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Missing Bones: the ‘Dirty War ’in Córdoba examines the history of state terrorism during Argentina’s 1976—83 military dictatorship in a single place: the industrial city of Córdoba, Argentina’s second largest city and the site of some of the dirty war’s greatest crimes. It examines the city’s previous history of social protest, working class militancy and leftist activism as an explanation for the particular nature of the dirty war there. Missing Bones examines both national and transnational influences on the counter-revolutionary war in Córdoba. The book also considers the legacy of this period and examines the role of the state in constructing a public memory of the violence and holding accountable those responsible through the most extensive trials for crimes against humanity to take place anywhere in Latin America.

In 1980, a death squad linked to business tycoons and military commanders murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero for denouncing widespread repression and poverty in El Salvador. Romero was known as the “voice of the voiceless,” and his criticism of the oligarchs who dominated the economy and the Security Forces that tortured and murdered civilians made Romero a military target. Two decades after his assassination, the Center for Justice & Accountability (CJA) found one of the conspirators, Álvaro Saravia, living in California and launched a wide-ranging investigation into the death squad and its financiers. This book chronicles the life and death of the Catholic martyr, examining his actions and situating his years as archbishop in the broader context of the Salvadoran clergy’s embrace of Liberation Theology. It also analyzes, through excerpts from witness interviews and trial testimony, the mindset of the death squad members, their leader Roberto D’Aubuisson, and their wealthy backers, that propelled them to want Romero dead. The U.S. government played an important and contradictory role in developing the death squads and funding the military from which they sprang while also investigating their crimes and seeking to keep them in check. Within this complicated historical context, the book provides a first-hand account of the investigation and U.S. legal case that led to the only court verdict ever reached for Archbishop Romero’s murder.

Security was the primary concern of colonial empire in the Americas, and nowhere was this more evident than in the walled port city of colonial Havana. Looking within, through, and beyond the colonial processes responsible for Havana's walls, Beyond the Walled City explores the complex history of Havana's relationship to colonial empire. The city walls, built in the early seventeenth century, defended Havana from pirates and corsairs and from the other Atlantic empires, Spain’s competitors. Through the groundbreaking and urbanization debates that surrounded their construction and demolition, Guadalupe García explores the interplay between urban space and imperial rule in colonial Cuba. She shows that the all-encompassing stone walls remained an integral part of Havana’s landscape for much of its colonial existence, marking the ways in which colonial exclusion became synonymous with colonial power. Beyond the Walled City demonstrates how urban development became a legitimating force of empire that remained constant throughout Havana’s existence and how people, space, and colonial sovereignty and legal practice converged to produce the landscape of the Spanish-Caribbean city. García reveals that while the Spanish crown remained oriented toward the Atlantic, Cubans turned their attention away from the sea and toward the internal changes taking place in Cuba. She traces the expansion of the city through over four hundred years of political, social, and economic changes to demonstrate how the founding concerns of the colonial city continued to organize Havana’s urban space long after the end of colonial rule, into the twentieth century—and, arguably, well beyond it.

For more than three hundred years, Mexico City’s Baratillo marketplace was synonymous with crime, vice, and the most disreputable elements of urban society. Despite countless attempts to disband it, the Baratillo persevered, outlasting Spanish colonial rule and dozens of republican governments. In the twentieth century, transformed the neighborhood of Tepito it into a global hub of black-market commerce. Black Market Capital argues that the Baratillo and the broader shadow economy—which combined illicit, informal, and second-hand exchanges—have been central to the economy and the politics of Mexico City since the seventeenth century. The Baratillo benefited a wide swath of urban society, fostering unlikely alliances between elite merchants, government officials, newspaper editors, and street vendors. Vendors in the Baratillo turned their market’s economic appeal into political clout, petitioning colonial and national-era officials and engaging in the capital’s public sphere to defend their livelihoods. Using records from municipal and national archives in Mexico City, newspapers, travelers’ accounts, and novels, Black Market Capital reconstructs the history of one of Mexico City’s most enduring yet least understood institutions. It provides a new perspective on the relationship between urban politics, the informal economy, and public space in Mexico City between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries.

