspect of Latin American history that is published anywhere during the imprint year previous to the year of the award. Sound scholarship, grace of style, and importance of the scholarly contribution are among the criteria for the award. Normally not considered for the award are translations, anthologies of selections by several authors, reprints or reeditions of previously published works, or works not primarily historiographical in aim or content. An honorable mention may be awarded for an additional distinguished work deemed worthy by the Bolton Prize Committee. The prize carries an honorarium of 500 dollars.

Conference on Latin American History Prize

The Conference on Latin American History Prize, established in 1961, is awarded annually for a distinguished article on any significant aspect of Latin American history that appears in journals edited or published in the United States. Given that they have their own prizes, articles published in the Hispanic American Historical Review and The Americas are ineligible for the CLAH Prize. The award committee will review only those articles published in the year preceding the award, thus articles published in 1998 will be considered for an award in 1999. The prize carries an honorarium of 200 dollars.

James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize

The James A. Robertson Memorial Prize was established in 1953 to improve the quality of articles appearing in the HAHR. Originally, in addition to a cash award of 200 dollars, the winning article was to be published in the HAHR. The early history of the prize was unsatisfactory and in 1957 its terms were changed to provide an award for an article already published in this journal. However, the provision that unpublished articles might also be considered was retained. The annual award is given for an article that appeared in the year preceding the award, in one of four consecutive issues starting in August. Thus articles published in the HAHR between August 1997 and May 1998 were eligible for the 1999 award. The article selected for the award is to be one that, in the judgment of the prize committee, makes an outstanding contribution to Latin American historical literature. An additional distinguished article may be awarded honorable mention by the same Robertson Prize Committee. The prize carries an honorarium of 200 dollars.

Tibesar Prize

The Tibesar Prize was established in December 1990 by the Conference on Latin American History in cooperation with The Americas. A Tibesar Prize Committee, annually named by the president of the Conference on Latin American History, is to designate the most distinguished article published by The Americas that best combines distinguished scholarship, original research and/or thought, and grace of writing style. Eligible articles are those published in the volume year (July through April) that ends in the year before the award is announced. Thus articles published between July 1997 and April 1998 are considered for the 1999 Tibesar Prize, awarded in January of 1999. The Tibesar Prize Committee may decide to award honorable mention to an additional distinguished article. The Tibesar Prize carries an award of 200 dollars.

Lewis Hanke Prize

The Lewis Hanke Prize was created through generous donations from students, colleagues, and family members of the late Lewis Hanke. It is made by a committee appointed by the CLAH president and is given annually to a recent Ph.D. recipient in support of field research that will allow the recipient to transform the dissertation into a book. Applicants must have completed their Ph.D. degrees in the field of Latin American history no more than four years prior to the closing date of the application. The award, of up to 1,000 dollars, may only be used for international travel.

Lydia Cabrera Awards for Cuban Historical Studies

The Lydia Cabrera Awards are available to support the study of Cuba between 1492 and 1868. Awards are specifically designed to support the following: 1) original research on Cuban history in Spanish, Mexican, and United States archives; 2) the reediting of meritorious books on Cuban history currently out of print; and 3) the publication of historical statistics, historical documents, and guides to Spanish-language archives relating to Cuban history between 1492 and 1868.

Applicants must be trained in Latin American history and possess knowledge of Spanish. Successful applicants will be expected to disseminate the results of their research in scholarly publications, through professional papers delivered at scholarly conferences, and through public lectures given at educational institutions. Applicants for support of original research must be currently engaged in graduate studies at a United States institution or be affiliated with a college/university faculty or accredited historical association in the United States. A limited number of annual awards will be made, up to a maximum of 5,000 dollars per award.

James R. Scobie Memorial Award for Preliminary Ph.D. Research

The James R. Scobie Award is meant to permit a Ph.D. student to carry out a short, exploratory research trip abroad (normally four to twelve weeks) in order for him or her to determine the feasibility of a dissertation topic dealing with some facet of Latin American history.

One or more travel grants will be awarded each year. The funds are to be used only for international travel expenses and may not exceed 1000 dollars. The grant must be used during the summer following the award, unless there is prior approval for rescheduling from the Award Committee and the Secretariat of the Conference on Latin American History. Under no circumstances is the James R. Scobie Award to be combined with a research grant for an extended stay although the awards may be used in combination with other funds that are not for international travel. Submission of a final report is required that should indicate the sources and amounts of all awards received.

Session Reports

African Identity and Resistance in Colonial Spanish America

Jane Landers (Vanderbilt University) began the session with a paper on the evolution of maroon communities in seventeenth-century Colombia and Mexico. Landers argued, following Richard Price in this respect, that political authority in the maroon communities initially rested in the hands of African-born kings. Over time, however, political authority came to be vested in acculturated, American-born creole governors and captains who shared power with African-born war captains. Unlike Price, however, Landers argued that there was an intermediate period in the evolution of the maroon communities. She asserted that briefly in the seventeenth-century, maroons survived repeated assaults by the Spanish and represented themselves as a republic. By the eighteenth century, however, immigration by whites and mestizos had transformed the black towns into pueblos.

Matthew Restall (Pennsylvania State University) examined the Afro-Yucatecan community during the colonial period. Using race, culture, religion, occupation, location, kinship, and family life as indicators, Restall suggested that even though people of African descent in the Yucatán did not identify themselves as Yucatecans, one can argue that an Afro-Yucatecan community developed; significant numbers of Africans were concentrated in particular locations and were tied to each other by virtue of a culture, kinship relations, and family life that they shared with Mayans and Spaniards.

Discussant Colin Palmer commended Landers and Restall for working to shed more light on African communities in Spanish America. However, he cautioned against the tendency to overlook the atrocities of slavery when discussing slave resistance and cultural production. He also suggested that the concept of resistance is too elastic. It denies slaves the freedom and capacity to make choices. Palmer emphasized the role of the maroons in contesting and establishing the first “free state.”

Palmer also pointed out the problems in using race, culture, occupation, and other similar indices for describing the Afro-Yucatecan community. He posited that a community should be viewed on its own terms—its ethos, the identifying chords that hold it together, and its mechanisms for conflict resolution. Palmer noted that it is important to examine marriage choices, social institutions, patterns of village membership and household structures, and methods of socialization when dealing with the formation of community or ethnicity, such as that of the Afro-Yucatecans. Finally, Palmer emphasized the importance of recognizing the diversity of slave systems in Latin America.

The presentations evoked a lively discussion on the issues of ethnicity, identity, resistance, and the evolution of African communities in Spanish America, especially after Palmer’s insightful comments. Since there were only two presenters, the discussion period lasted almost as long as the presentations.

edmund abaka

Colonial Discourses and Human Bodies in Early Latin America

Despite being the final panel on the last day of the conference, this session was attended by 35 people. The three papers showed that the human body was used by various peoples in their efforts to assert dominance. In her paper, “Unstable Bodies: Gender, Ethnicity, and Shape-Shifting Brujería in Late-Seventeenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala,” Martha Few (University of Miami) used Inquisition records to demonstrate that female “witches” used their own bodies as ritual weapons in community conflicts.

In his paper, entitled “Performing Masculinity: The Yucatecan Maya Male Body in the Eighteenth Century,” Pete Sigal (California State University, Los Angeles) analyzed Mayan curing ceremonies recorded in the eighteenth century to suggest that the ritual violation of the male body marked masculinity and asserted male power.

Finally, in her paper, “Wet Nurses, Infants, and the Discourse of Disease in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro,” Erica Windier (University of Miami) presented preliminary findings from her dissertation by analyzing the rhetoric of Brazilian reformers who attempted to stop the practice of wet-nursing. Richard Trexler (SUNY, Binghamton) provided excellent comments, which were followed by a lively discussion about the ideological constructions of the body, gender, religion, and power. Neither the commentator nor the audience were convinced, however, that Few had proved (as she claimed) that colonial authorities persecuted colonized peoples by attempting to control their bodies nor that Sigal had effectively challenged (as he claimed) Irene Silverblatt’s thesis about gender parallelism in indigenous society.

silvia arrom

From the Monstrous Head to the Distant Provinces: Space, Politics, and the Press in Argentina, 1930-1955

Four interesting papers, covering aspects of Argentine culture and politics from the 1920s through 1950s, were presented. One aspect of the panel was unusual: only one paper dealt with events in Buenos Aires; two examined occurrences in the province of San Juan, while the fourth compared events in Mendoza and San Juan.

James Cane (University of California, Berkeley) delivered a paper entitled ‘“A Purely Commercial Enterprise’: La Prensa and the Conceptions of ‘Freedom of the Press’ in Peronist Argentina,” which explored the justifications offered for the seizure of the paper La Prensa by the Peronist regime. Cane demonstrated that the state created an alternative definition of freedom of the press based on the economic ability to publish.

