Reviews

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10000933

John Hillman, The International Tin Cartel (London and New York : Routledge,2010), pp. xii+484, £120.00, hb.

The title of this remarkable book is not strictly inaccurate because the volumeprovides what must surely stand as the definitive account of the internationalmarket arrangements for tin between 1931 and 1985, with particular attention tothe International Tin Restriction Agreements of 1931 to 1946 – but the book isfar, far more than that. Had Professor Hillman been a more boosterish author,no doubt Routledge, which has charged a cover price suggesting that it knowsfull well the value of its product, would have marketed the book in the mannerof recent popular titles on co!ee, cod, tea, salt and other commodities. Unlikeso many such studies, however, this is a profoundly original and scholarlyendeavour, combining the knowledge and wisdom of a distinguished academiccareer in a truly magisterial manner. This work will greatly enrich our knowledgeof market regulation, international relations, the tin mining and processingindustries, and the more general role of minerals and mineralogy in themodern world. It is, in short, a comprehensive history of tin wrapped up in arevealing study of what many will see as a distinctly ethereal world of com-mercial power.

Regular readers of the JLAS may feel that their regional interests can be ad-equately satisfied by reference to John Hillman’s work on the leading LatinAmerican tin economy, Bolivia, published in these pages long before its incorpor-ation into the book.1 While that course of action should not by any means bediscouraged, it would still only provide a limited, monographic portrait, necessarilycontextualised with considerable concision. In The International Tin Cartel, the fullglobal scene is depicted and discussed in a rich vein of comparison that throws lightnot just on regional and industrial di!erences but also on the vital patterns ofcontinuity and rupture that existed in the mid-twentieth century. It is assuredly not astudy apt for a single reading, but, opening with a pithy quote from that maverickTory grandee Alan Clark, the volume possesses a range of voices, a compelling set ofanecdotes, statistics and illustrations, and a delightfully clear-minded and lucidlyexpressed treatment of an international market.

The survey stretches from the foundations of the tin industry in those epochs ofhuman history known through metallic adjectives, right through to the crash of themarket on 24 October 1985, when ‘Pieter de Konig, Manager of the Bu!er Stock ofthe International Tin Council, informed Ted Jordan, Chairman of the Committeeof the London Metal Exchange, that he was no longer in a position to meet his

1 ‘The Emergence of the Tin Industry in Bolivia ’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 16, no. 2(1984) ; ‘Bolivia and the International Tin Cartel ’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 20,no. 1 (1988) ; ‘Bolivia and British Tin Policy, 1939–1945’, Journal of Latin American Studies,vol. 22, no. 2 (1990).

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42, 615–681 f Cambridge University Press 2010 615

financial obligations. Overnight, £900 million in paper assets vanished’. Of course,in recent years such scenarios have become rather less rare, and we are rapidlybecoming as habituated to the lineaments of market failure as we were in decadessuch as the 1980s to tutorials on its cast-iron success. What is o!ered in Hillman’sbook is a detailed empirical and analytical account of the negotiations and achieve-ments of the world’s first intergovernmental agreement to provide regulatoryauthority – through the International Tin Council (ITC) – for a world commoditythrough the power of controlling production. This is substantively important as wellas o!ering many broader lessons. Hillman approaches the experience through threedimensions : the structure of the industry, the form of regulation, and the normative.In the first, he asks : how is the product used, what are the conditions under which itis produced, and how is it marketed? In the second he inquires as to who theregulators are, how they are connected to the industry, what instruments they haveat their disposal, and how decisions are made about these instruments’ use. And inthe third, his queries are : how well did regulation solve the problem that promptedits formulation, who benefited, and who lost? In all cases, his approach is admirablyfair, although he is not notably sympathetic to the assumption that regulation is anaberrant condition. The range of detailed empirical study is truly global in a mannerthat can only be aspired to by many shallow essays trading under the fashionableensign of ‘globalisation ’ studies. All continents are considered, hundreds of schol-arly works and some 40 journals in half a dozen languages have been consulted(and with unnerving attention to detail). The account rests upon a formidableamount of primary documentation, not just from the ITC itself (mostly accessedthrough the Colonial O"ce records at Kew) but also from the most relevantcolonies/countries (including Nigeria, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia,Bolivia, Burma, Malaysia and the United States), the local domestic administrationswithin those states (for Malaya alone – Batu Gajah, Ulu Selangor, Trengganu, Perlisand Johore), the industry associations, and the companies themselves (with sourcesranging from minutes books to shareholder lists). In a decades-long pursuit of thesesources, John Hillman visited over 30 depositaries from Cochabamba to KualaLumpur.

Follow the results of that trail and you will pick up not just answers to thequestions posed above, but also a history of economic thought during theDepression and beyond. You will learn that there exists a buoyant literature linkingpreserved foods and civilisation (‘Pickles and Purity ’), and that if Niger did not sellmaterials for Saddam Hussein’s putative weapons of mass destruction, it almostcertainly supplied the Phoenician bronzesmiths of Hannibal’s Carthage. Forstudents of Bolivia, perhaps the most impressive contribution of the book lies in thedetailed account of the integration of so-called ‘national capitalists ’, principallySimon Patino, into the international arena, to the extent that their national originbecomes an entirely secondary attribute – but after a few chapters of this excep-tional study, the reader becomes accustomed to learning through surprise. You maynot possess the personal resources to acquire the title for yourself, but you shoulddefinitely recommend it as an acquisition for your library, where it will serve asan invaluable resource for students of international political economy, history,globalisation and business studies.

J A M E S D U NK E R L E YQueen Mary, University of London

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J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10000945

Carlos Ivan Degregori and Pablo Sandoval (eds.), Saberes perifericos : ensayos sobrela antropologıa en America Latina (Lima : Instituto de Estudios Peruanos/InstitutoFrances de Estudios Andinos, 2008), pp. 250, pb.

Carlos Ivan Degregori and Pablo Sandoval, Antropologıa y antropologos en el Peru :la comunidad academica de ciencias sociales bajo la modernizacion neoliberal (Lima :Instituto de Estudios Peruanos/Consejo Latinomericano de Ciencias Sociales,2009), pp. 178, pb.

I remember speaking to an anthropology class at Lima’s San Marcos University backin 1990. The Communist Party of Peru–Shining Path was then still waging its war ofpropaganda, bombings and assassinations, and San Marcos had become a battlezone. A student rose to interrupt me halfway through my talk with some ShiningPath boilerplate about the glorious coming revolution. Others, sick of the Maoists,shouted him down. Chairs went flying and the professor who invited me cancelledthe class.

These two books from Carlos Ivan Degregori and Pablo Sandoval explore thestate of anthropology in Peru today. Education seemed to many Peruvians to be theblack box of progress and modernity in the last century. Along with an enormousgrowth in the primary and secondary school system, the number of universitiesexpanded exponentially from six to 82. Anthropology followed the trend with newprogrammes both in Lima and in provincial universities in Ayacucho and Huancayo.

And yet, Degregori and Sandoval show a recent decline in hopes for highereducation in general, and anthropology in particular. They especially blame formerpresident Alberto Fujimori’s neoliberal policies, among them cutbacks for alreadyunderfunded public universities. The embrace of privatisation and the marketexacerbated the old hierarchies that left provincial universities poor cousins to thosein Lima, and public institutions to private ones. Anthropology has su!ered especiallyfrom new emphasis on technical and business training. Alejandro Toledo, Fujimori’ssuccessor, made much of Peru’s indigenous heritage, and his wife was an anthro-pologist who liked to dress up in native garb, but his government did little toaddress the grim present day confronting the impoverished Andean majorities or aneducational system in shambles.

Today, only Lima’s Catholic University has a strong anthropology programme.Through interviews and surveys, Degregori, Peru’s leading anthropologist, andSandoval, a San Marcos graduate and doctoral candidate at the Colegio de Mexico,reveal feelings of superiority among some Catholic University students, who aremore likely to be white and from well-o! families, and a sense of second-classcitizenship among their counterparts in poorer and provincial universities. The stateof Peruvian anthropology, Degregori and Sandoval conclude, has descended into‘ fragmentation, exclusion, inequalities, abandonment, prejudice, and mistrust ’(Antropologıa y antropologos en el Peru, p. 151).

The contributors to Saberes perifericos give us other views of anthropology inPeru and, in two essays, Mexico and Brazil. As Degregori and Sandoval point out intheir introduction, Latin America has a ‘mestizo anthropology ’ – in other words, atradition marked by local intellectual currents as well as the influences of the UnitedStates and Europe. Yet several contributors also focus on the way in which the‘peripheral knowledges ’ of Latin American anthropologists have been devalued byacademics from the more prosperous north. A provocative yet overheated and less

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than persuasive essay by Raul Romero accuses US scholars not only of ignoringthe work of Peruvian academics, but also of replicating crude stereotypes about Peruas a place of su!ering, exoticism and danger. Marisol de la Cadena’s fascinatingcontribution uses the debate around anthropologist and novelist Jose MarıaArguedas’ Todas las sangres to suggest that indigenous intellectuals may be theprotagonists of a previously ‘unthinkable ’ epistemological revolution that dissolvesold binaries between nature and culture, science and magic, reason and religion(Saberes perifericos, p. 123). If embarrassment in the United States over the discipline’sreal and imagined past sins has led to plenty of ‘anthro(a)pology ’, Mariza Peiranoargues that anthropology in Brazil has done more good than harm. She citesthe discipline’s challenge to ethnocentrism and provincialisation of the West inits demonstration of the fuller range of human possibilities. Carmen Salazar-Bondy reminds us about the distinctive genealogy of French anthropology ofthe Andes.

As elsewhere, Latin American anthropology began as the study of the exoticand the primitive. This made Indians, cast as the internal Other, into the mainobject of investigation. A wonderful essay by Claudio Lomnitz locates anthropologywithin what he calls the ‘manic-depressive cycles of disillusion and discovery ’that have characterised dominant thinking about America’s first peoples ever since1492. From Columbus’ enchantment with New World marvels to eighteenth-century Spanish disillusionment to the nineteenth-century Romantic ‘ rediscovery ’of the Americas, the attitudes of outsiders towards Indians have typically saidmore about their own mood and agendas than the realities of native experienceitself. Lomnitz contrasts the place occupied by Indians in the Mexican imaginationwith that of blacks in the United States : both historically oppressed, and yet Indians,unlike blacks, were nonetheless also glorified as the touchstone of the modernnation. At least in the early twentieth century with the Mexican Revolution andthe likes of Manuel Gamio, anthropology assumed an especially prominentrole. It was the science of those conceived as the backbone of the revolutionaryproject.

Degregori and Sandoval pinpoint the massacre at Uchuraccay in 1983 as a turningpoint in Peruvian anthropology. Here villagers killed eight journalists and theirguide, mistaking them for Shining Path guerrillas ; it was the beginning of a peasantrebellion against the insurgents, and the death knell for any orthodox Marxism inPeru (Maoism, in particular, exercised a strong influence in universities, with severaltop rebel leaders trained as anthropologists). Uchuraccay also marked the end ofanthropology’s proclivity for exoticising the Andes as a zone of timeless Otherness,of primordial ‘Quechua Indians ’. Contrary to the report produced by famed novelistMario Vargas Llosa, the villagers in Uchuraccay were not Dark Ages peasants cut o!from history and the world, but very much a part of modern Peru, with wideexperience of travelling to the jungle and elsewhere in search of work. As Degregorinotes, you are just as likely to encounter the Indian ‘Other ’ nowadays walking downa city street as up in the mountains. Millions of villagers, over many decades now,have headed to Lima and in the process transformed Pizarro’s Spanish capital intoan Andean city.

For all the changes that have taken place, the anthropology of Peru still smellsof colonialism in some ways. The reinvention of anthropology as the study ofculture everywhere – and not just putatively exotic peoples – has been relativelyslow to take hold. Most anthropologists still ‘ study down’, focusing on the brown

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majorities, and there has been less work as yet on the institutions and sensibilities ofthe middle classes, elites, corporations and military. Whether white NorthAmericans or middle-class Limans, the majority of anthropologists themselves stillcome from relative privilege. And there has been a costly brain drain of promisingprovincial scholars to greater opportunities in Lima or abroad – and of young Limanacademics to the better salaries and job stability of North American and Europeanuniversities. There remain many top-notch scholars based in Peru doing excitingnew work, but the panorama of anthropology as a whole is bleak.

In concluding Antropologıa y antropologos en el Peru, Degregori and Sandoval advanceproposals for reinvigorating Peruvian anthropology. Interestingly, they suggestthat an insistence on learning English should be one step, given that it has becomea global lingua franca. But adopting any of Degregori and Sandoval’s suggestionsis another matter in a Peru that seems suspended in an eternal limbo of badgovernment, terrible inequality and dismal economic prospects. The demographicsof Peruvian anthropology have made it an aging profession heavy with scholars intheir fifties and sixties. It will be with a new generation of anthropologists that anyreal hope of renewal lies.

O R I N S T A R NDuke University

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10000957

Richard Kernaghan, Coca’s Gone : Of Might and Right in the Huallaga Post-Boom(Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 308, $65.00, $24.95 pb.

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork spanning almost a decade, RichardKernaghan’s book tells the story of the aftermath of the cocaine boom in the UpperHuallaga Valley, Peru. The objective is to consider the ways in which violent actsare turned into narratives and how these stories have the power to separate outhistorical eras and forge new legal orders.

In the mid-1970s the Upper Huallaga Valley became the centre of the Peruviancocaine trade. Huge numbers of dispossessed people from all over the countrymigrated to the region to try their luck in the tropical colonisation zone. The settlersfound jobs growing coca leaf and processing cocaine paste, and in activities relatedto the service of the burgeoning drug economy. Kernaghan’s informants recountfantastic tales of the boom years when ‘money was easy to come by ’ and theHuallaga was ‘ the place to go ’. The Shining Path, a Maoist splinter group ofthe Peruvian Communist Party, began its armed insurrection in 1980. Attracted bythe cocaine economy, it was not long before the guerrillas descended on theHuallaga Valley. Initially the guerrillas appealed to both the drug tra"ckers and thepeasants because this provided them with protection from the militarised policeforce, which was carrying out counter-narcotics and crop eradication operations inthe region. The Shining Path took control of the area and established a parallel stateapparatus, exacting taxes from the local population, imparting justice and imposingits puritanical rule through extreme violence and intimidation tactics. The Peruvianstate’s response to the threat of the Shining Path was to send in the armed forces.According to Kernaghan, the soldiers who were responsible for imposing stateauthority colluded with the drug tra"ckers and were often as brutally violent as theiropponents. In the early 1990s the price of coca began to fall as drug tra"ckersshifted their production to safer areas such as the departments of Madre de Diosand Apurimac. Then, in 1992, Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman was arrested

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and sentenced to life in prison. Today the Shining Path is a fragmented shadow of itsformer self.

It is in this context of the ‘post-boom’ that Kernaghan found himself in theHuallaga Valley carrying out fieldwork in the mid-1990s. He describes a sluggish andforsaken place ; rusting signs for long-closed-down nightclubs, derelict concretebuildings and fading Shining Path gra"ti acted as reminders of the area’s previousdynamism. Kernaghan’s informants widely perceived themselves to be on athreshold, tottering somewhere between the past era of excess and a future ofradically reduced possibilities. This ‘hard crease ’ in time, which divides the twoepochs, is also marked by two legal regimes, the former belonging to the ShiningPath and the latter to the Peruvian state. This ‘crease ’ is not complete, however ;while the reckless abandon and good times might have passed, some things havestayed the same. At night along the main highway and across the river in the ruralexpanse, the region remains a ‘no man’s land’ controlled by a shifting patchwork ofguerrilla groups, drug tra"ckers and bandits.

Kernaghan’s task is to capture the memories of the boom, which he tells us weighheavily upon the residents of the Huallaga Valley. To do this he looks at howthe past is narrated through newspaper clippings, oral testimony, radio programmesand civic events. The stories that are told are not direct representations of whathappened ; rather, Kernaghan explains that historical memory is formed collabora-tively as people try to impose a retroactive sense of order onto events. Thus thenarratives tell Kernaghan as much about the contemporary political and socialmilieu as about what actually transpired, and he stitches these stories together into adense interlocking collage of events spanning two decades.

Central to Kernaghan’s analysis is the way in which violent acts shape anemerging ‘historical sense ’. His focus on violence stems from the fact that duringthe boom years the Huallaga Valley was essentially lawless, and was marked byenduring conflict between the guerrillas, the military and groups competing forcontrol of the drug trade. Each group was intent on imposing its own brand of orderonto the tropical landscape. This was done through the strategic deployment oflethal force, which Kernaghan contends has a lawmaking potential. The book islittered with vignettes about bodies chopped up with chainsaws and put in blacknylon sacks, people bound and tossed from helicopters, and bodies dumped on thehighway. Inevitably these violent episodes become the basis for future stories. WhatKernaghan is interested in is the way that such events leave their mark on the formand content of the stories and thus shape perceptions of political time and space.

What is intriguing about this book is that despite the violence it describes,the author is careful not to take sides. Rather, Kernaghan provides a sympatheticaccount of almost all involved. There is a notable absence of the voices of cocagrowers and members of the Shining Path, but of course, access to these peoplewould have been very di"cult at the time that Kernaghan conducted his research.The Huallaga valley remains an unstable area and as a result has been neglected byanthropologists. Kernaghan’s book therefore represents an important contributionto the regional literature.

Kernaghan is not afraid to take the ethnography seriously. In this highlypersonalised, reflexive work, the reader is given the opportunity to see the events asthe fieldworker experienced them. What is more, Kernaghan allows his informantsto speak directly to the reader. Overall the book provides an engaging and vividaccount of the boom years and the subsequent depressed social and economic

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landscape. The book will be of great use to those scholars seeking to understandthe background to the emerging politicised coca growers’ movement in Peru.It will also be of interest to students of the Shining Path and the modernPeruvian state.

T H OMA S G R I S A F F ILondon School of Economics and Political Science

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10000969

Carlos de la Torre and Steve Stri#er (eds.), The Ecuador Reader : History, Culture,Politics (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 437,£57.00, £13.99 pb.

The Ecuador Reader is Duke University Press’s most recent addition to its LatinAmerica Readers series, which includes volumes on Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico,Cuba and Costa Rica. Designed to be a compilation of original texts spanningthe period of conquest and colonial rule through the twentieth century, as well asproviding contemporary analyses of Ecuadorean society, culture and politics, thisanthology o!ers a broad introduction to the country’s geopolitical ‘place ’ in theregion and world, its diverse cultural and linguistic traditions and its intellectualproduction. Although it is not entirely comprehensive and lacks at least two keyareas of analysis, The Ecuador Reader would be a useful companion text for under-graduate and graduate courses in Latin American studies, political science, sociology,anthropology and history, among other fields.