Popular culture has long conflated Mexico with the macabre. Some persuasive intellectuals argue that Mexicans have a special relationship with death, formed in the crucible of their hybrid Aztec-European heritage. Death is their intimate friend; death is mocked and accepted with irony and fatalistic abandon. The commonplace nature of death desensitizes Mexicans to suffering. Death, simply put, defines Mexico. There must have been historical actors who looked away from human misery, but to essentialize a diverse group of people as possessing a unique death cult delights those who want to see the exotic in Mexico or distinguish that society from its peers. Examining tragic and untimely death—namely self-annihilation—reveals a counter narrative. What could be more chilling than suicide, especially the violent death of the young? What desperation or madness pushed the victim to raise the gun to the temple or slip the noose around the neck? A close examination of a wide range of twentieth-century historical documents proves that Mexicans did not accept death with a cavalier chuckle nor develop a unique death cult, for that matter. Quite the reverse, Mexicans behaved just as their contemporaries did in Austria, France, England, and the United States. They devoted scientific inquiry to the malady and mourned the loss of each life to suicide.

In the first decades of the 1800s, after almost three centuries of Iberian rule, former Spanish territories fragmented into more than a dozen new polities. Edge of Empire analyzes the emergence of Montevideo as a hot spot of Atlantic trade and regional center of power, often opposing Buenos Aires. By focusing on commercial and social networks in the Rio de la Plata region, the book examines how Montevideo merchant elites used trans-imperial connections to expand their influence and how their trade offered crucial support to Montevideo’s autonomist projects. These trans-imperial networks offered different political, social, and economic options to local societies and shaped the formation of political projects that emerged in the region, including the formation of Uruguay. This book connects South America to the broader Atlantic world, providing an excellent case study for examining the significance of cross-border interactions in shaping independence processes and political identities.

The deep relationship between the United States and Mexico has had repercussions felt around the world. This chronicle of the economic and social connections between the two nations opens a new window onto history from the Civil War to today and illuminates the course of events that made the United States a global empire. The Mexican Revolution, Manifest Destiny, World War II, and NAFTA are all part of the story, but this narrative transcends these moments of economic and political drama, resonating with the themes of wealth and power. Combining economic and historical analysis with personal memoirs and vivid descriptions of key episodes and players, this book is based on substantial amounts of previously unexplored source material. Recently declassified documents in the archives of the United States government have been examined for this book and the author has also traveled extensively in rural Mexico to uncover the rich sources for this gripping story of 135 years of intervention, cooperation, and corruption. Beginning just after the American Civil War, the book traces the activities of an elite group of financiers and industrialists who, sensing opportunities for wealth to the south, began to develop Mexico's infrastructure. It charts their activities through the pivotal regime of Porfirio Díaz, when Americans began to gain ownership of Mexico's natural resources, and through the Mexican Revolution, when Americans lost many of their holdings in Mexico. The book concentrates less on traditional political history in the twentieth century and more on the hidden interactions between Americans and Mexicans, especially the unfolding story of industrial production in Mexico for export to the United States. Throughout, this narrative illuminates the development and expansion of the American railroad, oil, mining, and banking industries. The book also shows how the export of the “American Dream” has shaped such areas as religion and work attitudes in Mexico. This book reveals much about the American psyche, especially the compulsion of American elites toward wealth, global power, and contact with other peoples, often in order to “save” them. These characteristics were first expressed internationally in Mexico, and the book shows that the Mexican experience was and continues to be a prototype for U.S. expansion around the world. This work demonstrates the often inconspicuous yet profoundly damaging impact of American investment in the underdeveloped countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics and the Struggle for the Street in Chile is a cultural history of the street in Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende, the hemisphere’s first democratically elected Socialist president. Santiago became a contested political arena during Allende’s 1000 days in power. Residents across the political spectrum engaged in a heated battle to claim public space and challenge the terms and limits of political contest. Santiaguinos occupied public spaces in ways that appear fleeting, ephemeral, or mundane, but that challenged the sites and forms of legitimate political debate in Chile. Ephemeral Histories studies the tactics of political conflict— marches and protest, posters and murals, and documentary film and street photography—and sheds light on the contours of a public sphere of political debate rooted in urban practice. Street art, for instance, was both vehicle and window into a wider attempt to claim public spaces as a means of reimaging political citizenship. Graffiti, posters and murals might last an hour or a day before they were torn down or painted over, but they allowed a wide range of urban residents to redefine how and where politics was done and debated, and to reimagine the very mode of legitimate political debate in democracy and again in dictatorship. In fact, santiaguinos turned again to ephemeral political practices to rebuild political networks and reestablish political debate after the bloody military coup that deposed Allende on September 11, 1973. Placing urban and visual culture at the center of a story of political change over time, Ephemeral Histories traces the connections and continuities in political citizenship and practice in democracy and dictatorship. It suggests that the regime’s violence did not represent a clean rupture with the past, but a brutal engagement with the history of urban politics under Allende.