Mark A. Healey (Duke University) followed with “Paper Tigers: Modernist Architects, Reluctant Locals, and the Peronist State after the San Juan Earthquake, 1944-1948.” Healey examined the military government’s plans to rebuild the city of San Juan after the devastating earthquake of 1944 and the failure of the regime to carry out the architects’ ideas, in part because of the opposition of the local elite. He tied the plans, and the failures of these plans, to the outcome of the 1946 elections in the province of San Juan, where Perón fared poorly.

In a paper entitled “San Juan and Goliath: Provincial and National Politics in Argentina, 1930-1943,” Alistair V. Hattingh (University of California, Santa Barbara) examined politics in San Juan during a slightly earlier period. Hattingh analyzed the relationship between national and provincial politics, especially during the presidency of Roberto M. Ortiz. He argued that to understand one side of the equation, one must understand both. He found that Ortiz’s goals in intervening in San Juan went beyond just restoring democracy in Argentina.

In the final paper, “Commerce and Populists: Allies and Adversaries at Cross-Purposes in the 1920s and 1930s,” Nancy Westrate (Duke University) compared the reactions of merchant organizations in San Juan and Mendoza to populist politics and to the precarious financial situation of the provinces. She argued that the merchants of Mendoza behaved much more responsibly than those of San Juan.

Commentator Joel Horowitz (Saint Bonaventure University) praised the papers, stressing the importance of the questions that they raised. He welcomed the emphasis that the presenters had placed on the provinces and, in the case of Cane, on the ideology developed by Peronism. Horowitz also noted that more attention needs to be given to the peculiar political traditions of Cuyo (San Juan and Mendoza). Questions from the audience followed the formal presentations.

joel horowitz

Gender and U.S. Foreign Policy in Latin America: Chile and Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s

This lively and stimulating panel looked at how the United States government, specifically the CIA and private agencies such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the J. Walter Thompson ad agency, gendered their programs in Chile during the 1960s. Margaret Power (Illinois Institute of Technology) examined the United States government’s sponsorship of the 1964 Scare Campaign in Chile. This campaign attempted to convince Chilean women that if the “communist” Allende were elected, their children would be taken from them, shipped to either Cuba or the Soviet Union, and returned to Chile as the brainwashed products of a sinister indoctrination program. Graphic images of such a future plastered the walls of Santiago and were broadcast on many of the major radio stations throughout Chile. Power noted two precedents for this campaign: Operation Pedro Pan in Cuba in the early 1960s and conservative Brazilian women’s mobilization against President Joáo Goulart in 1963. She ended by encouraging other Latin Americanists to pool their knowledge on this relatively unexplored aspect of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.

Victoria Weinberg discussed the relationship between the Rockefeller Foundation, reproduction, and poor Chilean women. She argued that poor women’s wombs and medical philanthropy became a critical aspect of the “high” politics of U.S.-Chilean Cold War diplomacy in the 1960s. Chilean politicians requested help from U.S. philanthropies, state agencies, and private firms to limit population increase in urban areas. United States and Chilean health personnel pressed poor women to accept interuterine devices. When administrators from the Chilean government, Population Council, and Rockefeller and Ford Foundations thought the acceptance rate was too low, health workers surreptitiously inserted IUDs in unsuspecting women. The Johnson administration unsuccessfully pressed U.S. philanthropies to stop such activity. Weinberg’s paper reveals that U.S. organizations did not operate in a monolithic manner, but rather were often in conflict over the nature of their medical activity in Chile. The “IUD scandal” in Santiago underscores the historical and gendered complexities of philanthropic, state, and women’s interactions on an international scale.

William Walker, who graciously offered an on-the-spot commentary, suggested that the panelists broaden their perspectives beyond a narrow focus on gender to include discussion of the larger context in which foreign policies operated; he also urged the panelists to discuss the nature of Chilean democracy in the 1960s and 1970s. Gilbert Joseph (Yale University), the chair and commentator, posited that far from offering an essentialist vision of gender, both papers looked at how gender was constructed in very specific contexts. He encouraged the panelists to examine how these gendered policies were constructed by their respective U.S. agencies, the impact these policies had on men in Chile, and the similarity in contemporary ideas about gender in both the United States and Chile. Audience members offered their observations on U.S. government policies and gender in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, and stressed the need for Latin Americanists to examine this issue further.

margaret power

Gender, Ethnicity, and Identities in Brazilian Slavery

This session, organized by Mieko Nishida (Hartwick College), comprised three case studies on Brazilian slavery during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Panel members emphasized the heterogeneity and complexity of Brazilian slavery and suggested new approaches to the important issues of gender, ethnicity, and the creation of identity in New Word slave systems. Despite the absence of Professor George Reid Andrews (University of Pittsburgh) as panel chair, and Professor Kathleen J. Higgins (University of Iowa), approximately 60 scholars filled the large conference room, testimony to the reemergence of strong scholarly interest in Brazilian slavery. Alida C. Metcalf (Trinity University) chaired the session and also served as commentator.

The session began with Professor Metcalf’s reading of Higgins’s fascinating paper. Entitled “Gender and Slavery in Brazil’s Colonial Mining Region: Sahara, Minas Gerais, 1710-1809,” Higgins’s study examined the unique forms of slavery, slaveholding, and manumission in a mining region of in the central part of southern Brazil. Higgins attributed the formation of the unique slave society in Minas Gerais to extremely unbalanced sex ratios not only among the slave population but also among slave owners. Her paper successfully characterized the historical construction of distinctive gender relations and gender identities in mining slavery.

Mieko Nishida then delivered her paper, “The Creation of New Identity: Ethnicity and Gender in Urban Slavery, Salvador, Bahia, 1808-1840.” She examined the processes by which the enslaved population of African birth created new ethnic and gender identities within the context of urban slavery in a major Brazilian port city.

Professor Mary C. Karasch (Oakland University) presented aspects of her new research in a paper entitled “Crioulos and Captives: Slave Identities in Goias, 1804–1832.” Karasch described the juxtaposition of black and Amerindian slavery in the frontier of Brazil and examined the diversity of slave identities. Her meticulous presentation provided the audience with an abundance of fascinating yet unpublished primary data on ethnicity and black brotherhoods, which she had recently uncovered in her archival research in Portugal and Brazil.

Professor Metcalf discussed the uniqueness of each case study while also noting the similarities and differences in their approaches to common topics. Metcalf’s most gracious, thoughtful, and encouraging comments, coupled with her sharp critiques and suggestions for the presenters, were followed by many provocative questions and answers.

mieko nishida

Gendered, Marginal, and Alternative Visions of Cuban History: Eighteenth through Twentieth Centuries

It has only been in the last ten years that Cuban historiography has opened itself to the study of women. Heroic biographies have been replaced with research on women’s education, the women’s movement, prostitution, women in the work force, and the evolution of law. Gender studies that include historical research into the social behavior of men has not been developed, except to the extent that the study of leaders has always focused on patriarchy and patriarchal values. In Cuban history marginality has been front and center because most political and economic histories have been elaborated in response to continuous unrest caused by pressures from marginal groups that, from the colonial period to present, attempted to assert their power. The four papers offered in this session broke new ground in analyzing the presence of marginalized people in the Cuban experience.

In a paper entitled “The Struggle to Redefine the Rules of Convents in Late-Eighteenth-Century Havana,” Jay Clune discussed convent reform in nineteenth-century Havana. Focusing on the Convent of Santa Clara, Clune detailed how the “Clares” resisted orders from the crown and the pope to reform their closed admissions standards. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Santa Clara offered the most prestigious educational opportunity for elite girls in Cuba. But the Clares were challenged by the more progressive Ursulines, who immigrated from the United States and offered open, secular classes to nonresidential girls. Both the crown and pope ordered the Clares to reform their cloistered educational style. Their refusal to do so resulted in the waning of their prestige and their marginalization from Havana’s powerful elite.

Sherry Johnson (Florida International University) presented a paper entitled “Militarization and the Marginal Sectors: Redefining the Boundaries of Prosperity in Havana, 1763–1796,” which focused on the economic stimulation and social mobility of lower-class white society. Most histories of this period treat either the elite, the Spanish administrators and officers, or the slave population. Johnson’s work contributes to our knowledge of marginalized whites, usually associated with the military, who made up a significant portion of the total population. In 1764 Spain reformed its laws to allow free labor procurement that would augment the workforce that was heavily dependent on requisitioned workers and slave labor. As fortresses and urban construction demanded a larger labor supply, military men were allowed to work for wages in the construction workforce. They could also seek employment and garner additional pay in outlying military posts, such as St. Augustine, Florida. Administrative positions were also sought and obtained by the previously dependent soldiers. In addition to soldiers, skilled workers immigrated from Spain to Cuba in search of employment. Finally, some criminals were allowed to work off their sentences in the controlled environment of urban construction.