The Ecuador Reader is divided into six sections, each including its own introduc-tion : ‘Conquest and Colonial Rule ’, ‘A New Nation ’, ‘The Rise of the Popular ’,‘Global Currents ’, ‘Domination and Struggle ’ and ‘Cultures and IdentitiesRedefined ’. It captures the breadth and depth of some topical sections more suc-cessfully than others. In their introduction, the editors address the process of howthey selected materials for the reader. As they point out, Ecuador is not often on the‘geographic or imaginative map’ of people living outside Latin America, nor, forthat matter, of other Latin Americans (p. 1). They state : ‘Among outsiders who dohave an image of Ecuador, the country is generally seen as relatively peaceful, easy toget around in, and possessing spectacular beauty in both human (i.e., indigenouspeople with colorful clothes and weavings) and natural forms (i.e., the Andes,Amazon, and Galapagos Islands) ’ (p. 1). Their aim as editors is to dispel mythsabout Ecuador as a ‘banana republic ’, challenge pervasive cultural stereotypes andintroduce readers to the richness of Ecuador’s geographic, political and culturallandscape. They also aim to further problematise Ecuador’s position vis-a-visglobalisation, and to introduce readers to the legacy of economic instability, andmore recently, the pervasive debt crisis and reliance on structural adjustment loans.In relation to this, the anthology o!ers readers some idea of Ecuador’s politicaltrajectory and forms of governance in light of the country’s struggle for politicalsovereignty and economic autonomy. Unfortunately, very little of the more con-temporary process of economic and political restructuring, which spans the periodof the 1980s through the 2000s, is addressed in the collection.

To a large degree, the selected readings in each section help the reader understandthe country’s long-standing historical trends – trends that have also changed quite abit over time, leading to new understandings of Ecuador as a nation and to newnotions of citizenship and belonging among diverse groups of Ecuadoreans.In particular, the readings do a good job of portraying the experiences of indigenous

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and Afro-Ecuadorean communities across the span of centuries of colonial andpost-colonial rule. For example, in sections I and II (‘Conquest and Colonial Rule ’and ‘A New Nation ’, respectively), there are selections that document the manyconsequences of colonial rule and ideologies for indigenous communities, includinghow indigenous people have been historically constructed and governed, throughcolonialist ideologies, as the ‘miserable Indian race ’ (for example, the chapter byAndres Guerrero) ; this topic is also addressed in later sections highlighting notionsof indigeneity in the twentieth century (selections by Jorge Icaza, Henri Michaux,Carmen Martınez Novo and Norman E. Whitten Jr., among others). Likewise, anumber of chapters address processes of creolisation and racialisation, particularly asthey have a!ected the lives and identities of Afro-Ecuadoreans (chapters by SherwinK. Bryant, Jean Muteba Rahier and Norman E. Whitten Jr.).

Additional topics are addressed throughout the remaining sections, albeit withless depth. Section III, ‘The Rise of the Popular ’, addresses Ecuador’s shift from an‘old ’ to a ‘new’ political order in the first half of the twentieth century, emphasisingthe nation’s ongoing struggle for cultural and political modernity and the rise ofpopulism. Section IV, ‘Global Currents ’, includes a wide range of selections, someof which speak more directly to the section’s theme than others. There are textshighlighting global or foreign institutions such as the Catholic Church and theUnited Fruit Company ; a selection highlighting the forced migration of European(in this case, Hungarian) Jews who moved to Ecuador during the Second WorldWar ; and selections on Ecuadorean singer Julio Jaramillo, and on the Panama hat,which, contrary to popular belief, has its origins in Ecuador. Section V, ‘Dominationand Struggle ’, chronicles a few kinds of political struggle that continue to charac-terise the Ecuadorean political landscape – namely, struggles concerning women’srights, the environment, the global oil industry and Afro-Ecuadorean rights.One highlight is an interview with Nina Pacari, one of Ecuador’s most prominentindigenous leaders, who once served as minister of foreign a!airs. In section VI,‘Cultures and Identities Redefined’, there are selections by well-known writers andartists ( Javier Vasconez, Marıa Fernanda Espinosa and Ivan Onate), in addition toanalyses by and/or about Ecuadoreans who have contributed to the country’s arts,media and cultural production.

While clearly a reader of this type cannot cover everything, there are at least twoobvious absences in this collection. Firstly, there is unfortunately very little onEcuador’s political economy and cultural production since the 1980s. Given thecountry’s serious bout of financial crises in the 1990s, followed by several changes ofgovernment and the redrafting of the constitution in 1998 (and again in 2008), it is ashame that very little of this is addressed in the book. These crises also providedopportunities for social change, including in the redrafting of Ecuador’s consti-tution, which became the first in the region to include an anti-discrimination clauseon the basis of sexual orientation. Importantly, this period of crisis led to the shift tothe ‘New Left ’ in the 2000s, which arguably paved the way for the state to shift awayfrom the hegemonic neoliberal development model and implement its ‘citizen rev-olution ’ ; all of this, too, is ripe for discussion. Secondly, there is little analysis ofgender and sexuality as they relate to the other themes presented in the book. Tobegin with, there is only one article on women’s political participation (by SarahRadcli!e), despite the fact that there are numerous Ecuadorean feminist scholarswho have documented rich histories of women’s participation in politics and otherareas of public life over the span of centuries. People such as socialist feminist Nela

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Martinez and indigenous leader Transito Amaguana immediately come to mind, asdoes Manuela Saenz, the mistress of revolutionary leader Simon Bolıvar and asymbol to some contemporary women’s organisations in the country. Sadly, thereare no selections on gender and/or women in the volume written by Ecuadoreanscholars (there is the one interview with Nina Pacari conducted by Carlos de laTorre) and very little discussion of the role of sexuality in colonial and post-colonialgovernance. Increasingly, these are considered central issues in Latin Americanstudies ; it is a shame that they are not better represented here.

In sum, The Ecuador Reader introduces readers to important debates about colonialand post-colonial Ecuador, particularly through the mid-twentieth century.Importantly, it introduces students and interested readers to key debates ongovernance, economic change and culture as they have transpired over time in thecountry, with particularly strong emphases on pre-1980s Ecuador and on indigenousand Afro-Ecuadorean experiences.

A M Y L I N DUniversity of Cincinnati

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10000970

Edward F. Fischer (ed.), Indigenous Peoples, Civil Society, and the Neo-liberal State inLatin America (New York and Oxford : Berghahn Books, 2008), pp. vi+214,$29.95 ; £17.95, pb.

A review of scholarly work on indigenous movements in Latin America conductedby Jackson and Warren a few years ago convincingly argued ‘why certain dichoto-mies and concepts, usefully employed in earlier analyses, now hinder more thanhelp ’. It referred to oppositions between indigenous and non-indigenous peoplesand between traditional and modern practices. Coming to terms with several waysof ‘being indigenous ’ and understanding multiple and fluid identities is betterenhanced by equally sophisticated analytical tools than by conceptual dichotomies.The review also identified the ‘equivalent need ’ to examine di!erent kinds ofcitizenship emerging in new ‘civil society ’ discourses and practices.2 Without citingthem explicitly, these ideas were taken up by Edward Fischer for a project that led tothe edited volume under review here.

Under neoliberal dominance, the concept of civil society rose to prominence as adomain to which a retreating state delegated decentralised responsibilities, as well asone from which robust citizens and their associations were to emerge, either bychoice or necessity. Within this ideological context, civil society and the market wereperceived as the opposites of an obese and increasingly dysfunctional state. Whilethe market would guarantee wealth and e"cient resource use, civil society wouldspawn an active citizenry and become the foundation of democracy. However, asGoldstein et al. make clear in their contribution, things turned out di!erently, andthis volume contains interesting and thought-provoking case studies of indigenousmovements and practices that explain why. In all their diversity and on the basisof rich ethnographic research, the chapters share a critical stance towards unifiedindigenous identities and towards a one-dimensional view of civil society. Fischersummarises this point at the beginning of his introduction when he points to the

2 Jean A. Jackson and Kay B. Warren, ‘ Indigenous Movements in Latin America, 1992–2004 :Controversies, Ironies, New Directions ’, Annual Review of Anthropology, no. 34 (2005),pp. 557, 561.

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complexity of civil society as ‘ simultaneously a point of resistance and of hegemoniccollusion ’. By the end of the book the dichotomy of state and civil society hasdissolved in a web of interconnections.

One way of elaborating this general point is the argument that indigenousmovements or organisations can neither be taken for granted, nor assumed toautomatically emerge or exist and exert a favourable influence on the consolidationof democracy, rule of law and participation. In a well-informed historical analysis ofthe Andean region, Baud makes abundantly clear how for a long time indigenouspeoples actively engaged with the wider political and social environment, whichshaped their own political evolution and that of the state. A contemporary lawsuit ofindigenous and non-indigenous groups from the Ecuadorean Amazon againstChevronTexaco, analysed by Sawyer, did not arise spontaneously but was activelyachieved through a politics of articulation. Similarly, the concept of ‘vernacularstatecraft ’ (Colloredo-Mansfeld) indicates how indigenous organising and demandmaking are the outcome of coping with increasingly plural local communities insocial, economical and cultural terms (instead of coming out of some pre-existinghomogeneous subject), and how these experiences were subsequently ‘uploaded ’ tonational-level politics. Studying Colombia’s oldest indigenous organisation,Rappaport examines changing indigenous discourses as key instruments in thepolitics of articulation and highlights the way in which an indigenous movementcontinuously (re)positions and aligns itself to other social actors. Indigenouscombativeness and ethnic di!erence carry various meanings over time, generating‘di!erent degrees of acceptance by the state and by middle-class civil society ’.

The supposedly beneficial and uncontroversial nature of civil society is e!ectivelyrefuted in the contributions by Goldstein et al. and Pitarch. The first deals with aparticularly violent form of popular agency in the barrios of Cochabamba: popularlynchings. It uncompromisingly but rightly concludes that these violent expressionsof civil society are inherently undemocratic and harmful for the rule of law.However, extra-legal violence also seeks to address feelings of insecurity and defendcitizen’s rights. It is even instrumental in the construction of communitarian soli-darity and civil society itself. Pitarch, on the other hand, concentrates on the politicsof ‘ indigenous doctors ’ in the highlands of Chiapas. In a case study of the internalworkings of civil organisations of indigenous peoples in a heavily politicised en-vironment, the author questions the issue of indigenous representation and legit-imacy. A careful look at the experiences of three organisations of indigenousmedicine and practitioners shows that in some cases these organisations are e!ec-tively ‘kidnapped’ by non-indigenous outsiders for political purposes. These out-siders – unfortunately the author never specifies who they are – supplant theindigenous voice, reduce the plurality of positions and thereby e!ectively underminepractices of multiculturalism while formally defending them. Pitarch speaks un-equivocally of ‘uncivil e!ects ’ and calls the practice ‘ventriloquism’, a term also usedby Baud for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latin America, and suggeststhat Zapatista spokesman Marcos is the master of it. Does this mean that every formof outside intervention necessarily leads to ventriloquism and the manipulation ofindigenous interests ? The contributions of Sawyer on the interconnections betweentransnational NGOs and local indigenous activism and of Dickens on the conse-quences of externally financed development intervention and ecological conser-vation in Guatemala certainly refute this by pointing to the negotiations that tookplace between insiders and outsiders.

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Such a subtle approach can hardly be found in Cojtı’s study, perhaps more apamphlet, which at the beginning sets out to argue that the state in Guatemala‘ remains structurally colonialist and racist ’. Is this something typical of the harshrealities of Guatemala ( just as Pitarch suggests ventriloquism to be something veryMexican, which Baud would probably deny)? No, at least when we read CasausArzu’s contribution about the role and discourses of Guatemala’s Maya intellectualsin bringing about a more just and inclusive state and society. She sees evidenceof ‘ the influence and growing participation of indigenous movements andMaya intellectuals in the creation of a new, plural state ’. It is a pity that the editorof the volume, a specialist on Guatemalan indigenous activism, does nothingmore than note these ‘very di!erent perspectives ’ on developments in Guatemala.With respect to this country, the reader is left with the glass half-full, or indeed,half-empty.

W I L G. P A N S T E R SUtrecht University and University of Groningen

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10000982

Benjamin T. Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements : The Politics of State Formationin Postrevolutionary Oaxaca (Lincoln NE and London: University of NebraskaPress, 2009), p. x+578, £22.99, pb.

With the publication of Francie Chassen-Lopez’s From Liberal to RevolutionaryOaxaca : The View from the South, Mexico, 1867–1911 in 2005, Mark Overmeyer-Velazquez’s Visions of the Emerald City : Modernity, Tradition, and the Formation ofPorfirian, Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006, Patrick J. McNamara’s Sons of the Sierra : Juarez, Dıaz,and the People of Ixtlan, Oaxaca, 1855–1920 in 2007, and Benjamin T. Smith’s Pistoleros andPopular Movements : The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca in 2009,historians now have an encyclopaedic account of the politics of this fascinating butlong-ignored state from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Betweenthem these authors have rewritten the narrative of this relatively isolated, ethnicallyheterogeneous and geographically fragmented region.

With Pistoleros, Smith joins the new generation of Mexicanists who have con-cluded, based on intensive archival research at the state and local levels, that theonce-posited omnipotent power of the post-revolutionary one-party state neverexisted. Strong and ruthless though they may have been, neither the federalgovernment nor its collaborator, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), wieldedunchallenged power. No matter what the regime attempted, it encountered resist-ance, had to constantly negotiate, and was often stymied or ignored at every level.Nothing evaded the filters of local political networks and local traditions. To Smith,local power structures, which resulted from ‘a series of historical, political, cultural,and social contexts ’, ‘modified, contradicted, and paralyzed’ the policies of the state.

The crucial participants were local political bosses, known as caciques, and localinformal elite networks, known as camarillas. The caciques acted as intermediariesbetween the villages or municipalities and the outside world. Given the geographicalisolation of much of Oaxaca, there were ample opportunities for such people. Smithidentifies three important camarillas : the rich elites of the Central Valley (vallistocracia),the hacendados of Jamiltepec and the commercial farmers ( finqueros) of Tuxtepec.

The rural caciques divided along ethnic lines into two groups. The first consistedof Indian or mestizo bosses in indigenous areas where communal lands remained.The second was made up of Hispanics in commercial agricultural areas, where the

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social structure from the Dıaz era continued. There was contention in the cacicazgos(areas ruled by caciques) because the old ways of deference to experienced eldersblocked the advancement of the younger generation returned from the wars. Smithmakes a considerable contribution in his detailed illumination of how the caciquesoperated, examining closely four cases. This is crucial because although the localbosses ‘came to form the backbone of the regime’s capacity to govern rural Mexico’,we know almost nothing about them.

In considerable detail Smith narrates the interplay of local and state politics,explaining how successive governors conflicted and cooperated with variouspopular organisations, bosses and camarillas. They formed ‘ loose, heterogeneousand shifting ’ coalitions (p. 103). Often the combination of local factionalism andthe weakness of the state thwarted the incipient corporatist regime Cardenas wasconstructing. In one revealing case, the author picks up the narrative begun byPatrick McNamara relating the politics of the Sierra Juarez during the Cardenas era.According to Smith, although initially the Cardenas reforms threatened the serranos’‘ attachment to municipal autonomy and rule ’, by 1940 the inhabitants had nego-tiated new arrangements that were to last another decade (pp. 131–2). Thus, despitethe tidal wave of agrarismo, labour reform and federalised education set o! by theCardenistas, the locals forged agreements based on their own politics and traditions.The Sierra Juarez did not submit to the new corporate caciques or the regimentationof the peasant leagues or labour unions.

Perhaps the most important of the caciques of the post-revolutionary periodwas Heliodoro Charis Castro in Juchitan. Charis was in his early twenties whenhe took over Juchitan in 1920 as a staunch ally of Alvaro Obregon. The story of howhe resisted and negotiated with Cardenas is a compelling example of the tenuousnessof Cardenista rule and the important role that indigenous people, in this instanceZapotecs, played in the politics of the time. Smith presents four cases, includingCharis, which clearly indicate that the national state did not have the resourcesto reach into the regions and that Cardenas valued stability to an extent that hewould accept local autonomy as its cost. Cynically (or realistically), Cardenas sawthese local bosses or regional strongmen as counterweights to overly ambitiousgovernors.

While Smith persuasively contradicts the notion of the all-powerful centralgovernment/political party for the 1920s and 1930s, he is not the only researcher todiscover the continuation of local and regional autonomy for these decades – andperhaps, given the exigencies of economic and political reconstruction after a longseries of civil wars and uprisings, this finding is not so surprising after all. But Smithis quite at the forefront in detailing how local autonomy was sustained well intothe 1940s, especially from 1946 to 1952, when President Miguel Aleman Valdessupposedly cracked the whip. Smith argues that ‘ the period 1940 to 1944 wascharacterized by volatility, decentralized government, growing urban discontent, andunresolved tensions between the president, the state governor, and Oaxaca’smultifarious regional caciques ’ (p. 290).

Centralisation made some inroads in the late 1940s. From 1947 to 1950, OaxacaGovernor Eduardo Vasconcelos put together a coalition of urban artisans, vendors,workers and the elite of the Central Valley which was much more amenable tothe dictates of the national regime. Nonetheless, resistance to the incursion ofcentralisation continued and more than a few of the rural caciques maintainedtheir positions.

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Smith also dispels the notion of any Pax PRI in the post-Second World War years.There were two notable popular movements in Oaxaca during this period. The firstcaused the removal of Governor Eduardo Sanchez Caro in 1946, and the secondunseated Governor Manuel Mayoral Heredia in 1952. The latter is of particularinterest, because female street vendors spearheaded the protests.

Although Smith’s research makes it quite clear that neither the Partido de laRevolucion Mexicana (Party of the Mexican Revolution, PRM, later the PRI) nor theapparatus of the national government were nearly as powerful as observers oncebelieved, and despite the fact that he insists that Oaxacans had much more to sayabout the governance of their everyday lives than we formerly thought, ironically hisfindings do not make us feel any better about the way the revolution turned out.Local autonomy certainly did not make for less corruption, and only erratically did itassure more democratic politics. Nor is it likely that Oaxacans got the kind of livesthey wanted; they remained poverty-stricken and badly educated.

M A R K W A S S E RM ANRutgers, The State University of New Jersey

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10000994

Samuel Logan, This is for the Mara Salvatrucha : Inside the MS-13, America’s MostViolent Gang (New York : Hyperion, 2009), pp. 245, $24.99, hb.