This book examines Colombian society's attempt to move beyond the Western Hemisphere's worst mid-century conflict and shows how that effort molded notions of belonging and understandings of the past. The book reconstructs encounters between government officials, rural peoples, provincial elites, and urban intellectuals during a crucial conjuncture that saw reformist optimism transform into alienation. In addition to offering a sweeping reinterpretation of Colombian history—including the most detailed account of the origins of the FARC insurgency in any language—the book provides a Colombian vantage on global processes of democratic transition, development, and memory formation in the 1950s and 1960s. Broad in scope, this book challenges contemporary theories of violence in Latin America.

This book examines the construction of crime as a central focus of public life in postrevolutionary Mexico. It does so by exploring cases, stories, and characters that attracted Mexican publics between the 1920s and the 1950s. The problems of learning the truth about criminal events and of adjudicating punishment or forgiveness concerned a broad spectrum of the population. This book looks at narratives, debates, and social practices through which a diversity of actors engaged the state and public opinion around a theme of common interest. Narratives and media about crime and justice that are still in place today developed during the decades of the twentieth century examined in the book: broadly shared ideas about impunity and corruption, extrajudicial punishment and the public meaning of homicide, and the divorce of legal justice and the truth.

In 1968 a street and media-savvy democratization movement led by students emerged in Mexico City. The 68 Movement was targeted in a state-sponsored massacre at a massive new housing complex ten days before the city hosted the Olympic Games. Both the complex and the mega event were symbols of the country’s rapid modernization but also decades-long political disenfranchisement and urban redevelopment that rendered citizens “guests” of the government and its allies. In spite of institutional denial, censorship and impunity, the massacre remains a touchstone in contemporary public culture thanks to the public memory work of survivors and narrators among Mexico’s intelligentsia. Hotel Mexico asks: How was urban space—material but also literary and cinematic—harnessed as a recalcitrant archive of 1968 and continues to serve as a framework for de facto modes of justice. The 68 Movement’s imaginary and tactics are interwoven and compared with other efforts, both official and countercultural, to reevaluate or renew Mexico’s post-revolutionary modernity: in architecture, urbanism, literature, visual arts, and film—among them, Mario Pani’s housing complex Nonoalco-Tlatelolco (1958–64), kinetic environments created for the 1968 Olympics, and David Alfaro Siqueiros last major mural, The March of Humanity (1964–71).

Explicitly focusing on the malaise of underdevelopment that has shaped the country since the Spanish conquest, this book offers a panoramic interpretation of Mexican history and culture from the pre-Hispanic and colonial eras through the twentieth century. Drawing on economics, psychology, literature, film, and history, it reveals how development processes have fostered glaring inequalities, uncovers the fundamental role of race and class in perpetuating poverty, and sheds new light on contemporary Mexican reality. Throughout, the book traces a legacy of dependency on outsiders, and considers the weighty role the United States has played, starting with an unjust war that cost Mexico half its territory. Based on decades of research and travel in Mexico, the work helps us better understand where the country has come from, why it is where it is today, and where it might go in the future.

This study marks the culmination of over twenty years of research by one of America's most prominent Mexico scholars. The book provides a detailed examination of Mexico's power elite—their political power, societal influence, and the crucial yet often overlooked role mentoring plays in their rise to the top. In the course of this book, the text traces the careers of approximately four hundred of the country's most notable politicians, military officers, clergy, intellectuals, and capitalists. Thoroughly researched and drawn from in-depth interviews with some of Mexico's most powerful players, this book provides insight into the machinations of Mexican leadership and an important glimpse into the country's future as it steps onto the global stage.

This book provides a provocative interpretation of Latin American history and the region's place in the changing global political economy, from the discovery of America into the twenty-first century. The book sheds new light on historical processes and explains how this vast expanse of territory—stretching from the American Southwest to the tip of the Southern Cone—became Europeanized in the colonial period, and how the European and American civilizations transformed one another as they grew together. The book departs from traditional historical thought by situating the narrative in the context of world history, showing how the Iberian populations and cultures—both European and American—merged and evolved.

Threatened by the violence of the anti-Chinese campaigns, Chinese Mexicans strengthened their ties to China as a way to safeguard their presence in the country. Paisanos Chinos illustrates the ways in which these transpacific ties helped Chinese Mexicans make a claim to belonging in Mexico and challenged traditional notions of Mexican identity and nationhood. From celebrating the end of the Second World War alongside Mexican neighbors, to carrying out an annual community pilgrimage to the Basílica de Guadalupe, Chinese Mexicans came from out of the shadows and sought to refute longstanding caricatures about the Chinese presence in the country. Using English-, Spanish-, and Chinese-language sources, Paisanos Chinos is the first work on Chinese Mexicans after 1940.