A middle class emerged out of the urban growth and liberal labor laws of the late eighteenth century. Retiring military men needed homes, which some built themselves. The continuing need to support their families drove them to wage labor. The pressure on land for house construction induced some families to leave the garrisoned cities for the countryside, thus increasing the population in the interior of Cuba. The tendency of military men to maintain both legitimate and illegitimate families (often with women of color) gave recognition and validity to a racial class usually repressed in other areas of Latin America. By the end of the eighteenth century, this upwardly mobile middle class began to challenge the traditional elite and take command of the labor force by seeking out wage labor and decrying slavery. Only the strong arm of Captain General Luis de las Casas, who took action in 1794, secured Cuba’s economic future for sugar and the slave plantation system by countering pressure from the white workforce to build a middle class.

In her paper, “Murder in San Isidro: Crime and Culture during the Second Cuban Republic,” Mayra Beers focused on the life and death of Alberto Yarini. Yarini, the son of a leading family, was a local politician, a pimp, and a patriot who lost his life in 1910 fighting for the honor of one of his women. Beers captures the passionate contradictions in Cuban society during the first decade of nation-building. Social flux and political chaos brought people of the demimonde into the respectable parlors of leadership, as Cubans aspired to shape national identity. Yarini embodied Cuba’s national complexity. He was a “virile” patriot, a trickster, and a romantic fighter. He faced death with the same gusto as he lived life. He was mythified in plays and a requiem that are still interpreted and reinterpreted by Cubans in both Cuba and the United States. Beers uses a cultural studies approach to look inside the Cuban sense of self at the beginning of this century.

Kim Morrison delivered the final paper, entitled “The Limits of Patriarchal Imitation: Reading Gender from a 1915 Afro-Cuban Text: Views from ‘Palpitaciones de la Raza de Color.’” She examined the discourse among middle-class Afro-Cuban intellectuals found in the popular newspaper La Prensa. She captured the dilemma these leaders faced in the postindependence period when Afro-Cubans were likely to be relegated to marginal status. The middle-class intellectuals had to decide whether they would stand proud of their blackness and defend the rights of Cubans of color to participate in the Cuban state or if they would try to imitate the white way of life in their demeanor, comportment, and values. The Afro-Cuban intelligentsia opted for the whitening of their racial background and asked for acceptance on the basis of their ability to adopt European values. In her presentation, Morrison described how the Afro-Cuban intelligentsia criticized members of their race in attempts to civilize them, encouraging Afro-Cuban men to mend their barbaric ways and familial irresponsibility and to assume their rightful place as heads of households. Afro-Cuban women were to acquiesce to male dominance and produce healthy and educated children.

After Allan Kuethe (Texas Tech University) commented on the papers, the audience offered questions and comments on the research topics that had been presented.

k. lynn stoner

Insurgent Peasant Politics and Colonial Crisis in the Southern Andes, 1740s-1780s

Over a decade ago, Steve Stern urged historians to “rethink the age of Andean insurrection” that affected the central and southern Andes during the second half of the eighteenth century. Among other themes and approaches, he suggested that historians should pay more attention to subaltern modes of political consciousness and ethnic identity in their ongoing engagements with the wider colonial world. To one degree or another, the papers presented in this session answered his call. Each examined local political practices and the pursuit of justice in the decades leading up to, and including, the Andean civil wars of 1780-81.

In his richly detailed paper, “Community, Cultural Identity, and Revolutionary Response in Rural Cuzco,” Ward Stavig (University of South Florida) examined how the day-to-day interactions of Spanish political authorities and rural villages mediated and shaped the varied responses of village kurakas to the succession of corregidores who ruled the province of Canas y Canchis prior to the 1781 rebellion. Situating the unfolding political activities and aspirations of Túpac Amaru in that context, Stavig traced the rebel leader’s complex negotiation of Christian and Inca symbolism, as well as his use of kinship alliances, to build a “revolutionary” coalition.

Sergio Serulnikov (Boston College) followed with his presentation of “From Everyday Forms of Colonial Politics to the Politics of Anticolonialism: Northern Potosí, 1770-1778.” Serulnikov explored the unfolding patterns of social conflict by looking at both the inner workings of the Spanish government and the ethnic repertoire of peasant politics. He showed how anticolonial sentiments gradually grew out of, and were shaped by, a decade of collective village protest against the abuses of royal, ecclesiastical, and indigenous authorities. In tracing peasant politics through the 1770s, Serulnikov placed his study of ethnic consciousness and solidarity in the context of an emerging crisis of Spanish cultural hegemony in the southern Andes. He elucidated, for example, emerging conflicts among Bourbon reformers, provincial authorities, and parish priests that in the late 1770s led, paradoxically, to a fragile and transitory alliance between rebel peasants and high Bourbon judges and administrators.

Finally, Sinclair Thomson (New York University) presented a paper entitled, “We Alone Will Rule: Peasant Political Consciousness and Anticolonial Projects in La Paz and Southern Andes.” Thomson’s paper captured the subtlety, flexibility, and creativity of Andean peasant political culture in the La Paz region during the late eighteenth century. Rather than advancing a unified separatist movement, Aymara anticolonialism was rooted in local struggles, meanings, and debates, which produced a variety of political agendas ranging from innovative notions of popular sovereignty to assimilationist ideals that enforced ethnic “cross-dressing” and drew the “new Indians” into a unifying “man-comunidad.”

Commentator Christine Hunefeldt (University of California, San Diego) commended the three presenters for their detailed reconstructions of local events that led up to the generalized unrest in the Andes that emerged in response to the pressure of the Bourbon Reforms. She noted how the present generation of historians is rethinking the 1781 rebellions from the vantage point of ongoing political-cultural struggles and traditions at the village level during the crucial decade of the 1770s. But she cautioned against losing sight of colonial institutions, symbolism, and actors, and noted situations such as the ambiguous role of the Christian doctrine and priests in these political and cultural struggles (a point that Stavig, in particular, had raised) and the powerful impact of creole fear in the wake of the peasant political mobilizations that had preceded the general revolts. She also challenged the authors to think more critically about the “anti-colonial” content and the intent of the peasant political projects that they had described in their case studies.

Due to the length of the session and the late hour, audience discussion was limited. One audience member urged two Bolivianists to engage each other’s work more explicitly in the future, something they did immediately at the CLAH cocktail party that same evening.

brooke larson

Narratives of Nationhood, Memories of Exploitation: Cuba, Argentina, and Chile

In his paper on “A National Rhythm: Race, Politics, and Social Dance in Nineteenth-Century Havana,” John Charles Chasteen (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) argued that nineteenth-century Cuba, especially Havana, produced a unique cultural blend that did not develop in other cosmopolitan capitals such as Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires: the Afro-Cuban dance, or habañera, that elite readily joined. Chasteen reasoned that dance made a significant contribution to the creation of a national identity in a society that had yet to attain political independence. That lag meant that the Cuban elite was less concerned about Europeanization than their counterparts in Brazil and Argentina.

In his paper on “Facundo in Songs and Stories in (Sarmiento’s) Facundo: Oral Culture, Literature, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Argentina,” Ariel de la Fuente (Purdue University) approached a similar theme from a different perspective. On the basis of his research on the province of La Rioja, de la Fuente analyzed the oral source that had contributed to Sarmiento’s portrait of the caudillo in Facundo. These sources are now available in a recently produced collection of songs and poems from the mid-nineteenth century. An analysis of these source reveals a consciousness of a “national space” in which an Argentine nation-state would eventually be created.

Florencia Mallon (University of Wisconsin, Madison), in a paper on “Land, Morality, and Exploitation in Southern Chile: The Mapuche Community of Nicolas Ailio and the Discourses of Agrarian Reform, 1906-1974,” addressed culture in yet another dimension. She focused on the history of agrarian reform in Chile, tracing the differing rationales (maximization of output, family subsistence, communal cooperation) for the breakup of large units or the consolidation of small ones. The touchstone for testing all these rationales was the fundo Rucalán, which had been taken over by peasants in 1971 before being returned to the original owners after the military coup of 1973. Mallon ended her paper with a nostalgic look at the relative success of the peasant occupation and suggested that even the victorious military government had to acknowledge that the “moral economy” of the peasant occupation had produced more than what the capitalists considered a satisfactory output.

Donna Guy (University of Arizona) had been listed as commentator but was unable to attend. She did, however, send comments on Mallon’s paper. Guy praised Mallon’s impressive research and the subtle story she told. Guy also noted that, as Mallon argued, the differing historical interpretations recounted by the contesting historical actors reflected their differing ideological lenses. Guy suggested that the picture might be enriched by considering how changing concepts of the welfare state might have affected the actors and how that consideration might lead to a modification of the idea of moral economy, which occupied a central place in Mallon’s analysis.

Thomas Skidmore (Brown University) filled in to comment on the papers by de la Fuente and Chasteen. He noted that both authors were analyzing the dialogue between popular culture and elite culture, a subject that has been treated in important recent works by Hermano Vianna, William Beezley, and Robert Stam. The key for this session, he suggested, was to link themes from popular culture to the construction of national identity. Skidmore concluded that interesting ties had been established in both papers, although everyone recognizes that all such links are at best suggestive.