Founded in 1980s Los Angeles by Salvadorean war refugees, Mara Salvatrucha(MS or MS-13) is today one of the main street gangs in the United States andnorthern Central America. In recent years the group has developed a reputation forextreme brutality and, arguably, ties to drug tra"cking organisations. Given thegang’s reach and ostensibly destructive impact, the first non-fiction narrative by USinvestigative journalist Samuel Logan clearly engages with a very topical issue.Through the case of Brenda Paz, a Honduran-born teenager who joined MS-13 inthe United States and was brutally killed by fellow gang members after havingbecome a federal informant, This is for the Mara Salvatrucha aims to take us into thevery heart of the gang. This gripping and highly readable account provides a detailedunderstanding of Paz’s story, which has never been exhaustively covered despite themedia attention it received. However, for those hoping to learn more about MS-13,particularly its transformations, the book will be a disappointment. The volumemostly chronicles Paz’s brief stint in the gang, her cooperation with the police andespecially her inner struggles over her desire to abandon violence but not herfriends, and exposes the gang’s hidden world in barely three of 54 brief chapters. Asthe title indicates, Logan argues that MS-13 is the United States’ most violent gang,yet his evidence is unpersuasive and testifies to a possible over-reliance on lawenforcement sources, which tend to have a narrow view of street gangs. Like manyworks in the journalistic genre, the book lacks references and makes only briefmention of the use of interviews. This ambiguity raises questions about the ways inwhich the story was reconstructed, particularly Paz’s thoughts and emotions, andmakes it impossible to verify its more contentious points.

The book o!ers some fascinating insights into gang joining and gang life, in-cluding the role of females in these groups. Paz, a good student from a humble butcaring family, entered MS-13 in search of belonging and attention when her parents’marital problems and her mother’s growing mental illness required the girl to livewith relatives in Texas. Paz’s example shows how easy it is for youths to get into a

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gang, often unaware of the price they will pay for a semblance of friendship, funand freedom. For those who believe that street gangs form essentially for criminalpurposes, it also constitutes a reminder that these groups serve to fulfil personalneeds, some shared, some conflicting, and will not be e!ectively controlled throughpolicing alone. Logan emphasises the link between the immigrant experience andgang development, but appears to attribute gang joining merely to dysfunctionalfamilies and Latino communities when it is largely facilitated by the local socio-economic conditions among marginalised populations, immigrant or not. Theauthor cogently underscores the paradoxes of gang life, a life in which solidarity,excitement and respect coexist with violence, prison and the threat of a prematuredeath. What is particularly striking is the apparent irrationality of some of the killingsand the trauma that violence (and the talk of violence) causes among gang members.The intensity of the emotional distress that these youths undergo makes it impera-tive to help them recover psychologically, a need that rehabilitation programmesoften neglect. Similarly, Logan’s account endeavours to bring out some of thespecifics of female gang a"liation. Paz’s testimony makes it painfully clear thatgirls are subordinate in a macho world to which they are jumped in or sexedin. Many su!er physical abuse, some are pimped, and all are tolerated but neveraccepted as equals. Nonetheless, female members remain an understudied aspectof the gang phenomenon that deserves much greater scrutiny than it has thusfar received.

The volume is at its weakest when it touches on the most controversial charac-teristics of MS-13. Its author seems to agree that cliques have a formal leader, aposition that echoes the law enforcement perspective but contradicts the researchon the subject. In the book, MS-13 bosses come to life through physical descriptionsof menacing-looking, heavily tattooed youths who dedicate all their time to ganga!airs and distinguish themselves through their preparedness to kill. Logan’sassertion that one leader’s tattoos – an ‘MS’ on the forehead and a teardrop – are‘hard-earned symbols of status and power ’ (p. 36) is factually incorrect, however.Although the teardrop often denotes a homicide and serves police in identifyingsuspected murderers, gang tattoos generally mean whatever their bearers want themto mean. More importantly, these fearsome individuals are depicted as representa-tive of MS-13, but actually remain the exception. As Logan admits that mostmembers act tough but try to avoid violence, his insistence on labelling the entiregang as violent is puzzling.

Most of what readers will discover about MS-13 is derived from Paz’s statementsto the police, comprising information on the gang’s history, rules, recruitment,expansion, hand signals, organisational structure and criminal activities. Chap. 27,which recounts Paz’s videotaped interview to a group of law enforcement o"cers, isin some ways one of the most intriguing parts of the book, although Logan re-produces much of this data rather uncritically. Indeed, he introduces MS-13 early onas a group of irresponsible, violent and delinquent youths who regularly extort poor,hardworking people. While there is some truth to this image, it is unnuanced andexaggerated. Logan largely ascribes the gang’s US-wide expansion to the recruitmentdrive of individual members, including one who reportedly distributed businesscards to aid this e!ort. The research literature indicates, however, that while indi-vidual gang migration is extensive, it generally occurs for social reasons, notablyparental relocation, and to a lesser extent to escape law enforcement crackdownsor to find employment. Equally, the volume glosses over the role of community

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conditions, the copycat phenomenon and gang polices in the proliferation ofMS-13. More surprisingly, the book is silent on the gang’s growth in Central America,where its impact is much more destructive. The violent and criminal nature ofMS-13 is generalised from a few spectacularly brutal incidents, often describedin chilling detail, and some police detectives’ ‘knowledge ’ that the gang is viciousand organised. Logan admits that the gang’s criminal evolution remains a mystery ;nonetheless, his portrayal of MS-13 overstates the level of members’ delinquent andviolent behaviour and wrongly associates the acts of some youths with the entiregroup. Furthermore, Logan fails to consider the extent to which sensationalistmedia coverage and the gang’s emergence in quiet, rural towns has helped inflate theMS-13 threat.

Throughout his work Logan addresses, with mixed success, gang withdrawal andgang control. He narrates a powerful tale of a teenager worn out by violence and theconstant pressure to prove her loyalty to the group, yet wrestling with the pullbetween a gang-free future and her a!ection for her friends. Paz’s case shows thatleaving the gang is a complicated process and requires the support of individuals,such as her defence attorney, who are extremely committed to helping gang mem-bers return to a more conventional lifestyle. Curiously, however, Logan concludesthat these youths are ‘able to leave the gang just as easily as they arrived ’ (p. 244).Perhaps wanting to end on a positive note, he risks sounding naive. For manygang members, renouncing their friendships and support network is no simpletask, and many are killed by their peers, who resent being abandoned. Finally, theauthor is rather uncritical of current gang policies. Logan questions neither lawenforcement attempts to dismantle MS-13 as an organised crime group nor thepaucity of prevention/rehabilitation programmes. Indeed, his implicit support foralternative strategies seems to conflict with his portrayal of MS-13 as a criminalorganisation.

This journalistic piece makes for an enjoyable read, but reveals much less aboutMS-13 than the title promises. It leaves some of the most hotly debated questionsunresolved and paints the gang as more influential and terrifying than it is. Logan’score argument represents the most troubling facet of the volume, given its inac-curacy and its potential for strengthening existing gang stereotypes and prejudices.The book was originally written to expose the harmful consequences of gang life anddeter at-risk youths from joining one of these groups, but to marginalised young-sters, for whom the prospect of fun, respect and status is powerful stu!, thiswarning may well be a doubtful deterrent. Logan’s work will be of interest both tothe wider public and to students of the Central American gangs, but above all itshould find an attentive audience among policymakers who have yet to recognise,after decades of failed anti-gang e!orts, that resources need to be invested in youngpeople, not more uniforms, squad cars and weapons.

S O N J A WO L FUNAM, Mexico City

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001008

Marcelo Bergman and Laurence Whitehead (eds.), Criminality, Public Security, andthe Challenge to Democracy in Latin America (Notre Dame IN: University of NotreDame Press, 2009), pp. xiv+344, $40.00, pb.

Contributors to this important and insightful volume agree that Latin Americandemocracies are haunted by the twin spectres of rising criminality and widespread

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public insecurity. Both present a challenge for social analysis. Why now? How arethese issues related to large-scale socio-economic transformations and local politicaldynamics? What is being done about the seemingly intractable explosion of crimi-nality? Who is to act when the very forces in charge of fighting crime are, to a greatextent, responsible for it ? What are the implications of inaction for our nascentprecarious democracies?

Contributors use microscopes and periscopes to examine, quantitatively andqualitatively, both specific case studies of rising crime, police corruption and sharedperceptions of public insecurity, and the larger implications that all these simul-taneously occurring and mutually reinforcing phenomena have for the region’spresent and future. Chapters dissect empirically the skyrocketing of certain types ofcrime and the attendant perceptions of insecurity in various countries in the sub-continent, e!orts (or lack thereof ) to fight crime (including several interesting essayson the promises of, and obstacles to, police and judiciary reforms and on currentmano dura approaches), issues of police corruption and o"cers’ views of their ownforce, and the utter failure of several prison systems to dissuade, incapacitate orrehabilitate o!enders, along with the related routine violation of inmates’ most basichuman rights.

Despite some repetitions typical in edited collections (there is no need to reiteratethat crime is indeed a real issue and a shared public concern in Latin America) anda few doubtful claims (for example, that zero-tolerance policies were e!ectivein curbing crime in New York), the volume is filled with interesting and originalempirical data and challenging invitations, in the form of unsolved puzzles andprovocative questions, to further investigation.

Given that the contributors are among the most recognised experts on thesubject, this reader would have appreciated deeper insights into the connectionbetween the social insecurity generated by the great neoliberal transformation ofthe last three decades (in the form of deproletarianisation, hyper-unemploymentand mass misery) and rising crime. True, the volume editors’ introductory essayand several chapters acknowledge the link, but one is left to wonder exactly howthese issues are causally connected, not simply correlated. This reviewer’s viewmay be skewed by the cases of Argentina and Brazil, but one also wondershow the dynamics of the drug trade enter di!erently into the causal argumentsabout growing crime. Similarly, one is left to speculate on how class, ethnicityand race are linked to crime and incarceration rates, and how gender operatesin both variations in victimisation and public perception. This reader wouldalso have welcomed some reflection on the impact that the ‘penal commonsense ’ currently dominating approaches to crime and poverty in the United Statesand Europe is having now that it is being exported to and adopted by govern-ments in Latin America (in the form of zero-tolerance recommendations, forexample).

One cannot (and should not) ask everything from one book, however, and evenless so from a book that acknowledges right from the very beginning the dearth ofgood empirical data available. Much work, simultaneously empirical and theoretical,lies ahead, but this book provides a very good, stimulating, start.

J A V I E R A U Y E R OUniversity of Texas, Austin

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J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X1000101X

Itamar Silva and Anna Luiza Salles Souto (eds.), Democracy, Citizenship andYouth : Towards Social and Political Participation in Brazil (London and New York :I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp. xviii+200, £57.50, hb.

This publication presents the findings of a study on Brazilian youth and the publicdialogue methodology associated with it. The details of the project’s origins, itsframework and results, and the evaluation of its methods will make it of particularinterest to young people themselves as well as researchers and policymakers.

The project took shape following President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s decision toset up an inter-ministerial group on youth policy in 2004. Spurred on by this interestat the top, a network of Brazilian NGOs, coordinated by Ibase and Polis, proposed asurvey of youth opinion that would feed into the process. Drawing on similar workdone by the Canadian Policy Research Network and funded by the Canadian-basedInternational Development Research Centre (which provided similar support to theBrazilian project), the study went beyond conventional forms of public opinionsurveying to encompass a more deliberative and participatory approach, including8,000 interviews and 40 focus groups across eight metropolitan areas.

The report is divided into two parts, the first providing a descriptive and analyticalsurvey of the study’s findings and the second an overview and evaluation of theresearch methods used. Chap. 1 shows that youth involvement in group activitiesnever exceeds 30 per cent, although the form of association varies : the younger andmore a#uent engage in religious, sport and cultural groups, while older and pooreryouth tend to participate in community associations.

The authors of chap. 2 note the importance of television in young people’s accessto information and the failure of schools to play this role or provide su"cientparticipatory space. The research shows that Brazilian youth do keep themselvesinformed politically and are committed to solidarity and voluntary activities, even asthey shun organised political activity as unresponsive to their needs. However, theauthors of chap. 3 observe that when tested on their knowledge of public a!airs,youth are extremely selective in their information gathering. Television does not playas significant a role in educating as do other sources : newspapers, magazines, theinternet and radio among A/B social groups, and the internet for D/E groups.

The second part of the report will be of particular interest to researchers. Itreviews the dialogue group methodology used in the survey, including researchers’and participants’ evaluations and the challenges posed by the choice of method,especially when adapting the model used in Canada to Brazil. In chap. 4 the authorsnote the three benefits of using dialogue groups, namely education, deliberationand research. At the same time, there were several limitations and challenges.These included insu"cient funding to evaluate the use of the findings by the groupparticipants and policymakers ; trade-o!s between socially homogeneous or het-erogeneous groups (the former enabling more discussion, less inhibition and moreexploration of attitudes, the latter o!ering more educative and deliberative scopebetween people) ; and the uncertain definition of what ‘participation ’ means (p. 96).

Chap. 5 provides feedback from the dialogue group participants themselves.Young people appreciated the fact that they had a chance to speak and were beinglistened to. They also felt the social dimension of the project was important : as wellas expressing their own views they were impressed by the opportunity to meet andengage with new people in new settings (that is, in a non-school environment). Thiscontributed to greater learning and reflection by all involved, with some admitting to

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having changed their minds several times during the day based on what they hadheard from their peers.

Chap. 6 provides a comparative account of the Canadian and Brazilian experi-ences and the decision to adopt a more decentralised approach in the latter. Chap. 7o!ers a review of some of the risks associated with this choice, such as the potentialdi!erences in methods and results and their incomparability. Despite these con-cerns, researchers concluded that building a network of regional NGOs was aworthwhile endeavour, since it strengthened their organisational and leadershipcapacities in their regions while Ibase and Polis played an influential role incoordinating the project. Chap. 8 o!ers an interesting insight into the role thatthe media play in publicising research and advocacy. It is a useful account of thesystematic way in which a strategy and series of campaigns was established, includingidentification of the target audience (young people and policymakers), the role thatregional organisations would play, and a breakdown of the three campaigns thattook place over the course of the project’s final year.

Throughout the report, the researchers’ concern is to demonstrate that youngpeople are not apathetic. Rather, they reject traditional or ‘adult ’ forms of partici-pation such as involvement in political parties or organised labour for those thatthey perceive as neither containing nor constraining them – for example, voluntaryactivities and religious, sporting and cultural groups. In this respect young peopleare more likely to pursue alternative forms of public engagement, as their role ininitiating the anti-corruption protests and demonstrations against President Collorin 1992 demonstrates (indeed, the authors’ omission of the pintados, the term used todescribe the young protesters and their painted faces, is surprising). That youngpeople can and do engage makes it all the more essential that policymakers heed thereport findings and adopt changes to enable greater participation by young people informal settings, including at the local, school and national levels.

G U Y B U R T ONLatin America Programme, Ideas Centre, London School of Economics

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001021

Ignacy Sachs, Jorge Wilheim and Paulo Sergio Pinheiro (eds.), Brazil : A Centuryof Change (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009),pp. xxvi+364, $65.00, $24.95 pb.

The quincentennial of Portugal’s encounter with Atlantic South America and theturn of the millennium combined to make for an outpouring of considerations ofthe ‘Whither Brazil ? ’ variety. Brazil watchers will remember, and some will havecome across, Brasil : um seculo de transformacoes, published in 2001 by Companhia dasLetras, the country’s premiere publishing house. The work of 15 leading academicand extra-academic experts on a range of issues, it is now available in an Englishtranslation, accompanied by a foreword written by Jerry Davila expressly for thissecond volume in what the University of North Carolina Press is calling ‘TheBrasiliana Collection ’ of the trilingual Latin America in Translation series that ithas published in collaboration with Duke University Press for the better part oftwo decades.

Translations, as a rule, are to be welcomed, and it may seem churlish to beanything but enthusiastic in one’s treatment of a new addition to a series that hasprovided so much to the field, beginning with John Charles Chasteen’s painstakingtranslation of Tulio Halperın Donghi’s Historia contemporanea de America Latina

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(The Contemporary History of Latin America, 1993) and including the prize-winning firstvolume in ‘The Brasiliana Collection ’, Joao Jose Reis’ Death is a Festival (2003), aworkmanlike English edition of another Companhia das Letras book (A morte e umafesta, 1991). Some translations are more welcome than others, however, and certainbooks, translations and non-translations alike, present particular puzzles to readersand especially to reviewers.

Brazil : A Century of Change is one of these latter books, though its editors andcontributors are very nearly blameless in the matter. The first problem presented byA Century of Change is that its fourteen chapters were intended to serve as interven-tions at a particular moment in time that has now passed. That is not to say that theissues that those interventions addressed, from ‘the (un)rule of Law’ (discussed byPaulo Sergio Pinheiro) to federalism (Aspasia Camargo) to the especially dauntingquestion of inequality (all 15 contributors), have been laid to rest, only that thecontext in which they will be debated and, one hopes, eventually resolved haschanged. The second problem is that the contributions to the original volume werenever intended for non-specialist readers beyond Brazil’s borders. For foreignersfamiliar with contemporary Brazilian intellectual life, like Um seculo de transformacoes’original target audience in Brazil, these essays will be easy reading ; indeed, specialistsmay safely skim or skip over some contributions as the contributors’ positions on theissues in question have long been established and are merely rehearsed or recycledhere. Upon encountering these same essays, however, beginners may well findthemselves adrift or befogged, despite Professor Davila’s heroic attempt to chart theshoals ahead. It will be little comfort to such readers to learn that sentences such as‘ In the social realm, the hegemonic portion of the dominant classes was still theagro-exporting oligarchies, mostly co!ee growers ’ (p. 66) possess at least marginallymore charm in their original Portuguese.

If A Century of Transformations will be largely unintelligible to the ‘U.S. public withlimited familiarity with Brazil ’ that the book’s ‘Translator’s Note ’ identifies as itsintended audience (the world’s other English-speaking publics go unmentioned),and actual and aspiring specialists will prefer the Portuguese-language original, whowill read it? The press’s selection of Professor Davila to write the foreword, togetherwith its solicitation of a back-cover blurb from another US-based historian of Brazil,suggests the hope that the book will be adopted by instructors at US universities.