Peyote has marked the boundary between the Indian and the West since it was outlawed by the Spanish Inquisition in 1620. For nearly four centuries, ecclesiastical, legal, scientific, and scholarly authorities have worked to police that boundary and ensure that while indigenous subjects might consume peyote, non-indigenes could not. It is a boundary repeatedly remade, in part because generations of non-indigenes have refused to stay on their side of the line. Moving back and forth across the U.S.-Mexican border, this book explores how battles over who might enjoy the right to consume peyote have unfolded in both countries in the two centuries since Mexican independence. It focuses particularly how these conflicts have contributed to the racially exclusionary system that characterizes modern drug regimes. Through this approach, we also see a surprising history of racial thinking that binds the two countries more closely than we might think.

This book recounts four centuries of the history of women labeled public women, whores, and prostitutes in New Spain’s archival records and works of literature from Spain and Mexico. Performing conventional gender roles, women resisted the archival inscription of these labels, so this complex story of multi-layered viceregal sex work acknowledges the ambiguities and limitations of documenting the history of sexuality via written sources. The elusive, ever-changing terminology for prosecuted women in the early modern Iberian world, voiced by kings, jurists, magistrates, inquisitors, and bishops, as well as disgruntled husbands and neighbors, foreshadows the increasing regulation, criminalization, and polarizing politics of modern global transactional sex. Key themes include: the history of the word “prostitute/prostitution,” narratives presented by women in a court setting, the creation of a victim narrative by defendants and prosecutors, legal history, and the importance of the economic and familial context in shaping sexual transactionality. Sources used come from the archives of police, church, and inquisitorial investigations. Interpretations are shaped by archival and sex work activism theories.

This book explorse the history of illicit and alternative sexualities in Latin America’s colonial and early national periods. Together the chapters examine how “the unnatural” came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, including acts officially deemed to be “against nature”—sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation—along with others that approximated the unnatural-hermaphroditism, incest, sex with the devil, solicitation in the confessional, erotic religious visions, and the desecration of holy images. In doing so, this anthology makes important and necessary contributions to the historiography of gender and sexuality. Amid the growing politicized interest in broader LGBTQ movements in Latin America, the book also shows how these legal codes endured to make their way into post-independence Latin America.

In the late nineteenth century, Mexicans quickly adopted new technologies imported from abroad to sew cloth, manufacture glass bottles, refine minerals, and provide many other goods and services across the economy. New technologies underlay rapid economic growth as well as cultural change and social dislocation. This book traces general trends across the Mexican economy and offers new case studies of the canonical technologies of the first industrial revolution (railroads, steam engines, and iron) and of the late nineteenth century (sewing machines, automated glass bottle manufacturing, and cyanide process in gold and silver refining). The central paradox of this experience is the contrast between rapid technological change and a persistent dependence on know-how and hardware imported from the countries of the North Atlantic. Dependence arose in the gap between adopting new technologies and assimilating new knowledge and expertise. Adoption proved relatively easy in most (but not all) cases, and new machines and products were quickly integrated into the lives of many Mexicans. Yet assimilating the knowledge and expertise embedded within technology imports proved more difficult.

A history of the pesticide DBCP in the United States and Central America, Toxic Injustice explores the production of both health inequalities and resistance in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century globalization. In the 1950s and 1980s, DBCP production, regulation, and use created disproportionate risk for Central American banana workers and their—often immigrant—U.S. farmworker counterparts. Despite toxicological evidence of DBCP’s dangers, transnational fruit and chemical corporations produced, used, and sold the pesticide for nearly three decades. Exposed workers developed experiential knowledge of DBCP but had little protection and limited power over working conditions. Beginning in the 1980s, workers in Costa Rica and Nicaragua demanded compensation for sterility and for cancer and other diseases they attributed to DBCP exposure. They demanded justice at the national and transnational scales, bringing lawsuits in the United States and organizing movements at home. Throughout DBCP’s history, corporations and workers alike engaged the state in legal and scientific processes shaped by national borders and domestic democratic traditions, as well as by interstate power dynamics and an ascendant neoliberalism. The successes of the Nicaraguan and Costa Rican movements—though transitory and partial—suggest the state remains an important site of struggle over health and environment on the national and transnational scales.