A lively discussion ensued, with the audience and panelists exchanging comments on topics such as the difficulty of choosing and then establishing the authenticity of sources on the creation of nationhood and the memories that have contributed to its articulation.

thomas e. skidmore

The Privatization of Village Lands in Porfirian Mexico: New Analytical Perspectives

The panel comprised papers by William Roseberry (New York University), Jennie Purnell (Boston College), and Emilio Kourí (Dartmouth College), who chaired the session, attended by some 55 people. John Tutino (Georgetown University) was the discussant. John Womack Jr. (Harvard University) was also scheduled to comment, but was unable to attend because of a snowstorm. The aim of the panel was to revisit the complex history of the breakup of communal village lands in Mexico during the Porfiriato, in part to demonstrate that the privatization of land in late-nineteenth-century Mexican villages was far more complicated than traditional interpretations have tended to portray.

Focusing on the process of disentailment in the indigenous community of Opopeo, William Roseberry’s paper, “Para calmar los ánimos entre los vecinos de este lugar: Community and Conflict in Porfirian Pátzcuaro,” showed that turn-of-the-century agrarian communities in the Pátzcuaro area were often involved in several different kinds of disputes that were at once both internal and external. Roseberry presented a detailed and suggestive “preliminary typology of contentious issues involving indigenous communities in late-nineteenth-century Pátzcuaro,” and argued that an understanding of these diverse late Porfirian rural conflicts could help us make sense of the “almost fratricidal” disputes that erupted in these same places during the 1920s and 1930s.

Jennie Purnell’s paper, “Negotiating the Nation: Property and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Oaxaca,” analyzed the politics of land partitioning in the Oaxacan district of Etla. Purnell highlighted the importance of local political negotiations over the meaning and implementation of land laws, as well as the role of intravillage boundary disputes in limiting the success of privatization efforts. She argued that “the Oaxacan pueblos engaged in a complex process of negotiation with state officials, agreeing to privatize some land, refusing to privatize other land, and generally protecting and advancing their various communal claims through legal arguments, the instigation of litigation, and the pursuit of injunctions against the actions of state officials.”

Emilio Kourí’s paper, “On the Business and Politics of Communal Disentailment: Papantla, Veracruz, 1870-1900,” surveyed the literature on communal disentailment in Porfirian Mexico, and showed that very little archival research has been done on this topic, despite its acknowledged historiographic importance. In the past, he suggested, there was a marked tendency simply to assume that villagers were almost invariably opposed to the partitioning, and hence scholars generally felt it unnecessary to explore the conflictive internal social dynamics of village life during the Porfiriato. Kourí then discussed the case of Papantla, and showed how the growth of vanilla cultivation and trade led to land competition and conflict, social divisions and communal strife, dissidence and rebellion, and, ultimately, to a militarized privatization of village lands.

In his commentary, John Tutino stressed the historiographic and interpretive importance of these new local studies of Porfirian village politics and social relations, and argued that they pave the way for a more nuanced understanding of rural conflict and solidarity in prerevolutionary Mexico. Tutino advocated the integration of the various analytical factors explored in each of these papers—local politics, business and markets, the law, culture—into our historical explanations of the evolution of village life during this crucial period. Finally, he reflected on the complex meaning of “community,” and on the nature of the social forces that can generate cohesion as opposed to those that promote fragmentation.

A discussion followed, with the participation of several members of the audience. By all accounts the session was a very successful one, as it raised many historiographic and interpretive issues worthy of further reflection and research.

emilio h. kourí

Public Ritual in the Americas during the Nineteenth Century

Pedro Santoni (California State University, San Bernardino) opened the session with a paper entitled, “Where Did the Other Heroes Go? The National Guard of Mexico and the Creation of Patriotic Myth.” He described the rituals of burial for war heroes from the early Republican era and the negotiation of their public memory.

Shannon Baker (Texas Christian University) spoke on “Antonia López de Santa and the Order of Guadalupe.” She discussed the elaborate rituals of a military order established to reward faithful supporters, gain entente with the Catholic hierarchy, and build international credibility for his Serene Highness before he was toppled by the Revolution of Ayutla.

Paul Beezley (North Carolina State University) analyzed the elaborate reburial rituals accorded to the former president of the United States Confederacy in “The Body of Jefferson Davis and the New South.” He argued that Davis’s corpse was carried by train from its original resting place in New Orleans to a lavish grave in Richmond as a calculated act both to bolster support among poor whites for an elite project of building the New South and to preempt the formation of a populist political alliance with African Americans.

Matt Esposito (Drake University) gave a paper on “Mindscapes and Landscapes of Memory: Civic Ritual, Public Space, and Commemoration of the Dead in Porfirian Mexico.” He discussed the role of ritual funerals for Porfirio Díaz’s military comrades in the Liberal wars in forging a sense of national identity in turn-of-the-century Mexico.

Steven Bunker (Texas Christian University) discussed “Marketing Cigarettes, Marketing a Regime: The Case of the El Buen Tono Cigarette Company in Porfirian Mexico.” He described the company’s elaborate advertising rituals designed to foster mass consumerism and create the image of marketplace choice.

All presentations were thoughtful, well researched, and succinct. Richard Warren (St. Joseph’s University) offered a stimulating commentary on methodologies for examining the implications of public rituals for popular politics. An audience of 25 then engaged the panelists in a lively discussion on public rituals in rural areas, church responses to secularization, and the effects of consumerism on the crisis of the Porfirian regime.

jeffrey m. pilcher

Racializing Region and Regionalizing Race in Latin America

This panel examined the way in which particular geographic locations in Brazil and Colombia became racialized, whether through competition for political power and economic resources or through the influence of new discourses and programs for hygiene and public health. Contesting the master narrative of the nation-state, which assumes that regionalism will subside with the rise of a centralizing state, these papers discussed the persistence of regional identity, fortified by racialized discourses of civilization and modernity. The panel was chaired by Eileen Findlay (American University) and included papers by Nancy Appelbaum (SUNY, Binghamton), Stanley Blake (SUNY, Stony Brook), and Barbara Weinstein (SUNY, Stony Brook). The discussant was Catherine LeGrand (McGill University).

In the first paper, ‘“Flesh of Their Flesh and Blood of Their Blood’: Creating a Regional Raza in Caldas, Colombia,” Nancy Appelbaum focused on a newly created frontier department in the central cordillera, where people of different ethnic origins from various parts of Colombia intermingled. In attempting to establish a hegemonic regional identity of “whiteness” and assert their own superiority, migrants from Antioquia denied the existence of internal diversity while long-standing inhabitants of the region, mostly of indigenous origin, contested this vision. The paper demonstrated how racialized identities underpinned claims to both resources in land and political power. By attending to specific local usages of the words “región” and “raza”, Appelbaum explicated the biological, cultural, familial, and gendered intermeshing of meanings that informed the thought of competing groups.

In the second paper, “Constructing Nordestino Identity: Public Health, Science, and Education in Northeastern Brazil, 1925-1940,” Stanley Blake explored the construction of the “nordestino”—the archetypal inhabitant of Brazil’s impoverished Northeast — as a social problem by professionals involved in the fields of hygiene, mental health, and public health. He discussed both the new state-sponsored programs that accompanied the consolidation of the Vargas dictatorship and the widespread use of testing to determine the physiological and mental fitness of the nordestino population. Despite the avowed rejection of scientific racism by the professionals involved in these campaigns, Blake noted that the new programs often relied upon and reproduced racialized categories that stigmatized nordestinos of African or mixed descent.

In the final paper “Region over Nation: Race and Regional Identity in the 1932 São Paulo Revolution,” Barbara Weinstein discussed the racialization of São Paulo’s regional identity, particularly in the context of the 1932 constitutionalist uprising by São Paulo against the Vargas regime. Paulista identity, Weinstein argued, was a form of regionalism that based itself on racial and cultural superiority, and positioned other regions of Brazil, especially the Northeast, as backward and uncivilized. While the small separatist faction in São Paulo was the most explicit in its deployment of racialized language, Weinstein noted that the more “moderate” factions, by portraying São Paulo as the center of civilization and modernity, also racialized regional identity.

In her comments, Catherine LeGrand remarked that historians of Latin America are broadening their critiques of the “myth of racial democracy” or the “myth of mestizaje” to consider the ways in which whiteness has been constructed and reconfigured. It is untenable to discuss “blackness” or “Indian” identity without a clearer idea of what constituted “whiteness” at different historical moments. All three presentations stressed the role of regional identity in the construction of racial hierarchies and the negotiation of national identity. Furthermore, they demonstrated that no sharp distinction can be drawn between biological and cultural racism, and they analyzed the implications of racialized constructions of regional identity for the imagining of economic development, for the administrative structuring of national territory, and for concepts of political rights. Taken together, LeGrand noted, Blake’s and Weinstein’s papers also raised the question of whether Gilberto Freyre, generally regarded as the ideologue of Brazilian cultural nationalism, should instead be viewed as one variant of a Northeast regionalist, who like the Paulistas, but also in opposition to them, endeavored to assert the national relevance of a particular regional vision.

barbara weinstein and catherine legrand

Sex, Religion, and the Devil in Latin America

Lisa Sousa began the presentations with a paper entitled “Sex, Violence, and the Devil in Early Mexico.” She explored the connections between indigenous culture and the image of the Devil through such concepts as nahualism, the tlacatecolotl, and the tzitzmitl. Based on material from cases dealing with violence in Nahua, Mixtec, and Zapotec communities, Sousa was able to explore native conceptions of the Devil. She emphasized the frequent references to jealousy (particularly sexual jealousy), which the Devil was able to distort and, in this way, cause assaults. Sousa also explored the connections between how defendants represented the Devil and prehispanic deities as well as the associations that were made, for example, between violence, jealousy, drunkenness, and malevolent deities. Sousa suggested that the Devil represented a genuine category in native thought used to explain antisocial and violent conduct and concluded by proposing the existence of a Devil complex in which four different but overlapping manifestations of the Devil were represented.