While the entire volume would be too much to inflict upon undergraduates,portions of it might fruitfully be used in classroom settings. Herve Thery’s‘A Cartographic and Statistical Portrait of Twentieth-Century Brazil ’, for example,delivers nearly exactly what its title promises : an accessible overview of some of themost striking changes that the country experienced between the late nineteenthcentury and the turn of the twenty-first. Jose Seixas Lourenco’s ‘Amazonia : PastProgress and Future Prospects ’ o!ers a singularly dispassionate introduction to aregion of Brazil that has aroused a great deal of excitement and agitation abroad.Some will find Lourenco’s approach to be refreshingly even-handed, while otherswill argue that it is unconscionably cool ; either response will be an invitation todebate. Cristovam Buarque’s cleverly arranged ‘The Northeast : Five Hundred Yearsof Discoveries ’ stands to be another discussion starter, providing as it does a com-pellingly humanistic brief for a national (not regional) struggle against poverty via a‘productive, social Keynesianism’ in which the state would ‘create employment thatdirectly produces the supply of essential goods and services ’ ranging from sewerlines to public schools (p. 287).

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These three contributions are not the volume’s only chapters of interest. Far fromit ; further chapters deserve the attention of anyone lecturing on modern Brazil. Butthe members of that audience will want to consult Um seculo de transformacoes, ratherthan its translation, while keeping in mind that the essays in question belong to ahallowed intellectual tradition (‘Whither Brazil ? ’) and to an unhallowed, increasinglydistant past.

J A M E S P. WOODA RDMontclair State University

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001033

Bernd Reiter, Negotiating Democracy in Brazil : The Politics of Exclusion (BoulderCO and London: First Forum Press, 2009), pp. viii+171, £48.50, hb.

Bernd Reiter provides a useful and insightful examination of Brazil’s democraticfailure. His ‘central argument _ that societal inequalities undermine democracy ’(p. 145) challenges the (generally) optimistic view of civil society as a democratisingforce across the region. Instead, democracy is being strangled through a racial zero-sum game where ‘ included ’ whites protect their social and economic status over‘excluded’ blacks. Using the extreme example of Bahia state, where the population ispredominantly black but treated as a minority, Reiter extends Pierre Bourdieu’sconcept of relational capital to include race, with ‘whiteness remain[ing] a culturalcategory, signifying superiority and well-deserved privilege ’ (p. 5). Since the mid-twentieth century this has been based less on biological grounds than on an a"nitywith European attitudes and mores. This shift in thinking has also coincided withothers regarding power and the people, the growth of the state and the transitionfrom authoritarianism to democracy. Throughout, the included have remained onestep ahead of the excluded.

That point is made explicit in the reproduction of inclusion/exclusion throughthe education system in chap. 4. Until the 1950s, access to public schools was limitedlargely to the included. When the system began to open up and quality fell, theincluded fled to selective private schools, abandoning the public schools to thepoor. Reiter doesn’t say so, but this distinction has persisted in higher education todate : the more prestigious – and selective – public universities are dominated by theincluded, while poorer students attend the less well-regarded private institutions. Forthe poor and excluded in the public school system, there is a further blow: not onlyare the schools badly resourced, with poorly paid, insu"cient and often absentteachers, but the students and their parents are also usually blamed by the sameteachers, principals and policymakers for poor performance and results.

The following four chapters o!er additional accounts, mainly through interviewsand participant observation, of how the excluded are kept at a distance by theincluded across both the public and private spheres. Especially striking is theexamination of how Brazilian social inequality begins at home, with chap. 5 showinghow racial separation and paternalistic relationships between employer and maidhave become normalised. Reiter notes the precariousness of the maid’s position, thelanguage and actions used to deny her autonomy (for example, the use of the term‘girl ’) and the location of maids’ living quarters by the kitchen and separated fromthe rest of an apartment – including in modern buildings.

Chap. 6 reinforces this paternalism within the public sphere. Reiter reveals thatof 17 NGOs at work in the Bahian state capital, Salvador, only four had at least50 per cent race-conscious Afro-Brazilians in decision-making positions (p. 98).

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This means that ‘most civil society organisations are indeed dominated by the in-cluded, who have taken it upon themselves to make decisions for their excludedclients instead of with them’ (p. 89). Even when the population is encouraged toparticipate, as shown in chap. 7, its involvement is marginalised. Although socialmovements and new political institutions such as the participatory budget suppos-edly exist to make democracy more substantive, the Bahian case reveals the contrary.Whether in education (public schools’ management and community schools), urbanplanning or even Salvador’s own participatory budget process, attempts by thehistorically excluded to participate and take ownership have been continuallymarginalised by dominant groups.

That the excluded are denied their rights may be explained by the prevalence ofa Brazilian ‘political class ’ that is dealt with in chap. 8. A political class of electedrepresentatives and civil servants who distinguish themselves from the people oneducational grounds, principally through a university degree, has persisted since thecolonial period. Rather than seeing themselves as public servants accountable tothe people, their main aim is to protect the social status of themselves and theirassociates. The result of this division is that the have-nots are obliged to defer tostate representatives for favours given in the form of clientelism and patronage.

That education has historically been seen as a privilege rather than a right posesparticular problems for contemporary Brazilian democracy. Much e!ort has beenspent since 1995 on reforming the system, including the rationalisation of respon-sibilities, constitutionally guaranteed funding for primary education (FUNDEF) andvarious assessment and evaluation methods.

The problem with these changes, though, is that they largely constitute a‘managerial revolution ’ (as Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s education minister,Paulo Renato Souza, titled his book on the subject in 2005) rather than a socialtransformation. Consequently, Reiter is right to be sceptical of the supposed finaldemocratisation of Brazilian politics and society following Lula’s election in 2002. Ineducation, the Lula presidency has taken its cue from its predecessor rather thanfrom its historic association with the renowned educationalist Paulo Freire, whose‘pedagogy of the oppressed ’ sought to overturn authoritarianism from below (andwho was himself education secretary for the PT administration in Sao Paulo citybetween 1990 and 1991). Instead, the main achievements of the current governmenthave been the expansion of FUNDEF to include pre-schools and secondary schoolsand the introduction of grants for poorer students to attend private (as opposed topublic) universities (ProUni).

Ultimately, although Reiter’s analysis of Brazil’s democratic weakness and per-vasive social inequality is excellent, it arguably falls at the last hurdle. He concludesthat ‘Democracy _ must translate into everyday life if it is have any meaning ’(p. 141) and echoes his support for social theorists such as John Dewey and AmyGutmann, who see the importance of acting democratically in schools if they are tobecome democratic (p. 110). However, as his book demonstrates, Brazilian society isseared through with strong social prejudice and injustice ; despite the best e!orts ofthe excluded to overcome their marginalisation, they continue to be thwarted fromtheir self-styled betters from above. On this most important question – what is to bedone? – Reiter leaves us hanging.

G U Y B U R T ONLatin America Programme, Ideas Centre, London School of Economics

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J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001045

Teresa A. Meade, A History of Modern Latin America : 1800 to the Present(Chichester : Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. xvii+389, £22.95, pb.

Writing a general textbook that covers any of the periods of Latin American historyis an enormously daunting task, so anyone who ventures into the field deservesthe gratitude of undergraduate teachers everywhere as well as their admiration. Thewriter must tread carefully, however, because this is a potential minefield withthe enormous amount of material that has to be covered and the consequentinevitability of choosing a route that, despite every good intention, does not fit everyteacher’s exact requirements and leads almost assuredly to some sort of criticism.Teresa Meade, a specialist in Brazilian history and gender studies at Union College,New York, is the latest to try her hand, in this case examining Latin America’smodern history from independence to the present day. The book has its goodpoints, but the final package is not as successful as one might wish.

Like Lawrence Clayton and Michael Conni! in their similarly titled (thoughsomewhat more detailed) textbook, Meade presents her history by focusingprimarily on themes rather than geographical areas. In the process, she manages totouch on most areas and gives some idea of how they were a!ected by the over-arching developments of the period. Her opening, background chapter is a ratherextensive account of the colonial period, although she skips over the vital role thatsilver mining played in the Spanish American economy, concentrating instead on theemergence of the big estate, which is one of the subjects that she subsequentlypursues. The independence period is situated in a chapter on slavery and the HaitianRevolution ; this is an interesting approach, but it results in a rapid and frequentlyinaccurate survey of the actual independence movements that existed at the time.Meade then deals with the rise of caudillismo and the emerging liberalism andnationalism in the new states. An examination of di!erent commodities that werecentral (or ‘key ’, as she tends to write) to the economies of di!erent nations in themid-nineteenth century opens the door to the topic of US interventionism in LatinAmerica and the story of the Panama hat. This, in turn, leads to late nineteenth-century immigration, urban and rural life, British investment and positivism.Examples from Mexico establish the background for a separate chapter on theMexican Revolution, although some historians now question whether this really wasthe transformative event that many have claimed. The rise of socialism and thelabour movement provides the framework for details of the Tenente movement,Modern Art Week in Brazil and Mariategui of Peru, while the next chapter onpopulism covers the careers of the usual suspects – Vargas, Peron and Cardenas,along with Gaitan of Colombia, Haya de la Torre of Peru, Sandino of Nicaragua andFarabundo Martı of El Salvador. Meade’s survey of the Second World War and itsaftermath, entitled ‘Struggles for Sovereignty ’, covers, not surprisingly, thenationalist revolutions in Guatemala and Bolivia ; the inclusion of Rafael Trujilloseems somewhat out of place, however. The Cuban Revolution provides the secondgeographically specific chapter, and in this case with obvious justification. Meadethen examines post-Cuban Revolution developments under the title ‘Progress andReaction ’, although the military takeovers and subsequent repression that occurredalmost everywhere from the 1970s seem to indicate that there was more of the latteroccurring than the former. ‘Revolution and its Alternatives ’ interweaves liberationtheology, the Central American revolutionary movements and the war on drugs. Thefinal chapter, on Latin America in the twenty-first century, underlines many recent

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examples of progress while pointing to problems that remain unresolved and willcontinue to a!ect the region well into the future. Numerous photographs and mapsillustrate Meade’s selections, while occasional boxed inserts provide opportunitiesfor brief primary documents, literary comments, biographies and the like. A list offurther reading is provided at the end of the book.

Running through the text are a number of themes. One of the most obvious isforeign intervention in its various forms, which Meade seems to hold responsible formost of Latin America’s problems, including the defects of even the more notoriousleaders. The United States attracts particular attention in this regard, which may besomewhat surprising in view of the fact that the book is designed largely with USundergraduates in mind. To that end it includes frequent references to developmentsthat have a!ected the United States, such as the Iran-Contra a!air, anti-Latinolegislation and Latino immigration, which tell us more about the history of theUnited States than of Latin America. Gender issues and cultural developmentsattract separate sections in the book’s earlier chapters and, in the case of the former,make a renewed appearance at the end. With the amount of material that now existsfor both, these could perhaps have been more smoothly integrated into the text.

The overview is thus comprehensive, although with some occasional oversights.One is the absence of any mention of Peru’s revolution of 1968–75, led by GeneralJuan Velasco Alvarado. As a result, the section that Meade provides on the ShiningPath lacks an essential explanatory context. Of greater concern is the fact that thereare several historical errors that detract from the narrative and ultimately undermineconfidence in the analysis. For example, the British government did not finance theWar of the Triple Alliance ; Eva Peron was Juan Domingo’s second wife, not hisfirst ; Anastasio Somoza Debayle was the son, not the grandson, of AnastasioSomoza Garcıa ; the city associated with Vıctor Raul Haya de la Torre is Trujillo, notCuzco, and he was very much alive in the 1960s when Hugo Blanco was leading landinvasions ; Emiliano Zapata was a mestizo, not an Indian ; the journalist murdered byNicaragua’s National Guard was an ABC television reporter, not a correspondentfor Newsweek ; and despite the accompanying picture, Tupac Amaru II was notexecuted by being torn apart by horses. The section on South American indepen-dence is particularly notable for its errors, perhaps the most egregious being theassertion that ‘after Bolıvar’s death, San Martın despaired of leading recalcitrantCreoles to carry out reforms’ (p. 72). These and the others will no doubt be cor-rected in the book’s second edition, but until then I think I shall continue to assignthe Keen and Haynes textbook to my undergraduate class.

P E T E R B L A N C H A R DUniversity of Toronto

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001057

Carmelo Mesa-Lago, World Crisis E!ects on Social Security in Latin America and theCaribbean : Lessons and Policies (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas,University of London, 2010), pp. vii+111, £20.00, pb.

Evaluating the impact of the global financial crisis that began in 2008 is still com-plicated as there are not enough data available and we do not know how economicconditions will evolve in the near future, yet this evaluation is precisely the task thatCarmelo Mesa-Lago attempts in this short but informative and ambitious bookpublished by the London-based Institute for the Study of the Americas. The bookaims to determine the impact of the crisis on social security (health and pensions) in

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Latin America and o!er some policy recommendations. While the analysis cannotprovide concluding answers given global uncertainty and insu"cient statistics, itpresents a useful methodology through which to explore the short-, medium- andlong-term evolution of social security.

To achieve this, Mesa-Lago concentrates on three key dimensions : (1) theimpact of the 1980s debt crisis on social security ; (2) the recent trajectory ofLatin America’s social models ; and (3) the di!erent characteristics of those modelsamong three groups of countries, di!erences that are likely to be accentuated inthe future. The 1980s crisis had a significant e!ect on health and pensions all overthe region. In the short run, pension coverage decreased or stagnated in 13 of the17 countries studied, health spending went down even in successful cases such asCosta Rica, and the equity and generosity of the system worsened. In the longrun, the crisis triggered structural reforms in ten countries, resulting in the creationof private pension systems and the expansion of private provision of health services,and parametric reforms in several others, including Brazil and Cuba. The e!ectsof these reforms on the coverage, generosity, equity and e"ciency of socialsecurity were quite diverse, but Mesa-Lago is generally critical of market-friendlyreforms.

By 2008, after many of the reforms had been consolidated and before the crisisexploded, social security systems could be divided into three groups. Group 1(pioneer-high) included Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Panamaand was characterized by early adoption of social security, higher coverage andless segmentation than in the other two groups. Group 2 (intermediate) includedMexico, Venezuela and Colombia – countries with intermediate positions in termsof coverage, extension and equity of pensions and health services. Group 3 (late-comer-low) included all Central American countries but Costa Rica, plus Peru,Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. These countries had a highly segmented system inwhich few groups benefited from social benefits and the poor (who worked in thelarge informal economy) had almost no access to social provision.

Mesa-Lago uses this classification to evaluate the impact of the crisis on pensionsand health services. As he recognises, the picture that emerges from this analysisis somewhat preliminary and incomplete and relies on some well-informed spec-ulations about future trends. In general, it is evident that the crisis has had perniciouse!ects in all countries, although the impact may end up being less dramatic thaninitially expected. Social security coverage will likely go down given the increase inunemployment and the reduction in medium-term growth rates, yet this reductionwill be more evident in group 3 countries, which have higher levels of informality,lower supply of health services and more limited fiscal space than the othertwo groups. At the same time, successful responses to the crisis have concentratedprimarily on group 1 countries, which have continued many of the reforms started inthe mid-2000s. Chile’s 2008 pension counter-reform, for example, ‘decreed freehealthcare access for all non-contributory pensioners and the gradual extension ofmandatory coverage to self-employed workers ’ (p. 56).

In terms of generosity of benefits and sustainability of schemes, capitalisationpension systems have generally su!ered particularly high losses. Mesa-Lago’sdiscussion of the impact of the financial shock on pension schemes in variouscountries is one of the most informative parts of the book. He concludes that ‘pureindividual capitalisation schemes are likely to be more a!ected in the short runbecause _ of volatile stock markets ’ (p. 70). In this environment, the ability of

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governments to maintain non-contributory pensions and commit to the sustain-ability of the public pension system will be particularly important.

Two general messages from Mesa-Lago’s detailed analysis are particularly clear.Firstly, poor countries are likely to su!er more than the rest and will have moredi"culties in implementing successful policy responses. It is for this reason thattargeted social assistance for the new poor may be particularly important in CentralAmerica, where the crisis is also likely to last longer than in the Southern Cone.Secondly, policy experimentation and policymakers’ decisions still matter. Uruguay’sinstitutional reforms and commitment to improving health and pension provision,for example, have been particularly impressive. Among poor countries, theDominican Republic has advanced more than other countries towards a moreuniversal system, even if financial constraints and institutional bottlenecks arestill severe.

So what can we predict for the future? Something that is evident from this book’shistorical review is that the length and depth of the global crisis will determine theseverity of its social consequences. In this sense, the rapid recovery by large coun-tries such as Brazil and Chile leads to some optimism, although global conditionscould easily worsen again in the months ahead. Yet, as we look at the future, it maybe even more important to think about the likelihood of dramatic policy shifts. HaveKeynesian interventions at the macro level translated into a new vision on socialpolicy in general and social security in particular? Will the healthcare reform in theUnited States influence policy discussions in Latin America, particularly in countrieswith poor services and low spending? These are not questions that Mesa-Lago’sbook aims to answer, partly because it is still too early to know, but they arefundamental. At the moment, there may be more reasons for pessimism thanoptimism. While it is true that development ideas in Latin America have becomemore progressive and that even latecomers such as the Dominican Republic or ElSalvador have undertaken more ambitious reforms than ever before, the globaldiscourse may not have changed as much as initially expected. In fact, the increasingattention to public debt levels and ‘sound ’ economic policy in OECD countries maytrigger a new era of macro-economic austerity and minimalist approaches to socialpolicy, something that will be far from the ambitious redistributive agenda thatMesa-Lago has been promoting during his whole career.

D I E GO S A N C H E Z-A N CO C H E AUniversity of Oxford

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001069

Lindsay Hale, Hearing the Mermaid’s Song : The Umbanda Religion in Rio de Janeiro(Albuquerque NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), pp. xvi+192,$26.95, pb.

InHearing the Mermaid’s Song, social anthropologist Lindsay Hale discusses Umbanda,a religion that combines various African, indigenous and European elements toform a new, uniquely Brazilian faith. Hale presents engaging ethnographic material,bringing spirits, rituals and individuals to life through vivid anecdotes and personalhistories. The book is based on research conducted in four Umbanda centres in Riode Janeiro, ranging from ‘White Umbanda ’, as it is called by its mostly light-skinned,middle- and upper-class practitioners, to more Africanised forms, usually referred toas ‘Afro-Brazilian Umbanda ’, in which mediums and visitors tend to be darker-complexioned, poorer members of the lower classes.