Rosalva Loreto López then presented “El demonio y el comport ainiento corporal femenino en el imaginario coventual poblano del siglio XVII.” She focused on nuns in seventeenth-century Puebla whose struggles with the Devil were recorded in their autobiographies or hagiographies. For these women, their own bodies represented the principal location or arena for this battle and thus the struggle against the Devil was related to bodily control and the construction of proper female conduct. Life in the convent was marked by highly symbolic visions. These included the Devil’s temptations and torments, which were represented—both in the iconography of paintings and in the nuns’ accounts—by animals such as snakes, griffins, dragons, and duendes, as well as by other sinister or magical creatures. These beings were feared because of their capacity to influence or enter the body. Poblana nuns particularly dreaded insects, which they feared would attack their brains. Loreto López concluded by emphasizing the importance of gender in Mexican religious discourse and in perceptions of the Devil.

Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (Carleton University) presented a paper entitled “The Devil in Daily Life in Central Mexico, 1750-1856,” which represented an attempt to understand the place of the Devil in situations that were less dramatic than the often reported diabolism and pacts with the Devil. She noted how the European concept of the Devil intersected with certain Nahua beliefs and linked how places and times that are associated with the Devil in contemporary Nahuatl culture were also present in beliefs about the Devil held in Mexican villages during the period under study. Lipsett-Rivera also contrasted Spanish views of the Devil as derived from morality literature to explanations given in criminal proceedings. There was a strong association between the Devil and sexuality, in particular, jealousy. Rapists frequently recurred to the temptations of the Devil in explaining their actions, especially when the victim was a young virgin. But the Devil was also responsible for gossip, which could lead to serious disturbances in the community and even violence. Lipsett-Rivera concluded by noting that mentions of the Devil seem to have been more frequent in rural than urban life.

Kristin Ruggiero (Keene State College) presented a paper entitled “The Devil and Modernity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires.” Her paper dealt with the influence of positivism on criminology, particularly the creation of new categories of crime and a redefinition of the criminal. She argued that in Argentina, the Devil continued to play a role in the courtroom and, in general, in Argentine notions of deviance. In this respect, the famous Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso influenced doctors and examining magistrates. Lombroso identified certain characteristics of deviant women, cruelty in particular, which he described as “diabolical” and related to traits of the Devil. Judges and lawyers in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires used these categories when prosecuting women criminals, arguing that these women were “demons” or “diabolical.” They also pinpointed bodily traits, which confirmed the diagnosis. Finally, the Devil was also associated with both mental and physical symptoms of psychological disorders that, at times, led to criminal acts.

Fernando Cervantes provided the commentary. He emphasized the malleability of the concept of the Devil and suggested that this concept needed to be examined within the framework of intellectual history. The historical evolution of the notion of the Devil, he noted, must provide a background for such studies. For example, although in medieval times the Devil was considered to attack the body, such concepts later changed, particularly under the influence of the Jansenists, who led the movement away from placing great importance on the potential sway of the Devil. Cervantes also stressed the importance of comparing colonial New Spain with other places and time periods. Finally, he warned of the danger of overemphasizing the lack of understanding of peoples under study.

sonya lipsett-rivera

States and Sexualities: Gender and Social Reform in Mexico and Chile, 1900-1940

After brief introductions, the panel began with a paper entitled “Mothers and Midwives in Service to the Nation, 1910–1940”, in which María Soledad Zárate explored the difficult, much contested, and still incomplete transition from traditional parteras to professional madronas in turn-of-the-century Chile. Patience Schell then followed with “Widows, Spinsters, and Virgins: Ideals and Realities for Teachers in Post-Revolutionary Mexico City,” which shifted the scene to Mexico City in the 1920s and the failed (because impractical) state efforts to push married and pregnant women out of the classroom and back into the home. Katherine Elaine Bliss (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) then presented “Paternity Tests: Fatherhood on Trial in Mexico’s Revolution of the Family.” She demonstrated that Mexico City’s men (at least lower-class men) were targeted by elite social engineers, often with active support of the wives and daughters of these men, who deployed notions of “fatherhood” on their own behalf. Elizabeth Quay Hutchison (University of New Mexico) concluded the presentations with “Women, Work, and Motherhood: Gender and Legislative Consensus in Chile, 1900-1930,” in which she examined the discursive efforts of Chilean legislators of various political persuasions to use protective legislation for women as a wedge for the broader social reforms that followed.

Thomas Klubock (Georgetown University) commented that, taken as a whole, the papers effectively demonstrated important links between women and incipient “welfare states” in Chile and Mexico and provided a solid foundation for further inquiries into the centrality of gender to the construction of modern nation-states. Robert Buffington (St. John’s University) noted the ambivalent nature of women’s alliances with the state and suggested that more work needed to be done on the specific role of sexuality in the nation-building process.

Despite a fifteen-minute delay caused by a fire alarm (and thanks to admirable discipline on the part of panelists and commentators), we had time for a lively and satisfying 20-minute exchange between audience and participants.

The papers were excellent and the panel thought-provoking and remarkably coherent. The comparative angle proved especially fruitful as participants and audience struggled with troubling similarities (given the very different historical contexts) and surprising differences (given the international nature of the social reform projects).

robert buffington

Transnationalization in the Americas: Writing and Teaching the Cultural History of United States-Latin American Relations

More and more, approaches to the past not only defy disciplinary but also national conventions. The roundtable “Transnationalization in the Americas: Writing and Teaching the Cultural History of United States-Latin American Relations,” offered presentations of new research (from a variety of methodological approaches and empirical fields) that shared a focus on questions of transnationalization in the Americas.

The initiative aimed at attracting a broad, diverse audience concerned with inter-American relations, cross-cultural exchange, globalization, and interdisciplinary research. By focusing on common historiographic and methodological problems, this roundtable aimed at playing a key role in building bridges between people sharing research and teaching interests on questions of internationalization. In addition, the initiative considered that beyond the question of how we study the interconnected histories of the peoples and nations of the Western Hemisphere is the tougher challenge of how we teach them. And in the classroom we draw not only on our scholarly interest in the enrichment of knowledge about the Americas but also on exciting innovations in research on transnational situations in a global context.

The large roundtable included five discussants and a chairperson, bringing together authors from different fields within the area of inter-American relations. (Even though Robin Derby (University of Chicago) and Ricardo Salvatore (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella) were unable to attend, excerpts of their papers were read by two of the other discussants). All the participants, with the exception of the organizer, Claudio González-Chiaramonte (SUNY, Stony Brook and Universidad de Buenos Aires), who works on a more contemporaneous time period, contributed to the recently published Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.—Latin American Relations, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore. Judging by the large audience and the lively discussion that followed the presentations, the roundtable fully achieved its goals. In open defiance of its critical place in the conference schedule (the session was held on at 11 a.m. on Sunday, while most flights were departing and wild book sales were taking place) the audience actively commented on the discussants’ papers and offered interesting views on particular situations they faced in their own research or teaching activities.

González-Chiaramonte opened the presentations with “A Discussion on How to Write and Teach about ‘Americanization,’” in which he synthesized recent methodological and historiographic approaches to describing the expansion of American culture in the Americas and attempted to link these approaches to similar analyses of the process of globalization. In searching for ways to bring scholarly studies on “Americanization” to the classroom, he referred to how scholars interpreted the expansion of “Americanism” as a transnational identity.

Seth Fein (Georgia State University) followed with “The Cross-Cultural Cold War Era: The United State Information Agency and the Production of Mexican Newsreels.” In this paper Fein described and critiqued theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights about transnationalization and the mass media in the Americas through the analysis of the covert collaboration between the USIA and CLASA, a leading Mexican film producer (and client of the Mexican state) during the “golden age” of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. The presentation was complemented by a video-clip selection that strongly supported Fein’s views. His analysis of CLASA newsreels linked the realms of production, representation, and reception to a specific case, and underscored the value of the material he had shown for teaching transnational themes.

Ricardo Salvatore’s paper, “Yankee Advertising in Buenos Aires: Reflections on the Questions of Americanization, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Representation,” was read next. It offered a redefinition of “modern consumption” within the context of “consumer nationalism” in Buenos Aires during the 1950s. The transformation of Buenos Aires into a mass consumer society required the diffusion of new means of representation already well established in the United States. The paper explored key connections among U.S. advertising entrepreneurs, the “new technologies of seeing,” and the formation of “national states” in order to show how a certain foreign company was involved in the redefinition of modern consumption as part of the “criollo” taste.

Robin Derbys paper, Deconstructing the Global: Transnational Ambiguity in the Caribbean,” examined the problems of delimiting the contours of the local and the global in the Caribbean, a region profoundly shaped by transnational forces. Through the discussion of interpretive strategies that analyzed symbolic practices such as gossip, consumption practices, and the use of domestic space, the paper explored local anxieties about globalization, which are manifested through debates over the use and abuse of foreign commodities. The paper demonstrated how, eventually, Dominicans recurred to the use and adaptation of consumer culture in order to counter U.S. influence.

Catherine LeGrand (McGill University) closed with “Cultural Perspectives on Foreign Business and the ‘Enclave’: Historiography, Sources, and Silences,” in which she discussed the new historiography on the Caribbean “enclave.” The new sociocultural questions and conceptualizations, which the author cited and analyzed, offer richer insights and more useful teaching resources about the complex societies and multiple interactions in and around those regions that coalesced around massive foreign investment. Then, turning to her own work on the Dominican sugar and the Colombian banana regions, LeGrand discussed the incorporation into the classroom of the concrete problems of accessing and reading business records from a cultural perspective. LeGrand distributed a handout listing recent Ph.D. dissertations in history and anthropology, as well as novels, that would be useful in teaching about “enclaves.”

As a whole, the presentations stressed the importance of interdisciplinary approaches and the incorporation of diverse sources for the study of inter-American relations. The authors successfully showed the rewarding use of unconventional elements as sites of history: the “enclave” as a new social community; the appropriation of foreign cultural elements; films made, produced, and distributed by multinational crews; and foreign advertising campaigns. All the presentations highlighted the importance of analyzing transnational dynamics “at the contact zones of the empire.” The study of local stories may uncover unexpected facets—such as silences, appropriations, and resistance—of the history of the transnationalization of culture in the Americas. In conclusion, the audience enthusiastically approved the basic goal of the roundtable initiative, that is, the idea that more ambitious studies on inter-American cultural relations should go beyond “United States ethnocentric” or “true Latin American” views and, instead, explore the interconnectedness of power and perception.

liria evangelista

Committee Reports

Andean Studies

The Andean Studies Committee met at 5 p.m. on Friday, January 8 with 24 members in attendance. During the brief business portion of the meeting, the committee chair, Clara López Beltrán (Universidad Mayor de San Andrés), reported on the continuing activities of the committee.

The meeting then moved on to the academic presentations, with a panel entitled “Family, Power, and Wealth in the Andean Colonial Society.” Three scholars reflected on the problems and possibilities presented by family studies for advancing our understanding of Andean colonial history.

Nancy Van Deusen (Western Washington University) spoke first on “Current Research Trends and Future Directions for the History of the Family in Colonial Peru.” Focusing specifically on studies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Van Deusen offered a synthesis of recent research on Andean families. She emphasized family formation in light of the Spanish invasion; the process of mestizaje; the impact of migration; the invention of lineage and family “memory”; the shifting meanings of “elite”; and the cultural codes and values that reinforced or challenged family bonds. Van Deusen also suggested where researchers might benefit from the work of other Latin Americanists to fill in existing lacunae.

In “Visible, Brave, and Conscious of Their Status: Women, Family, and Wealth in Colonial Charcas, 1550-1600,” Ana Maria Presta (Universidad de Buenos Aires) compared the familial roles of five women of higher social status and varying ethnic origin. She argued that regardless of racial or ethnic differences, these women shared similar objectives. Whether Spanish, creole, mestizo, or Indian, all were conscious of their status and power. They administrated the future of their offspring, accomplished family missions, fought for inheritance, denounced men’s pressures, and requested separations and divorce.

Although Carmen B. Loza (Max-Planck Institut für Wissenschftsgeschichte, Berlin) was unable to attend the session due to travel problems, her paper, “La naturalizatión de los indios: una política de población en favor del dominio de España sobre el Perú, 1571 y 1581,” was read by the committee chair. Loza’s study explored new legal aspects of Toledo’s visita, specifically the “naturalization” of individuals and families living outside of their native communities. This naturalization process was used as an instrument of ethnic dissolution.

Herbert S. Klein (Columbia University) served as commentator, praising all three papers and making suggestions for further research. Comments from the audience and panelists addressed specific questions arising from the papers. The meeting adjourned at 7 p.m.

clara lópez beltrán

Borderland Studies

The Borderlands Committee met Friday afternoon, January 8. Amy Turner Bushnell (College of Charleston) presided over the well-attended meeting at which a number of new members were welcomed. The program featured a look at career prospectives for new scholars in the field of borderlands studies, broadly defined, with presentations by three doctoral candidates: DeeAnna Manning (Washington University), Juliana Barr (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and Jennie LaMonte (Harvard University). Their dissertation topics illustrate the diversity of themes and geographic regions—including slavery, gender, identity, and comparative mining frontiers—that contribute to the historical study of borders and borderlands. The ensuing discussion stressed the importance both of expanding the definition of “early America” beyond the traditional borders of British America and of extending the field of borderlands studies beyond the United States Southwest to include the Caribbean/Atlantic world and the Spanish, Portuguese, and Amerindian frontiers of South America. The growth of this field is exemplified by two new doctoral programs recently launched at the University of Texas at El Paso and Southern Methodist University, both of which emphasize the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, migration, and Chicano or Latino/a identity.

During the biennium 1999-2001, Cynthia Radding (University of Illinois) will be the chair and Susan M. Deeds (Northern Arizona University) the secretary of the Borderlands Committee.

cynthia radding

Brazilian Studies

Well over 50 members of the Brazilian Studies Committee kicked off their participation at the Conference on Latin American History by attending the roundtable entitled “New Approaches to Brazilian History.” Jeffrey Lesser (Connecticut College) chaired the session in which four historians discussed their work.

In a brief business meeting, Lesser reported on the newly formalized relationship between CLAH and H-LATAM. It will consist of an H-LATAM editorial board on which each CLAH regional committee will have one representative, normally the committee chair. Lesser also reported on the Warren Dean Prize, which was established a few years ago but has yet to be awarded. The CLAH secretariat is currently investigating whether funds are now available to make awards and whether the prize can be awarded in alternate years for Brazilian and environmental history.

The roundtable portion of the meeting was a great success. James N. Green (California State University, Long Beach) discussed his use of a queer approach to Brazilian history. He focused on the tenuous social space to which Brazilian society consigns men and women who transgress the gender system, and described the case of writer Paulo Barreto (João do Rio). So long as Barreto publicly reproduced upper-class norms, he (like other frescos) was accepted by elite society. When he challenged prevailing opinion, however, this toleration faded and he faced all of the dominant prejudices against homosexuals. Green ended by calling on historians to pay greater attention to the evolution of Brazil’s gender systems, broadening their focus to include areas other than Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and asked that we share the documents about same-sex eroticism that we encounter in our own research.

Linda Wimmer (Bridgewater State College) discussed her work on the role of Brazilian tobacco in the Hudson Bay Company’s fur trade in her effort to reconsider Brazil’s place in the Atlantic economy. While only a small quantity of the commodity, grown mostly in Bahia, found its way to the Canadian north, the product was in high demand and had ritual significance in the trade. Crop failures in Bahia produced tobacco shortages in North America a few years after the poor harvests, much to the consternation of Company officials. Wimmer’s presentation highlighted the remarkable interconnectedness of the Atlantic world.

Darién Davis (Middlebury College) spoke about his recent experiences researching race in Brazil. While the fluidity of racial identities and the silencing of blackness have long been salient features of Brazilian society, race remains a fundamental social fact. He urged historians to look beyond the Arquivo Nacional and use other sources (such as periodicals and the political police’s recently opened archives) and to pay closer attention to the ways in which race is implicitly discussed in these sources.

Barbara Weinstein (SUNY, Stony Brook) surveyed the changing approaches to regionalism in Brazilian historiography. She traced the shift from the elite political and economic approaches of the 1970s and 1980s to the new political history that focuses on discursive production of identity. The study of regionalism has, she argued, gained considerable favor in the new Brazilian universities located outside the traditional centers of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In these new universities historians have found that studying regionalism brings their local scholarship into direct dialogue with the national Brazilian historical narrative still so often centered on Rio and São Paulo. However, as Weinstein concluded, this may not be new after all, for Gilberto Freyre’s concern with the distinctiveness of northeastern culture and society led him to formulate a regional identity that quickly became one of Brazil’s national myths.

Following the short and provocative presentations, a lively and wide-ranging discussion ensued. Audience members noted the importance of linking gender to race and called for more consideration of Brazil’s indigenous peoples; others spoke about their personal experiences in researching race, gender, and regionalism. Wimmer’s paper provoked considerable discussion about the importance of following commodities after they leave Brazilian ports.