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Hale puts forth three central arguments. Firstly, he situates the various spirits thatfigure in Umbanda practice within the context of Brazilian history and culture. Whilehe does this reasonably well, his analysis does not advance significantly beyondDiana Brown’s (1994) groundbreaking work. Secondly, he seeks simply to describethe Umbanda(s) he encounters. Hale’s final objective is to show how Umbanda is,for its practitioners, a way of seeing the world, a special manner of experiencing andfeeling. On this front, he is highly successful, and this is the work’s primary contri-bution to the study of Afro-Brazilian religions, and to Latin American scholarshipmore generally.

The first chapter capably explores Umbanda cosmology, eloquently in-troducing several central concepts : the distinction between the spiritual andmaterial world, the conceptualisation of the human spirit, the spiritual root ofevents, reincarnation and ideas of karmic debt, and the relationship between spirits,mediums and the natural world. Chap. 2 is composed of three case studies thatdiscuss how participants come to Umbanda. Two of the paths Hale follows arethose of centre leaders whose stories are similar to those described by previousscholars. The devotee first passes through a trying period of bad health or generalmisfortune, is brought to Umbanda despite avowed lack of interest or disbelief, andsubsequently has a deep religious experience, eventually becoming initiated andopening a centre.

The following four chapters examine the manner in which Umbanda re-enchantsthe world for its followers. The historical roots of the religious practice, Hale tells us,like most things in Umbanda, are multiple and contested. Of particular note is theway in which religious mistura, or mixture, is framed by di!erent Umbandistas. Asone might expect, centres with a more Afro-Brazilian focus tend to embrace andplace value on the African roots of Umbanda, whereas those in White Umbandaprefer to minimise or downplay these contributions, presenting their version of thereligion as cleansed of so-called primitive elements.

In his analysis, Hale rightly notes the way in which issues of race and class in-fluence practice. Yet he does not fully interrogate the ‘Africa ’ that participantsevoke, nor does he discuss the extent to which this Africa is imagined and con-structed, both positively and negatively, in either the origin stories or in ritualsregarding the old slave spirits, the subject of chap. 4. The same could be said for histreatment of Indian spirits (caboclos), which, as we learn, are often not Indians at all.Hale does well in outlining the central role that caboclos occupy for Umbandistas,however.

The final two chapters, entitled ‘Orixas ’ and ‘Blood and Water ’, further explorethe conceptual and ritual divides between Afro-Brazilian and White Umbanda. Interms of the orixas, African gods that are combined to a greater or lesser extent withCatholic saints, Hale identifies a functional di!erence. In Afro-Brazilian Umbanda,they come to earth in the bodies of their mediums with frequency, playing animportant role in regular ritual practice and in guiding mediums along their lifepaths. In the White Umbanda houses Hale studied, they do not descend at all, orthey send caboclo spirits as emissaries instead.

To practitioners of White Umbanda, the body is something to be calmed andstilled. In contrast, Hale writes, Afro-Brazilian Umbanda ‘connects with the spiritualthrough the organic symbolism of blood, plants, food and the voluptuous envel-opment and mobilisation of the body and its senses ’ (p. 136). It is within this frameof belief that Hale places the practice of animal sacrifice, about which he writes in a

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respectful manner that goes far in helping the reader to understand the controversialpractice.

Finally, a few words on theory and method, the measuring sticks for any goodanthropological work. Hale writes in the conclusion that it has been 20 years since hefirst met the Cabocla Jurema, with the longest period of study being carried out during1990–1. The reader gets no sense for how the groups studied have changed overtime, however, or how they might have responded, just to give one example,to processes of re-Africanisation, which have been prominent in Afro-Brazilianreligions in recent years.

The book poses no larger theoretical questions that would make it of interest toa broader scholarly audience. In regard to its relevance to anthropology (since theauthor is indeed an anthropologist), Hale presents an antiquated and outdated visionof the discipline, citing works by Mead and Malinowksi as examples of the kinds ofbooks he once believed anthropologists were supposed to produce – books whichhe critiques as representing cultures as singular entities (p. 159). He writes that whathe thought was the goal of fieldwork, to create a ‘concise model of a ‘‘culture ’’ ’, isnow to him a fiction (p. 160). Of course, most anthropologists have been arguingthis point for a long time now, and the author’s construction of anthropology missesthe direction in which the discipline has been moving for the past several decades.

Despite these shortcomings, Hale writes in an accessible, informal mannerthroughout, making his book especially well suited to undergraduate courses. Hissuccess at conveying the flavour of ritual experience and the personalities of thevarious spirits he encounters should go far in enticing newcomers to the study ofUmbanda to further explore its enchanted worlds.

E R I K A R O B B L A R K I N SUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001070

Joan Cameron Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers and Witches : Afro-Mexican RitualPractice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque NM: University of New MexicoPress, 2007), pp. xiv+296, $24.95, pb.

For many enslaved Africans, the baptismal ceremony carried out on the shores ofsixteenth- and seventeenth-century West Africa before they were loaded onto theterrible transatlantic slave ships was a fearsome ritual that signified the first step in aprocess which they believed would end in their consumption by Europeans, eitheras food or as an ingredient of gunpowder. Joan Cameron Bristol not only draws thereader’s attention to the initial distance of newly enslaved Africans from Christianity,but also constructs a wide-ranging narrative that penetrates and illuminates a sig-nificant sector of Christian society in New Spain, and in fact shows that ColonialAfro-Mexicans were, as she writes, defined by ‘shared values, cultural practices andcommunities ’ (p. 5). Afro-Mexicans, she argues, did not just crudely practiceChristianity to placate their owners and did not merely imitate elite forms of wor-ship, but instead ‘ found solace in Christian practice and associations ’ (p. 221). In thisrespect, Christians, Blasphemers and Witches o!ers a nuanced analysis of colonial re-ligiosity as it played out across a broad section of Afro-Mexican society. From a nunwhose piety caused her to be declared a popular saint, to neophyte bozales newlyarrived from Africa being prosecuted for blasphemy by the Inquisition, Bristoldemonstrates the multifaceted nature of Afro-Mexican participation in Christianritual practice during the long seventeenth century.

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The book’s opening case study introduces the reader to the story of JuanaEsperanza de San Alberto, a slave who had been given to the Carmelite convent ofSan Jose in Puebla. Such was her piety that she was given permission by the bishopto profess as a nun a year before her death, a privilege normally only granted to elitewomen whose families could provide significant dowries to the convent. After herdeath in 1679, the population of Puebla considered her a miracle-working saint. Thiscase, as Bristol says, seems to ‘fly in the face of what we know about Afro-Mexicanroles in New Spain ’ (p. 24), but it ably demonstrates to the reader that social andreligious boundaries in colonial Mexico were more fluid than one might otherwiseexpect. Esperanza was not merely a Christian ; her life was held up as a paradigmof Christian virtue, an example for all the citizens of Puebla to follow. The hagio-graphical account of her life even rationalised her lowly status as a slave by invokingthe holiness and su!ering of Christ.

Before following Esperanza’s story with other case studies drawn from thearchives of the Mexican Inquisition, Bristol necessarily charts the development ofrace perception in the Hispanic and Iberian world and explains that early denigrationof Africans was more to do with their lack of Christianity than any other definingcharacteristics. Over the course of the sixteenth century, theologies attacking theenslavement and systematic exploitation of Amerindian peoples also had an impacton thinking about the enslavement of Africans. While the Dominicans FernaoOliveira and Domingo de Soto condemned the illegal capture of Africans, Iberianintellectuals and theologians stopped short of questioning the inherent logic of theslave trade, which was a mainstay of empire. Africans had no Las Casas to fight inthe imperial court against their enslavement ; even the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval,whose treatise De instauranda Aethiopum salute vigorously condemned abuses againstAfrican slaves, did not take the final step and condemn slavery outright. The Jesuiteconomy in certain provinces of the Americas was heavily tied to slave labour, buttheirs was also a world in which the salvation of souls was more important thanphysical liberty. Slavery could be vigorously condemned if it imperilled the souls ofthose enslaved, but if it led to their proper Christianisation (such as in the case ofEsperanza) the moral ambiguities of the practice became much more pronounced,thus enabling slavery to be defended as an imperial concern.

These ambiguities are made even clearer as Bristol highlights the distance betweenthe absolute requirements of Christianity and the newly baptised African slaves’understanding of this new religion. Importantly, they did not see their ritual prac-tices as being at odds with Christianity, and those who had little or no contact withJesuit teachers learned about Christian practice by watching and imitating others inthe public displays of Catholicism so common to the Iberian world. Not surpris-ingly, these ritual imitations often led to new interpretations considered heterodoxby the inquisitorial authorities ; together with the continued practice of African ritualhealing – necessary given the dearth of trained physicians – this made ColonialMexico a fertile ground for the blending of African, indigenous and Hispanic healingand religious traditions. The inquisitorial trials for sacrilegious participation inthe sacraments, blasphemy and superstitious magic in all probability represent aninsignificant proportion of heterodox Afro-Mexican socio-religious practices.

Bristol’s careful selection of cases thus gives important insight into the typesof ritual practice taking place. At the same time, her argument is subtle and notoverstated. For example, when she discusses the use by Afro-Mexicans of scapulars,a devotional practice common to the Ibero-Catholic world and certainly one

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encouraged by the clergy, she draws a tentative parallel between this, magicalpouches prepared by Nahua priests, the Muslim practice of wearing Koranic versesin Senegal and the amulets worn by the inhabitants of the East African coast(present-day Sierra Leone). Far from suggesting direct links between any of thesepractices, she merely establishes their coexistence in the mind of the reader whilesensibly claiming that possible connections are di"cult to dismiss, especially amongthe slave population of New Spain, where these traditions might have cometogether. Overall, Bristol’s intelligent and nuanced analysis provides the reader witha valuable exposition of the dynamic development of the beliefs and religiouspractices of a significant sector of Colonial Mexico’s population, and her book is amuch-needed contribution to the scholarship of Slavery, the African Diaspora, andreligious beliefs and practices in the early modern Hispanic world.

A N D R EW R EDD E NQueen’s University Belfast

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001082

Lauren Derby, The Dictator’s Seduction : Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Eraof Trujillo (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. xv+410, $94.95,$25.95 pb; £65.00, £15.99 pb.

Rafael Trujillo’s brutal and corrupt authoritarian regime in the Dominican Republic(1930–61) was one of the longest and most pervasive dictatorships in LatinAmerican history. For decades, the charismatic dictator has been the subject ofnumerous historical studies and novels. While acknowledging the excessive stateceremony of Trujillo’s rule, most scholars and novelists have paid scant attention tothe way in which public ritual played a significant part in establishing a new civicidentity and facilitated the entrenchment of the dictatorial regime in the DominicanRepublic. In The Dictator’s Seduction, Lauren Derby presents a cultural history of theEra of Trujillo that focuses on public culture and daily life. Downplaying the impactof events such as the 1949 and 1959 exile invasions, the 1956 Galındez–Murphya!air and the murders of the Mirabal sisters in 1960, Derby emphasises the impactthat the 1930 hurricane, the 1937 carnival and the 1955 international fair had onlegitimising the regime. Derby, an associate professor of history at the University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles, who received her PhD in Latin American history from theUniversity of Chicago in 1998, interprets symbolic patronage and exchange throughthe popular idioms of ethnicity, gender, honour, intimidation, patronage, prestige,race, religion and state-sponsored violence.

Derby’s research is a finely honed combination of archival investigation blendedwith oral history that has its roots in her graduate studies during the 1990s.Acknowledging that the Trujillo regime’s excessive use of force has led historians toportray Dominicans as either victims or supporters of the dictatorship, Derbycontends that most Dominicans during the Era of Trujillo ‘ lived in a space ofambivalence and complicity, of passive action in the subjunctive mood’ (p. ix). Herstudy, therefore, presents a culture of consent that has its origin in the symbolicpatronage encouraged by the dictatorship. Especially revealing is Derby’s assertionthat gift giving on the part of the dictatorship created an unequal relationshipbetween the government and the public that resulted in an ‘ illusory bond’ betweenthe general public and the dictator that ‘masked a relation of domination’ (p. 260).Throughout the dictatorship, the national government granted thousands of gifts tothe masses. These gifts, which included Christmas bonuses and greeting cards, were

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viewed as tokens of o"cial recognition. Significantly, Derby explains that the mostextravagant gifts, public works projects, were ‘ framed as personal presentations ’from Trujillo (p. 261). As such, the phenomenon of gift giving helps to explain howTrujillo was able to remain in power for so long.

Unlike previous Dominican leaders who relied on the support of the Dominicanelite, Trujillo, who harboured an intense hatred of the elites, relied on the peasants,the military and friendly relations with the United States to keep himself in power.Recognising the scholarly contribution of individuals such as Richard Turits andEric Paul Roorda in defining and understanding the Trujillo dictatorship, Derbytakes the study of the regime to a new level. Her analysis examines the ‘everydayforms of domination ’ of the Trujillo regime and details how ‘the combination ofpatronage and fear created a culture of compliance ’ (p. 7). Unlike previous studiesthat emphasise Trujillo’s omnipresent role in the dictatorship, Derby concentrateson the way in which ‘state practices helped produce the idea that Trujillo wascompletely in control ’ (p. 8). Especially revealing is her understanding that state-sponsored patronage was not merely a means of co-opting the masses. It was animportant method of state control, ‘ a form of ‘‘ embedding ’’ the state in the privatedomain, as well as a technique for coercing consent to the regime ’ (p. 21).

Prior to 1930, an excessive degree of foreign intervention coupled with inept eliterule created an environment in the Dominican Republic that was receptive to astrong nationalistic regime. According to Derby, ‘Trujillo camouflaged a flagrantlynepotistic regime via a mask of national development ’ (p. 65). In the wake ofHurricane San Zenon, which destroyed the Dominican capital in 1930, Trujilloclaimed that he was responsible for rebuilding Santo Domingo; however, the re-building of the city was designed to serve his political agenda. Derby explains thatthe massive Jaragua Hotel was ‘designed primarily as a stage for Trujillista o"cialevents ’ (p. 102). The 1955 Free World’s Fair of Peace and Confraternity was a‘national extravaganza [that] surpassed all other events of the regime in its excessesof magisterial pomp and spending ’ (p. 109). Designed to highlight the success of theEra of Trujillo, the fair was not merely an example of Trujillo’s megalomania ; it was,Derby argues, ‘ an essential part of making the carnivalesque excess of the Era ofTrujillo believable ’ (p. 134).

Derby’s cultural history of the Era of Trujillo is a valuable contribution to thestudy of the regime. Her research, which is enhanced by her use of anthropologicaltools, should serve as a guide to historians as they re-evaluate other twentieth-century Latin American dictatorships. An engaging and well-written study, TheDictator’s Seduction will benefit scholars and students of Dominican history.

M I C H A E L R. H A L LArmstrong Atlantic State University

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001094

Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jimenez, John M. Kirk and William M.Leogrande (eds.), A Contemporary Cuba Reader : Reinventing the Revolution(Plymouth : Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), pp. xvi+413, £19.99, pb.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990–1, the Cuban leadership faced itsmost daunting challenge since the earliest days of the revolution. Against all oddsand with great skill and fortitude, it worked assiduously to adapt to a radicallychanged international environment and a domestic economic crisis without losingeither power at home or prestige abroad. Comprising 49 contributions, some from

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the ‘giants ’ in their respective fields, this comprehensive and impressive anthologytraces the extraordinary transition process that took place during what Fidel Castrodubbed Cuba’s ‘Special Period’ (approximately between 1990 and 2006).

Published somewhat unfortuitously just as Fidel ceded power to his youngerbrother, the book nonetheless provides an appreciation of the great man’s legacyand, as the editors remark in their preface, ‘ the boundless energy, creativity andpatience ’ of the Cuban people in what has been in many ways the reinvention of theoriginal revolutionary project. Sections cover Fidel Castro’s leadership, domesticpolitics, economics, foreign policy, society and culture. In a masterful introduction,the editors provide a succinct yet amazingly illuminating account of the history ofCuba up to the onset of the ‘Special Period ’, complete with a reference list thatwould provide a bibliography su"cient for any course on the subject.

The stated goal of the editors is to provide undergraduates with a resource thatbrings together the best of Cuban scholarship, and they have certainly done that,with a contributors’ list that reads like a who’s who of Cuban studies : Saul Landau,Julia Sweig, Wayne Smith, Jorge Domınguez, Susan Eckstein, Joaquın Roy, MikeErisman and Michael Chanan are all included. The only significant absentees areLouis Perez Jr. and Tony Kapcia. Worthy of note among the contributions areNelson P. Valdes’ analysis of Castro’s charismatic leadership, Rafael Hernandez’sconvincing description of Cuba’s democratic tradition, Phil Peters’ detailed expla-nation of the downsizing of Cuba’s sugar industry, Marguerite Rose Jimenez’s highlyoriginal ‘The Political Economy of Leisure ’ and Margaret E. Crahan’s expertexplanation of the religiosity that persists and pervades much of Cuban life.

In other respects, however, the editors’ good intentions have not wholly beenfulfilled. For example, the book’s dedicated webpage, promised by the publisher inthe frontispiece to include ‘declassified documents, significant speeches, art workand music ’, amounts on exploration to little more than a PDF directory of Cubawebsites. There are also some significant omissions. Where, for example, are thechapters on Cuba and Venezuela, Cuba and Latin America, Cuba and Africa?More importantly perhaps, where is the treatment of Cuba’s relevance to the overallhistory of socialism?

Most of the contributors underline the Cuban Revolution’s high moral aspirationsand worthy social gains, but there is nonetheless a discernible underlying tone ofdisillusion as so very often the contributions reveal how external constraints and/orinternal errors have thwarted utopian ambitions and radical experiments. Thechapter by Cuban economist Pedro Monreal even suggests that Cuba may beseeking an accommodation with the West, and the metaphor of the legend ofSisyphus, taken by Soraya Castro as the title of her contribution on US policytowards Cuba, seems particularly apt – it might equally be applied to the revolutionitself. Cuban author Leonardo Padura Fuentes would almost certainly agree ; hisessay here on culture under the revolution eloquently illustrates the stop-start natureof the Cuban experience and provides a critical yet positive home-grown perspectiveon a topic that has been the object of much external scrutiny and propagandising.

Inevitably, as with all publications of this type, there are also some contributionsthat are already dated. The final chapter on the Cuban media by Marıa Lopez Vigil isone case in point because much of her criticism has already been addressed by RaulCastro in o"ce, and the chapters on US policy su!er because they pre-date theelection of Obama. Be that as it may, there remains so much in this book that isrelevant, worthwhile and informative that it may be recommended to all students of

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contemporary Cuba and as an excellent core reader for any course on the sametopic.