The Brazilian Studies Committee executive hopes to inaugurate the new millenium in Chicago with another roundtable on issues not addressed in this year’s meeting.

hendrik kraay

Caribe Studies

The Caribe Studies session consisted of a panel entitled “The Dominican Republic in the Broader Caribbean and Latin American Context.” The goals of the panel were twofold. First, to explore ways of integrating Dominican history into broader discussions pertaining to the Caribbean and Latin America; and second, to illustrate how knowledge of the Dominican experience can enrich our understanding of other regions of the hemisphere. The three presenters were Julie Franks (Rutgers University), Richard Turits (Princeton University), and Ernesto Sagás (John Jay College and Rutgers University). Luis Martínez-Fernández (Rutgers University) chaired the panel and served as discussant.

Franks’s paper, entitled “Dominican Social History from a Latin Americanist Perspective,” explored the ways in which the recent historiography on Latin America’s peasantries and contemporary discussions of rural issues shed light on the social and economic transformations that accompanied the modernization of the Dominican Republic’s sugar industry from 1870 to 1930. Franks’s research demonstrates that plantations were consolidated in practice long before they were consolidated under law during the U. S. occupation of the Republic (1916-24). Still, the United States played a critical role in dismantling the traditional system of local adjudication of property rights, a critical step in the process of state formation.

Turits’s presentation, “Agonies of State Formation: Peasants, Nation, and Terror in Dominican History,” studied the mechanisms that Rafael Trujillo used to consolidate the Dominican state during his three-decade-long rule. Turits highlighted the manipulation of land reform and the massacre of several thousand Haitians in 1937. The massacre, he argued, “imposed the increasingly dominant international paradigm of a homogenous nation and impermeable state borders upon a formerly transnational frontier community.”

Sagás’s paper, entitled “From Ausentes to Dual Nationals: The Incorporation of the Diaspora into Dominican Politics,” traced the incorporation of nearly 700,000 Dominicans residing outside Dominican territory into the island’s political process. During his presentation, Sagás enumerated the logistical challenges of allowing overseas Dominicans to vote in national elections and speculated on several possible scenarios for the next Dominican presidential election in 2000.

The session concluded with a lively question-and-answer period that further explored the links between Dominican and Latin American history.

luis martínez-fernández

Central American Studies

A session on “The Sandinista Revolution: A Twenty-Year Retrospect” took place at the Central America Committee meeting at 7 P.M. on January 7 at the Marriott. With Ralph Lee Woodward (Tulane University) chairing the session, Michel Gobat (University of Chicago), Julie Charlip (Whitman College), Michael Schroeder (University of Michigan, Flint), and Richard Millett (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville) each made presentations offering different perspectives on the influence and legacy of the Sandinista Revolution. A spirited discussion followed, in which there was substantial audience participation, including an extended comment by Arturo Cruz of Nicaragua. Approximately 40 persons attended the session.

ralph lee woodward jr.

Chile-Río de la Plata Studies

The committee meeting began with the introduction of the new president, Barbara Ganson (Florida Atlantic University) and the secretary/president-elect, Margaret Power (Illinois Institute of Technology). Rather than the more traditional panel of independent papers based on primary sources, this year the committee officers decided on a roundtable discussion format focused on “Gender Issues in Historical Research in the Southern Cone.” The panelists were Thomas Klubock (Georgetown University), Elizabeth Hutchison (University of New Mexico), Christine Ehrick (University of Northern Iowa), and Joan Supplee (Baylor University). Each of the panelists identified key problems in the field, pointed to changes in the literature on gender, and situated his or her own work within the evolving historiography.

Klubock framed his discussion of gender scholarship in Chile by reference to two political moments that have shaped this historiography. These were the experience of the Allende period, including the 1973 military coup, and the opposition to Pinochet during the 1980s. Klubock pointed out that much recent scholarship has reexamined leftist politics and labor history through feminist theory and that many writers of gender history in Chile came to their projects by way of their participation in, and sometimes disillusionment with, the Unidad Popular movement. He also noted a shift in research interests toward marginal urban sectors, including women workers, which has necessitated a rethinking of traditional notions of social class, particularly through the prism of the work of Michel Foucault. Much of Klubock’s discussion revolved around the intersection of gender ideology and historical agency in cases that ranged from the copper mines to agrarian reform to the social welfare state.

Elizabeth Hutchison’s commentary focused on the cultural dynamics of North American scholars doing gender research in Chile during the contentious period of the remrn to civilian rule in the early 1990s. She pointed not only to the weakened condition of local humanities research, a legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship, but also to a number of attempts by Chilean scholars to recoup women’s history from that period. As Chileans incorporated gender studies into newly reconstituted academic institutions, publishing houses began to feature new scholarship on this theme, with particular attention to public policy issues. North American gender scholars followed a different path, often seeking to investigate the history of women in the early twentieth century or unearthing the gendered foundations of more recent political movements. For Hutchison, what has resulted is a somewhat frustrated North-South dialogue on gender studies in Chile.

Joan Supplee provided a long-range overview of debates on gender scholarship in Argentina. These debates, which began with discussions about machismo and marianismo in the 1970s, led to the use of mainstream models such as biography and prosopography to approach the history of Evita Perón and the suffragettes. The 1980s saw the intersection of gender and class under the influence of Marxism, which pushed gender studies onto a more theoretical terrain. Within a few years, historical studies of gender, health and sanitation, and marriage and family opened up a broad range of possibilities for research across disciplinary lines that eventually involved women’s opposition to the military government of the early 1980s. Supplee argued that gender issues are being recast according to the lines of subaltern studies, with a consequent reworking of traditional histories of politics, diplomacy, and war. Overall, Supplee suggested, gender history has provided a more complete picture of one of our most important social institutions, the family.

Christine Ehrick described how her own work on women and the welfare state in Uruguay intersects with a handful of similar efforts on Brazil and Argentina. She outlined the important role that women played in the construction of the bureaucracy of the welfare state and the role of the state in the development of liberal feminism. Ehrick also made a strong case for the repositioning of gender history outside of the main cities of the region. Her research on feminist activity in the provincial capitals of Uruguay has reshaped her understanding of national history in ways that challenge the Montevideo-based narrative.

anton rosenthal

Colonial Studies

The Colonial Studies Committee hosted the session, “New Granadan Traditions Re-examined,” on Friday, January 8, with presentations by Professors Ray Broussard (University of Georgia) and Luis Calero (Santa Clara University). Broussard, who retires this year, presented a paper entitled “Bautista Antonelli and the Defense of Cartenga de Indias.” He discussed a well-known aspect of sixteenth-century Cartagena—the slow and problematic implementation of Antonelli’s urban defense plan—but accentuated the underlying political and military irony in the crown’s uneven attention to the port’s needs. In his presentation on “Spanish Rule and Native Resistance in the Pasto Region of Colombia, 1535 – 1600,” Calero similarly covered familiar ground with a review of the cultural pressures imposed upon Indian communities by the encomienda regime. But, in keeping with the theme of the session, Calero also underscored the current historiographic emphasis on identity-formation, arguing that the encomienda reflected an official effort to establish a state identity just as much as it stressed the reformulation of Indian identity.

Lance Grahn (Marquette University), outgoing chair of the committee and session commentator, concluded that the two papers demonstrated that imperial administration was managerially ineffective but bureaucratically successful. Grahn suggested that “in red tape and paperwork themselves,” there was “both centralized order and the projection of vertical order.” Yet the realization of that envisioned order was left in abeyance.

Prior to the paper presentations, Grahn announced that elections for new committee officers would be held this year. Ballots will be distributed in the fall CLAH newsletter. Following the recommendation of the CLAH president, Susan Socolow (Emory University), he stressed that committee officers are expected to attend the annual meeting. He also noted that the new chair or the chair’s designate will be responsible for representing the committee on the H-LATAM Executive Committee and articulating the rationale for continuing a committee devoted to colonial history. Grahn ended his remarks with a word of thanks to the committee membership for their good work and collegiality.

lance grahn

Conference on Latin American History Teaching Committee

The Teaching Committee is working on creating a website. We discussed what the website’s niche might be, how to keep it manageable, and how to avoid duplicating the efforts of others. We plan to include copies of old Teaching Columns, a membership list, and links to other teaching resources on the web. UT-LANIC has an excellent website on teaching resources while H-LATAM maintains a site for syllabi. We should consider emulating Robert Levine’s impressive Carolina page (located at www.as.miami.edu/las). It might be useful to have mini-reviews of different books that people have used in their classes, as well as reports on the use of internet resources in teaching. It would be nice if this could be an ongoing project so that we could keep adding information.