S T E P H EN W I L K I N S O NLondon Metropolitan University

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001100

Thomas F. Carter, The Quality of Home Runs : The Passion, Politics, and Languageof Cuban Baseball (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009),pp. xvi+239, £50.00, £12.99 pb.

For baseball fans, it is a treat to watch the game in Cuba. Carter’s book, The Quality ofHome Runs, provides some insight into why. It addresses the particular attributes ofthe fans and the unusual role they play in the live experience of the game. With akeen eye to the intricacies of the sport as well as Cuban culture, history and politics,Carter, an ethnographer, examines what is Cuban about Cuban baseball, and howand why Cubans experience baseball the way they do. He treats baseball as a lensthrough which to view Cuban identity, attempting to explain how baseball in Cubaserves to shape the Cuban identity, which in turn embodies political, historical,cultural and religious factors, and, conversely, how this identity influences the Cubanexperience of baseball. While the book is enjoyable for its portrayal of the sport inCuba, the overall goal of drawing on the example of baseball to provide insight intoCuban identity falls short.

The strength of Carter’s book is found in those passages and chapters that stickmore closely to baseball per se ; these clearly reveal Carter as a keen observer(and lover) of the sport and the setting in which it takes place. His book presentsinteresting stories describing the dynamics between play on the field and theperformance and behaviour of spectators. We read about the groups of fans thatentertain and provide commentary on games. These groups act like a Greek chorus,and are integral to how the game is experienced and interpreted. Moreover, as Cartertells us, this chorus is not without contention over which group among the spec-tators constitutes the chorus, and what the message of the chorus should be.

While Carter shines as an entertaining storyteller, he comes up short as an aca-demic commentator. His evidence is drawn largely from his experiences attendinggames, primarily in Havana at the Estadio Latinoamericano, where he sits with agroup of true fanatics collectively called El Cırculo. The North American parallelis probably sitting in the bleachers at Yankee stadium. While the behaviour, com-mentary and antics of the members of this group may be interesting, one wants toknow how generalisable their experiences are. How much can we really say aboutCuba from the interpretations, behaviour and actions of this group? What aboutfans who sit elsewhere and are not part of El Cırculo, or who watch baseball athome, or who only read the box score the next day? Are their experiences, thejudgments they make and the emotions they feel really all that di!erent from thoseexperienced by baseball fans in North America? Certainly, the bland ‘games ’ inwhich we North American fans participate between innings thanks to massive videoscreens create a di!erent experience than does watching an impromptu skit onthe dugout roof deriding a player’s error or a manager’s decision. But are thesedi!erences best explained by something Cuban, something cultural – or merely bydi!erences in income?

The underlying question of how di!erent Cuban baseball really is arises withCarter’s discussion of the event that seemingly gave rise to the book’s title.

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Two teams are vying for a spot in Cuba’s Youth National Championship. A playoccurs wherein a batter severely injures the third baseman in his attempt to turn adouble into a triple. Subsequent to this, a teammate of the o!ending player comes upto bat in a situation that should call for the revenge act of intentionally hitting theplayer – yet given the stakes of the game and the score, doing so would come ata significant strategic loss. Carter successfully builds tension with each pitch andreports the commentary from the crowd as the pitcher and batter engage in a gameof cat and mouse, each trying to second-guess the strategy of the other. In the end,the batter hits a three-run home run, a hit that (we are led to believe) winds upwinning his team the game. Carter’s subsequent analysis of this story, wherein hesegues to the way in which ‘quality ’ and ‘struggle ’ are defined in Cuban baseball,seems at odds with the event : would not all baseball fans, regardless of culture, reactto this incident similarly? Would not the drama, the ‘quality ’ of that hit and thisgame, and the interpretations of the various players’ actions, be similarly interpretedand debated outside of Cuba? By failing to provide any comparative context, it ishard to know if what Carter says is Cuban about Cuban baseball is really Cuban at all.

An additional shortcoming is that the book’s language is frequently dense andopaque and makes too little e!ort to communicate to those not steeped in a certainacademic jargon. For example, in introducing his book, Carter writes : ‘ThroughoutThe Quality of Home Runs, a variety of positions are taken in order to elicit greateranalytic depth of Cubans ’ senses of themselves even as forces beyond their directexperience or control increasingly a!ect their localized experiences’ (p. 3). Severalpages later when developing a theoretical backdrop of identity politics, he writes :‘ It is through the disjunctive interplay of commerce, media, and national politics thatidentity, once a genie contained in the spatial bottle of locality, has now becomea global force forever slipping in, between, and through Aladdin’s lamp. Theseartificial encapsulations simply did not and do not reflect the ambiguous intangibilityof identities ’ locations, for like the locations of cultures _ they are not only lived inmaterial, daily interactions but are also imagined, multiple, and mobile. The di"-culties with such enclosed, ‘‘ spatialized’’ localities are that they obscure the livedrealities faced by any transnational person’ (p. 20). If ‘ the spatial bottle of locality ’ isnot a concept with which you are familiar, or if you have trouble distinguishing a‘ transnational person ’ from a ‘national ’ one, Carter’s book is likely to be frustrating.

K A T H E R I N E B A I R DUniversity of Washington, Tacoma

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X1000112

Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise : U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-CenturyLatin America (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009),pp. xvi+352, $65.00, $22.50 pb.

Dennis Merrill has written an informative account of the United States’ relationshipswithin its ‘hemisphere of influence ’, Latin America, in which he inserts intothe historical record of its ‘hard power ’ – gunboat diplomacy, empire building andhegemonic penetrations – the role(s) and ‘reach ’ of tourism’s ‘ soft power ’ in theform of successive waves of tourists and their ‘ facilitators ’ – that is, hoteliers, travelagencies and such. This focus on the unusual marriage of these very di!erentinfluential ‘penetrations ’ of ‘Americans ’ in their southern-hemisphere extension ofLatin America is not only refreshing but illuminating. Undertaking both a culturaland historical examination of international tourism and international relations,

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Merrill’s contribution to Latin American scholarship is his enthusiastic and un-abashed promotion of mass tourism as ‘ soft power ’ to address ‘challenging issuesin the history of U.S. foreign relations, [and] to bridge the chasm that typicallyseparates scholars of culture from those who study empire and internationalrelations, and to stimulate debate on both fields ’. In his own words, he ‘does so byexamining international relations from the bottom up and at times from the outsidein, frequently emphasising the agency of the ‘‘other ’’ within the U.S.-led empire ’.Equally informative and engaging, Merrill liberally sprinkles his stories with anec-dotal vignettes of everyday-life encounters and tensions between tourists and hosts,and balances these bottom-up negotiations with accounts of presidents, hotelmoguls and political figures and their influential engagements, national agendas andtourist ‘presences ’. This mix of perspectives works, in part because tourism is sucha messy international theatre, and in part because US–Latin American exchangesof both hard and soft varieties were invariably unequal, di"cult to interpret andculturally challenging to all parties involved.

The introductory chapter ‘Mass Tourism, Empire and Soft Power ’ first providesa succinct itinerary of the chronological order of chapters that trace the march ofthe US tourist presence in the more proximate venues of Latin America andthe Caribbean – first into Mexico, then into Cuba and on into Puerto Rico, andeventually back to southern Mexico (the Yucatan) and Central America (Costa Rica).Then, it more substantially presents the case for considering US tourism’s softpower as a perpetual bedfellow of this hegemon’s diplomacy, arguing that it‘heightened international awareness at home, invented identities for others andthemselves, helped forge and dissolve strategic alliances, [and] contributed to thecoming of revolutions ’.

The remainder of the ‘story ’ is then organised, or ‘culturally situated ’, into sixchapters in which US tourists play a much more central role in negotiationsand activities than other more conventional ‘ international relations ’ explanationsof the US ‘empire ’ in Latin America would have it. Chap. 1, ‘Lone Eagles andRevolutionaries ’, opens the saga with an examination of the opening up of Mexicoto US tourists in the 1920s, many of whom the author characterises as ‘Prohibition-Era escapists ’ : drunken cowboys, adventurers, poets, artists, college students.A tourism infrastructure for this ‘cross-border ’ travel emerged and tensions be-tween tourists and hosts were palpable, but exchanges and negotiations softenedrelations between post-revolutionary Mexico and pre-Depression, Prohibition-eraAmericans.

Starting before the age of aviation-driven mass tourism, chap. 2, ‘Containmentand Good Neighbors ’, then chronicles the growth of the Mexican tourist industryduring the 1930s and 1940s, and probes its impact on the everyday life of ‘empire ’. Itexamines how conflicting constructions of class, race and gender produced culturalclashes between visiting consumers and hosts, but also spurred negotiations. Thisstruggle reached its turning point when President Cardenas (1934–40), a populistbest known for nationalising the nation’s oil industry, intervened in tourism’sunregulated expansion and prohibited casino gambling while allocating state fundsto Mexican-owned hotels and restaurants to improve their competitive position withUS-financed hoteliers.

Chap. 3, ‘The Safe Bet ’, then moves to the Cold War era, from the age of traintravel to that of aviation (I am curious as to why the author almost passes overmaritime travel). The geographical ‘ story ’ also shifts from post-revolutionary

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Mexico to the pre-revolutionary Cuba of President Batista’s repressive dictatorialregime and its o!shore embracing of ‘crony capitalism’, in which US mobsters, citybosses and racketeers, as well as Washington’s political elites, featured prominentlyin Havana’s heightened presence as a major US metropole. Thus chap. 4, ‘ParadiseLost ’, stays in Cuba, to document the process by which this particular NorthAmerican o!shore playground came to be declared ‘o!-limits ’. The story startsduring the final days of the Batista dictatorship, on through the early days of FidelCastro’s succession and his fledgling government’s vain attempt to continue tour-ism. Eventually (within 18 months) and inevitably, because of the deterioration ofUS–Cuban diplomatic relations and the failed military adventurism that culminatedin the Bay of Pigs fiasco, there is an associated collapse of tourist ties. This ushers inan unwavering and often harsh US hegemony, so that there will be no rapproche-ment between the two administrations for the next 50 years or so – and no touristsoft power either.

Chap. 5, ‘Bootstraps, Beaches, and Cobblestone ’, describes and analyses PuertoRico’s ‘ strange odyssey ’ from colony to commonwealth, its clumsy attempt to forgean industrial modernisation programme in Operation Bootstrap, and the originsof its ‘planned postwar travel industry ’ in which successive administrationshave struggled with the identity of its heritage-tourism o!erings. Modernisation,migration and industrialisation tensions also characterise this period of changefor Puerto Rico, but the author’s attempt to attribute this island’s all-too-rapidtransformation to the failure of the wider Alliance for Progress that the UnitedStates attempted to build more broadly in Latin America is not very convincing.Puerto Rico had its destiny in its own hands both as a US-tourist alternative to Cubaand in regard to its own internal political turmoil over the choice of independenceand dependency, with Riquenos choosing the latter time and time again.

Chap. 6, ‘A Cold War Mirage ’, follows this Caribbean case further by chartingPuerto Rico’s ‘ rising stock as a reformist Cold War oasis ’, starting in the 1930s andcontinuing through the 1970s, and interweaving the growth of a US-dominatedtourism ensemble in Puerto Rico with the United States’ failed Alliance for Progressmodel for the remainder of Latin America. Here the cultural clashes of tourist andhost are painted in high relief, as they were in Mexico, whereas similar situations andconfrontations in Cuba had not appeared to matter as much.

Then follows a modest conclusion of only 14 pages, in which the author considershow the Mexican, Cuban and Puerto Rican stories fit together. This last chapterprovides a brief survey of post-1970s contemporary trends in US–Latin Americantourism – from Mexico’s Cancun to Costa Rica’s ecotourism, to revolutionaryCuba’s recent re-embracing of European, Canadian and ‘errant-American ’ tour-ists – but attempts to cover too many decades and too many dramatic changes ofcircumstances. Nor does it e!ectively ‘connect the dots ’, because the depth of detailand the dovetailing of tourism’s twists and turns with US–Latin America politicalmanoeuvring that has made each chapter so pleasantly readable and informative ismissing in this concluding ‘brief ’.

Despite this last minor criticism, Negotiating Paradise more than accomplishesits task by providing readers with an extremely interesting and informative historio-graphy of the United States’ neo-colonial designs on Latin America through its‘hard-diplomacy ’ and ‘soft-tourism’ influences. These two hemispheric ‘penetra-tions ’ sometimes coincide and collaborate while at other times the latter amelioratesthe former’s ‘big-stick ’, militaristic approach. Merrill shows us successfully how

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much tourism’s influences and soft-power interventions were implicated andinvolved in the geopolitical manoeuvring that took place between the United Statesand Latin America between the 1920s and 1970s. The quality of scholarship is high,the co-organisation of the cultural and political material is always thoughtful andinsightful, and the structural and ‘agency ’ perspectives and insights o!ered areconvincing and powerful. I am glad I have this on my shelf, and recommend it toother Latin American social scientists and historiographers.

D E NN I S C O NWA YIndiana University

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001124

Amalia L. Cabezas, Economies of Desire : Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the DominicanRepublic (Philadelphia PA: Temple University Press, 2009), pp. xii+218,$24.95, pb.

Amalia Cabezas’ Economies of Desire o!ers an ethnographically rich and analyticallyilluminating comparative study of heterosexual sex work in Cuba and theDominican Republic. Exploring the impact of neoliberal reform on gender andsexuality, Cabezas insightfully probes the sexual politics of two culturally analogousyet historically disparate Hispano-Caribbean nations. Accessible, but withoutcompromising analytical sophistication, Economies of Desire demonstrates howlow-income Cuban and Dominican women use a!ective relationships to navigateneoliberal economic transitions. Bringing political economy to life through poignantethnographic interviews, the book o!ers a fresh take on the long-standing scholarlydebates about women’s agency in the Latin American and Caribbean sex touristtrades.

Economies of Desire begins by examining the historical and socio-economic contextsof contemporary Caribbean sex tourism. With a primary focus on the Cubaneconomic crisis after the dissolution of the Socialist Bloc, the first two chaptersargue that Cuban and Dominican governmental reliance on tourism at the start ofthe twenty-first century thrust the islands into global capitalist circuits in a way thatheightened class, gender, racial and sexual inequalities. Drawing parallels betweenglobal tourism and histories of sugar production, Cabezas compares former colo-nisers to transnational tourists who consume ‘a new kind of brown sugar ’ (p. 53).

The book begins with familiar critiques of Caribbean tourism, but then expandson these claims to suggest that the Cubans and Dominicans objectified by the‘ tourist gaze ’ also ‘consume’ the tourists. Most notably, Cabezas persuasively arguesthat scholarly deployments of the category ‘ sex worker ’ diminish the fluid practicesand encounters that characterise transnational a!ective bonds. Here, Economies ofDesire o!ers its most important and far-reaching intervention into sex tourismresearch. Cabezas maintains that scholars should be more judicious when applyingthe category of sex work to erotic cross-cultural encounters, especially in situationsthat are ‘not clearly marked as commercial endeavors ’ but do combine ‘pleasure,intimacy, and monetary support ’ (p. 20).

As an alternative way to frame the dynamics of care and commerce inherent intransnational relations, Cabezas proposes the category of ‘ tactical sex ’. Rather thanhold sex work apart from other shadow economies, ‘ tactical sex ’ places sexualrelationships within a range of informal economic networks developed by youngmen and women struggling to make ends meet. Moreover, as a category of analysisthat privileges women’s decisions to engage in transnational relationships, ‘ tactical

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sex ’ helps to undo the entrenchment of victimhood models within scholarship onCaribbean sex tourism. In a stark departure from representations of Caribbeanwomen as victims, the subjects in Cabezas’ study vividly come to life as cleverstrategists who struggle against police harassment, poverty and discrimination.

In its final chapter, Economies of Desire responds to a question implicitly raised byCabezas’ analysis : does the rejection of the ‘sex worker ’ category foreclose thepossibility of organising around a common identity to advance collective politicalagendas? Cabezas suggests that sex workers may adopt identities strategically forpolitical purposes and advocates for sex workers uniting with other sexual minoritiesto build social movements. To illustrate this point, Cabezas shows how Dominicanwomen’s activists in the Movimiento de Mujeres Unidas (MODEMU) successfully usedthe term ‘sex worker ’ to position their cause within an international human rightsframework. In support of the work of MODEMU, Cabezas holds state govern-ments responsible for what she argues are human rights abuses resulting fromtourist-based economies.

Drawing on a rich ethnographic investigation into the a!ective relationshipsbetween foreign tourists and local women, Economies of Desire reconfigures scholarlyassumptions about power, sex and transnational ties. Informed by her decades-longengagement with Cuba and the Dominican Republic, Cabezas’ analysis resists re-ductive political conclusions. Throughout the text, Cabezas’ reflection upon herposition as a Cuban-American feminist presents an additional layer of critical insight.In part due to this measured reflexivity, Economies of Desire provides a comprehensiveaccount of the accomplishments of the Cuban revolutionary government alongsidecriticism of state violence against poor women of colour in Cuba and the DominicanRepublic.

Although the subject as a whole is beyond its scope, the book’s engagement withstate violence raises rich questions for future research. In particular, it becomes clearthat analysts would benefit from an ethnographic inquiry into the everyday practicesthat make up state bureaucracies. For instance, the book briefly discusses howwomen in the Federacion de Mujeres Cubanas led the e!ort to criminalise and eradicatethe Cuban sex tourist trade. How do Cuban women’s advocates working within stateorganisations challenge and complicate theories of ‘male state violence ’? A morethorough investigation of the decision-making processes of state leaders would il-luminate the complexities behind the forms of state violence that Cabezas describes.

Economies of Desire o!ers an important model that will prove useful for futureanalysts of gender, Latin America and the Caribbean. Cabezas’ critique of uni-versalising Western discourses of ‘ sex work ’ exemplifies the potential for a morenuanced, post-colonial framing of class, gender, race and sexuality in contexts ofneoliberal restructuring. Likewise, Cabezas’ work amply captures a critical momentof convergence for Cuba and the Dominican Republic. More recently, the Cubangovernment has begun to de-emphasise international tourism as a major engineof economic growth, largely due to the proliferation of inequalities that Cabezasoutlines. Thus, it remains to be seen whether the parallels between the two countrieswill endure into the twenty-first century. Economies of Desire will help us to unravel theintersecting nexus of a!ective ties, economic development and gender politics overthe coming decades.

N O E L L E M. S T O U TNew York University

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J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001136

R. Evan Ellis, China in Latin America : The Whats and Wherefores (Boulder CO andLondon: Lynne Rienner, 2009), pp. xiii+327, £20.95, pb.

There is no denying the growing significance of China in the world today. Since theglobal financial crisis, it has become the second-largest economy in terms of bothGDP and exports. It is also playing a greater role in global governance with itspivotal position in the G20 and the emergence of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia,India, China) as important global actors.

The (re-)emergence of China is having a major impact on the rest of the world,including the developing world. While the impacts of China on Africa have attracteda great deal of attention recently – not least because of the growing involvement ofChina in countries such as the Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe and the DemocraticRepublic of Congo, which have been sites of major conflicts and human rightsabuses – its impacts on Latin America have received less coverage. There is now,however, a growing literature on relations between China and Latin America, towhich this book makes a useful contribution.

After a brief introductory chapter, Ellis examines in turn the key interests ofChina in Latin America and what Latin America hopes to gain from its relationshipwith China. The chapter on the interests of China in the region highlights fourissues. Firstly, China sees Latin America as a source of primary products, both rawmaterials for its growing industrial sector and agricultural products. Secondly, itseeks markets for its industrial exports in the region. Thirdly, since half the countriesin the world that continue to recognise Taiwan rather than the government ofthe People’s Republic are in Latin America and the Caribbean, a major strategicobjective has been to woo these countries in order to further isolate Taiwan. This isparticularly important in Central America and the Caribbean, where China has littledirect economic interest. Finally, Ellis argues that China sees Latin America ingeopolitical terms as part of its strategy of promoting a multi-polar world in oppo-sition to US hegemony.

Latin American interest in China is primarily as a market for the region’s exports,which have increased rapidly since the start of the millennium. There are also greathopes of Chinese investment coming to Latin America, particularly to develop theregion’s infrastructure, although so far the actual investments that have been madeare quite limited. Ellis argues that relations with China are seen in Latin America as away of reducing the political, economic and institutional dominance of the UnitedStates, thus providing an opportunity for greater autonomy. This seems particularlythe case for governments such as those of Chavez in Venezuela, Morales in Boliviaand Correa in Ecuador, which have been characterised as populist left-wing regimes.

The book then provides more detailed case studies of individual countries, div-ided into three regional chapters on the Southern Cone, the Andean countries, andMexico, Central America and the Caribbean. The discussion of each country followsa similar structure, looking at the historical context of its relations with China, theethnic Chinese population, exports to China, imports from China, infrastructureprojects, technical cooperation, government and business infrastructures, intellec-tual infrastructure, and political and military relations. The final chapter looks tothe future.

This volume provides a wealth of information from the author’s own interviewsand numerous media reports, as well as some academic studies, to give an up-to-datepicture of Chinese–Latin American relations. This is also the weakness of the book,

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however. Such has been the spectacular growth of China that any account willinevitably get overtaken by events within a relatively short period of time, so China inLatin America is likely to date very quickly. This problem might have been avoidedhad the book developed a theoretical framework for analysing China’s impact onLatin America, but its focus is mainly descriptive rather than analytical.

A second problem is the book’s heavy reliance on media reports that may notalways be reliable or accurate, especially in relation to economic data. For example, itis claimed that Argentina has significant exports of sunflower products (p. 62), buttrade data show that these account for less than 1 per cent of Argentina’s totalexports to China. This is an even more acute problem when it comes to discussingforeign investment, where media reports are often exaggerated because they refer toplanned investment that may never materialise. A case in point is the proposed jointventure between Baosteel and the Brazilian iron ore mining company Vale. Ellisquotes reports of a US$ 1.4 billion investment in the state of Maranhao in 2006 andof a further planned steel plant in the state of Espırito Santo in 2007 (p. 51). In fact,this was merely a change in the planned location of the plant, which has now beencancelled. The scale of Chinese foreign direct investment in Latin America is alsooften exaggerated in media reports by the inclusion of flows to tax havens such asthe Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands.

The book also reflects its provenance in the emphasis that it puts on the im-plications of the growing Chinese involvement in Latin America for the UnitedStates’ relations with the region. This has been a major concern for the Right in theUnited States, which has argued that the Chinese presence represents a threat to USinterests and to free markets and democracy in the region. Although not going as faras some political figures such as Congressman Dan Burton, Ellis does appear toshare some of these worries.

Despite these criticisms this book provides a very useful summary of the currentstate of economic and political relations between China and the individual LatinAmerican countries, which will make it essential reading for anyone wanting an up-to-date picture.

R H Y S J E N K I N SSchool of International Development, University of East Anglia

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001148

Steven High, Base Colonies in the Western Hemisphere, 1940–1967 (Basingstokeand New York : Palgrave Macmillan, Studies of the Americas Series, 2009),pp. xii+299, $89.95 ; £42.50, hb.

This is a book for those interested in imperialism, international relations, the end ofcolonialism, and the unintended consequences of policy decisions. Students ofCanada and the Caribbean will find it especially intriguing. The history that StevenHigh recounts shaped the end of colonialism in the Americas. The ‘destroyers-for-bases ’ deal of September 1940 had the United States transfer 50 old destroyersto the British navy in exchange for bases leased for 99 years in Newfoundland,Bermuda, Trinidad, British Guiana, Jamaica, Antigua, St. Lucia and the Bahamas.The agreement not only tied the United States and the United Kingdom in thecrucial alliance against the Axis powers, but also marked the beginning of the end ofthe British Empire in the western hemisphere. President Roosevelt stated that theagreement was the most important US defence measure since the LouisianaPurchase. High, a professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal, has

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conducted extensive archival research and relates a readable, interesting andimportant tale. How di!erent the post-war history of the islands would have been ifthe Americans had not arrived to occupy those places !

The ‘base colonies ’ of the title is the term British and US diplomats and militaryo"cers used to refer to the leased bases. Steven High sees a deeper meaning in thephrase, however – these were not only ‘colonies with bases ’ but also ‘U.S. bases inBritish colonies ’ (p. 2). High observes that ‘ their existence made British controlseem conditional, even partial ’. There was also a deeper meaning for the colonisedpopulations of the Caribbean. Eric Williams, Trinidad’s first minister, saw the basesas the start of the West Indies’ connection with the modern world economy. Thebase sites became ‘a contact zone between colonised peoples and these two friendlyrivals ’ who expounded their formal and informal models of empire (p. 3). The US‘ invaders ’ or ‘occupiers ’ were none too impressed with Britain’s ‘ slum Empire ’, andtheir stinging criticism was a source of friction within the alliance.

High’s work o!ers readers a useful comparative perspective that broadens ourunderstanding of e!ects of the base colonies. Recent studies such as HarveyNeptune’s Caliban and the Yankees (2007) have shown how Trinidad’s elite fearedthe example that US troops provided for Creole men and women. Their presence‘destabilised the colonial order ’ (p. 4). Neptune saw the Americans more as libera-tors than occupiers ; in High’s view the situation was more complicated than that,because there were real areas of contestation that involved ‘ removal of inhabitants,base location, criminal jurisdiction, and Jim Crow racism’. High seeks ‘ to findmiddle ground between the political and diplomatic scholarship of the 1980s andmore recent works of cultural history ’ (p. 4). Through the inclusion of whiteNewfoundland he describes how race was not the factor there that it was elsewhere,though there were ‘striking similarities ’ in the ways the Americans treated locallabourers. They considered local workers as lazy natives regardless of their skincolour. It is particularly noteworthy that all of the US military personnel, save oneartillery unit sent to Trinidad briefly in 1942, were white, so the leased areas wereracially exclusionary and reflected race relations in the United States. Even so, theBritish colonial o"cials were ‘especially apprehensive lest the balance of colonialauthority be disturbed by the arrival of well-paid and well-clothed American Negrotroops ’ (p. 38).

The base colonies were invasions of US-style modernity complete with ‘ indoorplumbing, cafeterias, cinemas, golf courses, and other recreational facilities, socialclubs, hospitals, and even radio stations ’ (p. 10). Visiting civilians were awed by the‘power and wealth ’ that the bases evidenced. The contrast with the surroundingBritish colony was notable. An o"cial of British Guiana commented that normaleconomic restraints were absent, and that there were ‘no neglected houses or roadsand every person within the borders is employed, well-clad and well-fed’ (p. 10). UScivilian and military personnel were paid more than their British counterparts, andclass and racial di!erences were strongly seen in the crowds of soldiers and sailorson leave o! the base. The gates that separated these unequal environmentsfrequently became flashpoints for racial conflict and violence.

The base colonies had real military value. Beginning, as they did, before theUnited States entered the war, they were a sign that the Americans were committedto protecting Britain. Time magazine saw the bases as the equivalent to ‘five newbattleships ’. Hanson Baldwin of the New York Times said that the bases extendedthe US frontier ‘ to the Amazon and the Great Banks o! Newfoundland’ and

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‘made possible an ‘‘ aggressive defense ’’ of the Western Hemisphere ’ (p. 26). And,of course, with the addition of the bases in Brazil, the defence and supply line wereextended far down the South American coast.

High sets all this sensibly in an opening chapter on hemispheric defence andfollows with chapters on the delicate and painful question of base location in tinyBermuda and the problems related to building bases in the rather undevelopedenvironment of Newfoundland. He skilfully shows what was planned and how it allchanged during construction and operation. His chapter on the ‘Racial Politics ofCriminal Jurisdiction ’ highlights the intense problems involved in maintainingforeign bases. The US occupation caused a ‘great deal of friction ’ with the in-habitants. In British Guiana, slack discipline resulted in disturbing incidents thatincluded US planes firing on fishing vessels and a navy gunboat shooting up a village.The question of how such wrongdoing would be handled, and by whom, causedheadaches for the two allied governments and their local o"cials. Race was a constantflashpoint. On St. Lucia, US ‘o"cers refused to cooperate with black police con-stables of any rank ’ (p. 167). Among the British colonies, only ‘Newfoundlandregularly tried and convicted U.S. soldiers and sailors for serious crimes ’ (p. 168).

If the bases had been given up after the war the way the Brazilian bases were, itmight be possible today to look at them dispassionately – but they were not, and inthe post-war era they contributed to the end of British colonialism. High correctlyconcludes that it was ‘significant that the coming of the Americans was everywheredescribed as an ‘‘ invasion ’’, friendly or otherwise ’ (p. 204). Don’t miss this book – itwill broaden your perspectives on the e!ects of the Second World War.

F R A N K D. M C C ANNUniversity of New Hampshire

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X1000115X

Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule(Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. xiii+373, $84.95, $23.95 pb;£51.00, £15.95 pb.

This rich and masterful study explores the complicated and often contradictoryhistory of US intervention in Nicaragua, from the era of Manifest Destiny throughthe period of dollar diplomacy and military occupation. While others have troddenthis ground, Gobat sheds new light on much-studied topics, from William Walker’sfilibustering in the mid-1850s to Augusto Sandino’s rebellion against US occupation(1927–33), by stepping outside of the more dogmatic historiographic traditions thattend to oversimplify the lived experiences of empire and modernity. Gobat arguesthat Nicaraguan elites saw in US cultural values, such as liberal democracy, andforms, such as railroads and baseball, great possibilities for crafting an independent,cosmopolitan nation. These same values and forms, however, often produced un-settling changes that when joined to experiences of the darker side of US inter-vention led many of Nicaragua’s most profoundly Americanised elites to turn awayin scorn. Gobat’s nuanced arguments on the uneven embrace and rejection of‘Americanisation ’ are not simply compelling, but also highlight the need to attend tothe shifting landscapes of political, economic, social and cultural history. The sim-pleton’s claim that ‘ they hate freedom’ may su"ce as a sound-bite explanation foranti-Americanism, but Gobat’s study should serve as a model for understanding thedeeply ambivalent relationships that develop between the United States and thosecountries over which it exerts its imperial might.

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The book is organised in four major chronological sections. The first part ex-amines the potential inter-oceanic canal across Nicaragua as the site of paradoxicaldevelopments between Nicaragua and the United States from the Gold Rush erathrough the emergence of dollar diplomacy. Despite the disastrous encounterwith William Walker’s filibuster campaign in 1856, Nicaraguan elites envisioned thecanal and the United States as opportunities and models for cosmopolitan economicand cultural change. Their pro-American sentiments, however, were temporarilysoured by the USA’s choice of the Panama route in 1902 and the deterioratingrelationship with, and subsequent intervention against, Jose Santos Zelaya in 1910.The second part explores the aftermath of intervention and how US support forconservative oligarchs in the name of stability engendered a paradoxically liberalanti-Americanism. Despite this, US financial intervention transformed the politicaland economic landscape. The third part analyses the local impact of dollar diplo-macy between 1912 and the civil war of 1926–7, notably the unintentional levellingof rural economic opportunity and class relations that attended US control overNicaragua’s financial markets and instruments. Coupled with cultural threats to thegendered and social order, these changes led one-time pro-American conservativesto become some of the most ardent critics of the vision of US-style modernity.The fourth part tackles the US military intervention in response to the civil warof 1926–7 and ‘ the democratizing impulses of U.S. imperial rule ’ (p. 231). USoccupation led to resistance from both the newly anti-American conservatives andthe revolutionary forces of Augusto Sandino. Sandino’s successful struggle againstUS forces attracted the conservatives, but with the withdrawal of the US military in1933, the cleavages between their ‘ reaction and utopian forms of anti-Americanism’(p. 266) proved unbridgeable.

At turns cultural, political and economic, Gobat’s analysis relies on an astoundingand diverse array of sources. Dozens of newspapers, novels and memoirs arecomplemented by archival materials from Nicaragua and the United States, includ-ing personal and private papers, correspondence, court cases and land and mortgageregistries. Gobat’s seamless incorporation of local archival materials in Granada, inparticular, allows him to home in on the local context without losing track of thewider national and international implications of empire. The book is enhanced byfive beautifully rendered maps and dozens of photographs drawn from Nicaraguanand US archives. The images subtly but e!ectively augment Gobat’s argument onthe cultural and economic influence of US modernity in Nicaragua.

The book’s engaging narrative and incisive argument recommend it toreaders ranging from advanced undergraduates to specialists. Gobat ends with abrief and timely epilogue that places Nicaragua within the long century of USempire and elucidates the ‘more deeply rooted ’ sources of blowback to US inter-vention (p. 278). It is in these linkages, between the local and the internationaland between the cultural and the political, that Gobat is most e!ective. At the sametime, it is this localised approach that opens his analysis to a key question andcritique. Given the deeply regionalised and divided history of Nicaragua, how fullycan we extrapolate the experience of Granada’s elites to other regions and thenational level ? Hopefully Gobat’s extraordinary study will push others to take upthis call.

J U S T I N WO L F ETulane University

656 Reviews

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001161

Antonio Santamarıa Garcıa and Consuelo Naranjo Orovio (eds.), Mas alla delazucar : polıtica, diversificacion y practicas economicas en Cuba, 1878–1930 (Madrid :Ediciones Doce Calles, 2009), pp. 314, E30.00, pb.

Fernando Ortiz may have characterised Cuban history as a counterpoint betweenindigenous tobacco and foreign sugarcane, and other historians continue to pursuethis dialectical approach to understanding the island’s past as a dynamic relation-ship between its conflicting parts, but Cuban historiography has neverthelesstended to be dominated by the paradigm of sugar monoculture. By the mid-nineteenth century the island had become the world’s leading producer, and thisone crop increasingly dominated Cuba’s macro-economy. This increased as thecane fields continued to spread down the island, with sugar being largely respon-sible both for wealth generation and for the growing economic dependencythat would see Cuba swap colonial domination by Spain for neo-imperial controlby the United States. It was not idly that one of the co-editors of this collection,Antonio Santamarıa, entitled a previous publication Sin azucar no hay paıs.3 Recentscholarship is increasingly demonstrating the social and economic complexitiesthat the canaverales and imposing ingenios have tended to overshadow, however.This collection of articles by Spanish and Cuban historians seeks to make a con-tribution to this, showing how Cuban economy and agriculture in the nineteenthand early twentieth centuries was actually more diverse than has generally beencredited.

Rather than simply setting sugar to one side in order to concentrate on otheraspects of the island’s history, the collection begins with sugar at centre stage andspirals out from this, progressively widening to incorporate ever more elements of amore diverse economy and society, and broader transnational interconnections.Consuelo Naranjo examines the discourses surrounding the promotion of whitesettlement in Cuba during the nineteenth century, both as a racialised response tothe fears generated in a society whose sugar plantations in particular were dependentupon African slavery and as a means to help bolster Spanish rule. Most of the white(principally Spanish) colonists were destined for agricultural occupations, andalthough during the mid-nineteenth century they were involved in the cultivation offrutos menores (primarily food crops) and livestock rearing, by the late nineteenthcentury they had become particularly associated with cane cultivation. AntonioSantamarıa takes a broad view of the Cuban economy during the final two decadesof the nineteenth century and its relationship to colonial power – that is, to thedecline of Spain and the rise of the United States. Nevertheless, although he includesother agricultural and industrial sectors, his macro-economic perspective cannotavoid returning to the overriding dominance of sugar.

Oscar Zanetti’s chapter examines the flip side of an economy dominated by asingle export crop: the dependence upon imports to satisfy consumer demand inCuba. In particular, he looks at how – for all that the United States replaced Spain asthe principle source for many goods – Spanish merchants continued to play a centralrole in the island’s import trade, even after loss of the country’s colonial power after1898. Many of these were of Catalan origin (as they had been throughout the nine-teenth century), and the following chapter looks at the other end of this historic link

3 Antonio Santamarıa, Sin azucar no hay paıs : la industria azucarera y la economıa cubana (1919–1939)(Seville, 2001).

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between Cuba and Catalonia. Much of the latter’s economic development in thisperiod originated in the Antillean trade, and Martın Rodrigo shows how this resultedin the urban transformation of Barcelona. In particular he relates this back to thehigh profits generated by the sugar industry, whether directly or through the indirectgeneral stimulation of the economy.

The remaining four contributions bring the focus back down from the nationaland transnational to the regional and local, helping to build a vision of a Cubathat was, even during sugar’s heyday, considerably more diverse. Marıa AntoniaMarques’ posthumous chapter allows us a glimpse at the variety of small-scaleindustrial activity in Cuba in the final years of the nineteenth century, aimed not atserving the island’s export sector but at satisfying the demands of local society.She points to the combination of traditional and modern methods of productionand organisation. This can also be said of Leida Fernandez’s chapter, from thepoint of view of agricultural diversity and attempts to modernise food cultivationduring the period. She describes the technological innovations that enabledthe island’s farming sector to develop far more than just an advanced sugar in-dustry.