Members were excited about the idea of a panel on “the end of borders and regions” for the year 2000. The idea is still somewhat inchoate, but we noted that Jeffrey Lesser (Connecticut College) took students to Japan to study Japanese immigrants in Brazil; Teresa Meade (Union College) is working on the U.S.-Mexico border and recently gave talks in India about Latin America; Leslie Offutt (Vassar College) is taking students to Cuba; Craig Hendricks (Long Beach City College) teaches a course on Great Cities of the World; and there is debate in many departments about whether courses on Latinos in the United States are part of United States or Latin American history.

Avi Chomsky (Salem State College) wrote a column on “Teaching Gender in Latin American History” for the fall 1998 newsletter; Dale Graden (University of Idaho) is working on a column on teaching comparative African American history for the spring 1999 newsletter; and Jeffrey Lesser will submit a column on using “Mesolore” (see below) for the fall 1999 newsletter.

If you are interested in more information about any of the above projects, or would like to be included in the Teaching Committee mailing list, please contact Avi Chomsky at [email protected].

The second half of the meeting was devoted to a presentation by Lesser, Liza Bakewell (Brown University), and liana Hahnel (Connecticut College) about classroom use of the CD-ROM “Mesolore: Mesoamerican Lore through Mesoamerican Writing.” Bakewell designed the CD-ROM with Byron Hamann, and Lesser tested it in the classroom last semester. “Mesolore” allows students to study and analyze two Mesoamerican codices, one preconquest and one postconquest. It offers translations and analysis, tutorials, interviews with scholars of many disciplines who have worked on the codices, a fantastic library of scholarly articles, and debates among scholars on topics such as gender, cultural patrimony, and the writing of history. Hahnel, who was a student in Lesser’s class, described it as “awesome.” The CD-ROM is still being developed, but Bakewell will share it with interested teachers. For more information, you can contact her at [email protected].

avi chomsky

Mexican Studies

The panel discussed Paul Vanderwood’s The Power of God against the Guns of Government. Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, 1998), the story of a group of villagers from Tomóchic, Chihuahua, whose conditions of poverty and grievances against the modernizing state coalesced in 1893 in a religiously inspired resistance movement linked to the folk saint, Teresa de Urrea, “La Santa de Cabora.” Each discussant praised Vanderwood’s dramatic narration of insurrection, his masterful reconstruction of local history, and his insightful portrayal of multilevel camarilla politics in Porfirian Mexico.

Gilbert Joseph (Yale University) raised three issues “at the heart of the cultural historical enterprise in this exciting but terribly unsettled post-structuralist moment.” The first concerned the task of interpreting the modernizing process. Joseph praised Vanderwood for his rich interpretation of modernization not as an inexorable process that people unsuccessfully resist, but as one influenced by its antagonists, proponents, and those in-between. Vanderwood chronicles the story of people trying to make sense of a rapidly changing world that both seduces and repels them. Joseph asked whether Vanderwood’s simultaneous use of Manichean dichotomies (spiritual versus rational, modernity versus tradition, civil versus religious authority) was not at odds with the “anomalous, hybrid social movements. . .and identities” he uncovers in his analysis. Joseph then turned to the problem of decoding popular knowledge and aspirations—i.e., how to make sense of popular consciousness in fleeting moments of collective action that leave little cultural trace. Vanderwood discerns intentions and aspirations from action and context. As historical ethnographer, he traces demographic patterns, routines of family life, trends in landholding and labor recruitment, religious beliefs and practices, and the dynamics of local politics, building an evidentiary structure to support the weight of his inferences about millenarian consciousness. Compelled to read official accounts “against the grain,” he deciphers popular consciousness from what Ranajit Guha calls “the prose of counterinsurgency.” Finally, Joseph addressed the question of writing polyphonic narrative history when the historical record is incomplete. Some historians blur the lines between history and fiction, others are not averse to filling in where the trail of evidence disappears, but Vanderwood does not fictionalize the past. He tells us when an individual “meanders out of the documentation, with his place in the historical tapestry neither fully revealed nor altogether understood.” Still, with limited sources, Vanderwood gives voice to a considerable number of actors, including women (from Teresa Urrea to those who stood in the frontline of defense at Tomóchic).

Alan Knight (St Antony’s College, Oxford) raised questions about the role of religion in the rebellion. Vanderwood portrays the movement as motivated by multiple grievances but millenarian in its ideological expression. Knight found the evidence for millenarianism to be thin, based upon state and church sources with an interest in portraying the rebels as fanatics; upon the rebels’ association with Teresa Urrea, who denied messianic status; and upon the power of millenarian belief in human history. Comparing Tomóchic with the contemporary Canudos movement in Brazil, Knight offered an alternative argument. Both occurred in largely illiterate rural societies where the endemic precariousness of survival had become aggravated by processes of political centralization and capitalist development. Both typically turned to religion and magic to explain and control the vicissitudes of life, the more so when neither church nor state would provide assistance, and schooling had not taken root as an alternative form of knowledge and control. Popular religion took up the slack, producing a host of local saints, prophets, and healers. If millenarianism was common in Brazil, Knight argued, it was not in Mexico. Northern Mexico in the Porfiriato produced a heterodox anticlerical religiosity of Spiritism, Protestantism, and folk cults. These flourished because of the institutional weakness of the Catholic church and the North’s anomic, mobile, and individualist character.

In his commentary, Eric Van Young (University of California, San Diego) explored Vanderwood’s book as an “artifact of historical thinking and technique.” He asked how it achieved its truth effects through structure and interpretation that respected the mystery at the heart of the episode and of religious sensibility in general. Taking his cues from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou (Paris, 1975) and Luis González’s Pueblo en vilo (Mexico City, 1968), Vanderwood provides rich description of the texture of local life in work, home, entertainment, religion, and politics, all seen as affluents of cultural expression. While economic factors and social structure channel collective action, its wellspring for Vanderwood is religious sensibility. The story is one of Greek tragedy conveying a sense of dramatic inevitability “fostered by the omniscient narrator voice achieved by transhistoricizing much description; moving back and forth and forward sociologically across a wider front to contextualize actions and thinking.” Yet Vanderwood’s narrative sticks closely to his sources. Van Young detected a double standard in relation to treatments of religious sensibility versus those of politics, economics, and social relations. The latter Vanderwood sociologizes in terms external to the historical actor’s own categories, but religion he takes reverently at face value: Santa Teresa’s miracles, Cruz Chavez’s religious motives, and the Tomochitecos’ allegiance to Santa Teresa.

Vanderwood responded graciously to the panelists, noting that they had articulated theoretical and conceptual issues that challenge us all. He was especially pleased that the committee had chosen to discuss a book on religion, a topic that typically receives less attention from historians. In response to Joseph’s comment on dichotomizing the secular and sacred, he said that he tried to write the book from the perspective of the participants and that on these kinds of issues, the faithful drew sharp distinctions. He thought that Knight underestimated the power of popular religion and answered his doubts about millenarianism with evidence he believes marked the movement as millenarian. In response to Van Young’s comment about his failure to sociologize religiosity, Vanderwood responded that he believed in miracles. Answering the repeated suggestion on the need for comparison between this and other revolts, he said that comparison had not been his purpose. Rather, he intended to stick closely to what his actors of Tomóchic knew of the world.

mary kay vaughan

Population and Quantitative History

The committee convened at the CLAH meetings and heard a paper by Richard and Linda Salvucci (Trinity University) on “The Terms of Trade: Old Questions, New Answers”. Based on detailed analysis of Mexican and Cuban terms of trade (under its various definitions), the paper argued that there is little evidence that trade could have served as an engine of immiserization in nineteenth-century Latin America.

Rather than appointing a formal discussant, the committee chose a broad-based, roundtable format for a discussion of the issues raised by the paper. Approximately 15 people attended the session, and virtually all participated.

There were three concrete results of this discussion. First, there was a resolution to dedicate next year’s committee meeting to the question of standards of living in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America. The chair of the committee was directed by members in attendance to put together a panel of several presenters, which he is currently doing. Second, it was resolved that the chair should ask the CLAH administration to move the committee meeting time to a slot other than 7:30 a.m. The repeated slotting of the meeting at this hour is a disincentive for members to participate. Third, a subcommittee of those in attendance (Professors Edward Beatty, Richard Salvucci, Donald Stevens, Anne Hanley, David Weiland, and Herbert Klein) convened after the committee meeting had adjourned to discuss the committee’s future and its role in the CLAH. They resolved that the committee should be renamed the Committee on Social Science History. The reason for this name change is twofold. First, there is not, in fact, a branch of history called quantitative history. Rather, there are social science historians who use quantitative methods (as well as nonquantitative methods) in their work. Renaming the committee therefore brings its descriptive title in line with actual practice. Second, the committee seeks to broaden its appeal to those historians whose primary interest may not be quantitative methods. That is, the committee wishes to send a message to other members of the CLAH who may have some interest in using the analytic techniques of the social sciences that the door is open to their participation, even if their primary interest is not in quantitative methods.

Following this resolution at the subcommittee level, the chair emailed all members of the committee to elicit their views. All those who responded to the email voted to change the name of the committee. We therefore resolve to henceforth be called the Committee on Social Science History.

steve haber