One important example of a key food crop, the development of whose cultivationand trade has tended to be overshadowed by that of sugar, is the banana. AlejandroGarcıa explores the local economies of eastern Cuba, where the banana had longbeen established as a dietary staple, to show how, from having used bananas es-sentially as a subsistence crop, in the late nineteenth century Cuba developed asubstantial banana export sector whose growth in the period outstripped by three toone that of sugar. This consideration of other crops is followed up by MercedesValero, who assesses how di!erent agricultural projects pursued in the latter years ofthe nineteenth century actively sought to diversify Cuba’s fields. For the purposes ofthis chapter she pays particular attention to the little-known local attempts, par-ticularly in Villa Clara in the centre of the island, to cultivate mulberry bushes,thereby making possible the emergence of silk production.

This is a book that has come out of a collaborative research project whose centralfocus was the role of sugar in Cuban and Puerto Rican history.4 An importantoutcome of this project was to signal not merely the already much-discussed cen-trality of sugar cane to Antillean history, but to look beyond this at the widerdiversity and complexity that developed in the shadow of the cane fields. Thiscollection of superbly researched articles may not cover every possible aspect of this,but it makes an important, varied and illuminating contribution, and points the waytowards further avenues of research that will enable us to escape from the paradigmof sugar monoculture and delve deeper into the often hidden complexities anddiversities that were responsible for constructing Cuba’s past.

J O N A T H AN C U R R Y -M A C H ADOInstitute for the Study of the Americas

4 ‘Memoria del azucar : practicas economicas, narrativas nacionales y cultura en Cuba yPuerto Rico, 1791–1930 ’ ; see http://reccma.es/proyecto1.html.

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J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001173

Alejandro de la Fuente, with the collaboration of Cesar Garcıa del Pino andBernardo Iglesias Delgado, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century(Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), pp. xiii+285,$40.00, hb.

In 1570, Havana was only the 70th-largest urban Spanish centre in the Americas ; by1620 it had become the ninth-largest, and its 1,200 vecinos (heads of households) were20 times the number that had lived there 50 years before. This transformationfollowed the role that Havana had developed as the Caribbean hub for shipscarrying goods from the colonies to the metropole on the Carrera de Indias. Thecommercial, productive, racial and social consequences of this change are the focusof this detailed study on the emergence of a key centre in the New World.

The study is based on impressive archival research undertaken in Havana,London, Madrid, Mexico City and Seville. This painstaking work was facilitated byDe la Fuente’s Cuban collaborators, Garcıa del Pino and Iglesias Delgado, and thematerial is presented thematically, allowing the reader to develop a synthetic visionof how Havana’s growth related to the emergent realities of the Atlantic world.

The book is divided into an introduction and six subsequent chapters. In chaps. 2and 3, Havana’s maritime position is established, and the vital role of the city as a siteof both export and re-export of commodities from North America and Europe islaid out in forensic detail. De la Fuente writes with brio of the trade routes linkingHavana to ports in both North and South America and to Iberia, and lays out therole of the city in the trade in foodstu!s, wines, dyes, woods, tobacco, hides, fabricsand spices. He is particularly good at connecting the exports to and from Havanawith industries in Europe and commerce in places as far afield as China and India,thereby revealing how the Atlantic was already part of an emergent world system ofexchange by the latter part of the sixteenth century.

Having placed Havana’s growth in the context of its position in global trades, thenext four chapters address social history. In chap. 4, De la Fuente looks at urbangrowth, the large-scale migration of people from the Old World in the late sixteenthcentury and the development of the military infrastructure necessary to protect theSpanish fleet. The following chapter looks in detail at production in the hinterland ofHavana, and how the city both fed itself and developed consumer crops such assugar and tobacco. Chap. 6 looks at the life of African slaves in the city, and at howtheir presence related to the development of the system of colour racism that wasthe defining social feature of the colonial order in the Americas. Finally, in chap. 7,the features of life in Havana which De la Fuente has identified are related to thedaily lives of the city’s people, to their religious practices and festivals and to thehierarchies that emerged there between the elite and the commoners.

There is no question that De la Fuente has produced a work of much importanceto the study of early Atlantic history. Throughout, he never loses sight of how eventsin Havana were connected to developing commercial and manufacturing processesthroughout the western hemisphere and beyond. We see how the export of hidesrelated to Spain and Venice’s burgeoning leather industries, how developments insugar processing technology were imported from Brazil, and how changes inHavana’s slave population related to new directions that overtook the Atlantic slavetrade in the 1590s. By illustrating in detail how developments on all three sides ofthe Atlantic triangle were interconnected at such an early time in Atlantic history,and how local Cuban changes intersected with developments on a global scale,

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De la Fuente o!ers an impressive argument for a historical conception that goesbeyond merely imperial or national boundaries, and for the importance of push-ing the frontiers of transnational Atlantic history back to the dawning of themodern era.

De la Fuente is surprisingly reticent about the significance of this picture, how-ever, leaving his assessment of its place in the wider historiographical debate to afive-page epilogue. Although he has clearly read widely in the relevant literatures, thebook is thin on engagement with current debates, and this has the unfortunate e!ectof not allowing the author to make his argument as strongly as he might have done.The excellent chapter on the role of Africans and free blacks in the life of Havana,for instance, contains some important observations on the ways in which blacksused the institutions of Christianity, including marriage and the religious brother-hoods (or cofradıas), to develop autonomy and preserve elements of their Africancultures. However, De la Fuente fails to relate these to recent work by HermanBennett, Linda Heywood and John Thornton, or to the debates on ‘creolisation ’ inthe Americas, which have been especially lively in the past decade.

This is a shame, since De la Fuente himself is clearly aware of the implications ofhis work, and of how it could fit into the wider recasting of our understanding of theAtlantic. In his epilogue he notes that studies of the Atlantic as a global system havetended to focus on the eighteenth century, which of course suits the Anglophonepredilections of many historical writers. This, he continues, obscures the role ofwhat he calls ‘ the first Atlantic ’, when exchanges in the Iberian worlds helped tocreate a truly global system. By eschewing the demands of imperial historiographyand producing such a lucid and definitive work on one of the early hubs of thatsystem, De la Fuente has gone some way towards restoring the wider understandingof how the first global exchanges of the sixteenth century helped to shape themodern world.

T O B Y G R E ENCentre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001185

Manuel Barcia, Seeds of Insurrection : Domination and Resistance on Western CubanPlantations, 1808–1848 (Baton Rouge LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2009),pp. xiv+211, £22.00, hb.

The involuntary resettlement and enslavement of West Africans in Latin Americaand the Caribbean left an indelible imprint on that part of the world. From the1760s to the 1860s, large contingents of the hapless victims were taken to westernCuba. Many were forced to work on the sugar plantations, which helped transformthe once stagnant colony’s agricultural sector into a leading world supplier of thesweetener and its by-products. African slavery also altered the island’s social struc-ture and its relationship to Spain, especially during the Cuban struggle againstIberian colonial domination in the last third of the nineteenth century. Undoubtedlyfor these reasons, economic and institutional-political themes dominate the study ofthe African Diaspora in Spanish colonial Cuba.

Manuel Barcia’s book Seeds of Insurrection pursues a di!erent line of inquiry,focusing on the dynamic interaction between domination and resistance.Domination in a slave-based plantation society was implicit in law and custom andhad a clear punitive or deterrent purpose. Resistance was not so clear-cut. It spanneda continuum from non-violent to violent, and some of it was hard to detect. Planters

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and colonial o"cials, pressed to preserve their lives and properties, put a great dealof stress on stamping out the troublesome manifestations of slave resistance, butwere powerless to curb it entirely. The author maintains that the study of slavery inCuba has tended to follow this general pattern. Consequently, armed insurrectionsand group escapes have dominated the field of slave resistance at the expenseof other, less obviously unruly acts that sought to lessen, disrupt or overturn theinstitution of slavery. Resistance has also been studied piecemeal, arbitrarily splittingapart what may have been components of an interconnected universe of counter-hegemonic practices.

Barcia also notes that the domination-resistance binomial has been examinedalmost exclusively from a Caribbean or New World perspective, thus privilegingfactors that arose on this side of the Atlantic. The socio-cultural background ofbozales and the specific political state of a!airs of their places of origin in Africa areseldom considered important variables worthy of serious contemplation. WhileBarcia’s work is geographically grounded in western Cuba, he approaches itdiasporically in that both the American experience and African provenance of thecaptives are taken into account. For instance, some of the captives’ artisanal skills,religious values and military experience in Africa were often played out in Cuba,enabling Barcia to evaluate the potential material resources, worldviews and options(fight, flight, suicide, ‘ accommodation’ and so forth) that the enslaved had, and howthey went about acting on them while being held captive in Cuba.

Methodologically, Barcia uses two additional interpretive tools to round out hisinvestigation. The first, summed up in the concept of ‘everyday forms of resistance ’,captures the previously mentioned wide range of responses to bondage in whichenslaved men and women engaged. When this important advance in slave studieswas first introduced in 1941, the author notes, it debunked the long-held viewthat captives who did not forcefully defy the slavocratic system must have tacitlyaccepted it. Since then, researchers have uncovered ample evidence of enslavedindividuals and groups who relied on non-confrontational tactics, such as short- andlong-term escapes, legally contesting violations of slave ordinances, feigning illnessand ‘accidentally ’ damaging equipment, to name just a few. To this kind of resist-ance, Barcia adds oppositional expressions cleverly disguised as cultural perform-ance, including music, sacred rituals, dance, lore and gossip. This last category fitsneatly with his second analytical instrument : James C. Scott’s notion of ‘hiddentranscripts ’. Unlike public displays of insubordination, the latter often involvedsubtle, ‘behind-the-scenes ’ verbal and unspoken communication, manners andother patterns of behaviour critical of enslavement and other oppressive conditions.

The author probes a variety of primary documents on domination and resistancefound in Cuban, Spanish and English archives, including o"cial colonial dispatches,newspapers, letters and diaries. Separate chapters are devoted to homicides, con-spiracies and revolt, to marronage, to suicides, to slaves’ use of the colonial legalframework, and to disguised and non-violent forms of resistance. He carefully ex-amines the extant sources for each subject, the events they purportedly recorded andtheir end result. Rather than transcribing the information verbatim, he pays specialattention to the processes and constraints under which most of them, especiallycriminal proceedings, were created. Not all of them, he observes, were faithfulrenditions of the reputed incidents reported by planters, slave catchers and publicfunctionaries. Since the stakes were high for both the alleged o!enders and for thepersons who presented the cases against them, some of the parties interviewed

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might have slanted their declarations or provided biased, incomplete, contradictoryand even linguistically inaccurate testimony.

All in all, Barcia’s book o!ers a refreshing new look at African/black agency inthe western Cuban plantation world. Its suggests that while bozales might haveoperated on the basis of some West African influences carried over to the NewWorld, they did so in a Cuban environment that required making adjustments. Insome cases, this meant taking oaths of allegiance to certain African-based secretsocieties or naciones, or following leaders into the battlefield. In other instances,it required building cross-ethnic alliances with Cuban-born counterparts andfree people of colour. Sometimes, slave owners were surprised to learn that even theso-called esclavos mansos (submissive slaves) kept communications with or suppliedprovisions and weapons to cimarrones (escaped slaves/maroons) on a regular basis.Such role playing, duplicitous comportment, collaborations, adaptations, survivalstrategies and surreptitious activity, which often went on under the very noses ofcolonial overseers, call for a reconsideration of the role of resistance in helping todismantle the systems of control that sought to keep captives and free blacksin check.

J O R G E L. C H I N E AWayne State University

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001197

Juan Manuel Palacio, La paz del trigo : cultura legal y sociedad local en el desarrolloagropecuario pampeano, 1890–1945 (Buenos Aires : Edhasa, 2004), pp. 296, pb.

This book has a host of virtues to add to its alluring title. It is a work of localhistory – itself something of a rare bird in Argentinian historiography – that studiesthe mechanisms of the society that grew up around the production of wheat ina southern part of Buenos Aires province, Partido de Coronel Dorrego, fromits settlement by people of European extraction until the emergence of Peronismaltered the social dynamics of the region. The focus, however, is on two particularaspects of this society. In its more traditional vein, the work engages with the basiceconomic milieu and access to credit and land on the part of homesteaders-tenantfarmers and sharecroppers. By far the more original strand is the study of whatPalacio terms the local ‘cultura jurıdica ’, principally through an analysis of the roleof the justicias de paz (local magistrates who were not lawyers, and who dealt withlesser cases) in the mediation of the economic disagreements of local farmers,mainly with landowners, merchants and labourers. Lawyer-based justice – that is tosay, the principal juridical system dealing with more weighty conflicts – only appearshere as a result of appeals against local judgments.

From the outset this is a very well-written book, and it is an easy read (though onoccasion somewhat exasperating for the specialist, for reasons that will be exploredbelow). Moreover, encompassing as it does an unusual period of time, yokingtogether stages that are usually dealt with separately (interrupted by the Great Warand the Depression), it o!ers a picture of continuities and transformations thatenriches our understanding of the subject. Furthermore, the thematic originality ofthe second part of the book opens up an interesting area for the understanding ofhow this society functioned, dealing as it does with subjects that other studies haveinterpreted di!erently, such as conflicts relating to tenancy, credit, work and soforth. Above all, the focus on local history gives scope for some proper, deep mininginto social mechanisms in a way that is generally absent from wider-ranging studies.

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Precisely because of this, the analysis of the first part constrains the work’spotential as far as this reviewer is concerned. As stated, through the wealth ofinformation available to a local study, we are witness to the process of land occu-pation, the evolution of productive systems and tenancy relations, formal and in-formal credit and so on – but this is all analysed in a tone that the authoracknowledges as ‘pessimistic ’ and more in tune with the outlook of Scobie orGaignard (in studies dating from the early 1960s) than with the more rigorouseconomic analysis which has dominated the field since the publication of La pampagringa (Ezequiel Gallo’s doctoral thesis from 1970) and El progreso argentino (1979) byRoberto Cortes Conde. In fact, the author contrasts the old interpretation of Scobieand Gaignard with an opposing viewpoint that he defines as ‘optimist ’, and whichhe surprisingly associates primarily with the hypotheses of Jorge Sabato andGuillermo Flichman, rather than with the books by Gallo and Cortes Conde referredto above, or later works from the likes of Hilda Sabato (Capitalismo y ganaderıa) andthis reviewer (La tierra de los ingleses en Argentina), or with a slew of more recentstudies. Without doubt, his work is more in line with the first tendency.

Of course, this stance would be perfectly valid if it were well-founded, but I amnot sure that this is the case. As frequently happens with Argentinian historio-graphy – and, I’m afraid, with much of its society, a fact that may not be unrelated toits economic woes over the last century – there is a manifest incomprehension ofmarkets and a rejection of how they work. So, rather than any attempt to understandthe economic logic of the main actors’ behaviour, which at bottom might be said tobe an expression of human nature, a kind of moral economy is posited in which it ishoped that the state will ‘ correct ’ the injustices of the market. At the same time, thestate is never up to this task, being more or less clearly an instrument in the hands ofthe powerful.5 However, Argentinian economic history has long shown – andPalacio’s book confirms this in good measure – that increased state interventionin the economy from 1930, and above all during the early years of Peronism, wasnot accompanied by an improvement in either agriculture generally or in the cir-cumstances of those who worked the land in particular.6 Hence, the vivid examplesthat emerge from the Dorrego archive, and which illustrate the complex economicmechanisms that underpinned the wheat economy, sit uneasily in a study moreconcerned with judging than understanding.

Nor is it a well-advised choice to include the analysis of this reality within theframework of the historiography of haciendas and campesinos in indigenous regionsof Latin America, such as the Andes and Mesoamerica. Although it is, of course,possible to identify common features characteristic of the majority of agrariansocieties undergoing capitalist consolidation, the comparison tends to hide the basicfact that in one case the tenant farmers are former peasants who lost the right totheir land, while in the Pampas we are dealing with immigrants who looked to tenantfarming – with varying degrees of fortune – for a more promising path to socialadvancement than that provided by the labour market, which was in itself not

5 This view of the state, however, has not overshadowed more recent Argentinian histori-ography, with the most illuminating work in this respect being Tulio Halperın Donghi, ‘TheBuenos Aires Landed Class and the Shape of Politics in Argentina (1820–1930) ’, in EvelyneHuber and Frank Sa!ord (eds.), Agrarian Structure and Political Power : Landlord and Peasant inthe Making of Latin America (Pittsburgh PA, 1995).

6 In the case of tenant farmers, it is true to say that many benefited from the freezing of rentsunder Peron.

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particularly unfavourable given the high salaries on o!er. Understandably, however,beyond di!erences of interpretation, there is a sort of empirical reconciliation withthe ‘optimistic ’ camp, since the conclusion is that possibilities for social movementwere robust in the initial stages, but dwindled as the regional economy consolidatedand stabilised along similar lines to those observed in other frontier economies inArgentina and beyond.

Curiously, the final part of Palacio’s study, in which he engages with juridicalculture, reveals a very di!erent approach. Here he shows a real ability to understandthe thinking of the participants, leaving aside – and on occasion explicitly critici-sing – more moralising perspectives. He argues that, where the state was compara-tively absent, both judges and lawyers, the main arbiters of the legal system, showeda great capacity to mediate in conflicts. These cases, it ought to be said, were notespecially numerous, with 907 coming to court over 50 years, at an average of fewerthan 20 per year, although of course they were concentrated in critical years such asthe period around 1930. This is the background to what the author calls the ‘peaceof wheat ’, a fine expression that conveys the tendency of participants to conform tothe conditions in which they live their lives.

The ambiguity of the reading derives from the fact that while the weakness of thestate led to a lack of protection for tenant farmers and land workers in the economicsphere, this was made up for by a sort of legal free market, which satisfactorily filledthe void. At a time when economists and economic historians stress the significanceof a legal framework and the definition of property rights as the basis of any econ-omic system, it would seem that a greater e!ort to comprehend the economic logicof the participants might reconcile these analyses of the economic and legal markets.

E D U A R DO J O S E M I G U E ZUniversidad Nacional del Centro de la Provinciade Buenos Aires

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001203

Jose Antonio Sanchez Roman, La dulce crisis : estado, empresarios y industriaazucarera en Tucuman, Argentina (1853–1914) (Seville : Diputacion de Sevilla ;Universidad de Sevilla ; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientıficas,Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 2005), pp. 383, pb.

Sanchez Roman’s book is among a small but distinguished group of doctoral thesespublished as monographs this century that provide crucial contributions to theupdating of the economic history of Argentina. This statement may seem overthe top, as we are dealing with a book of regional history, but, partly due to this,that is what it amounts to. The book shows clearly the extent to which Argentina’sagro-export growth during the ‘gran expansion ’ was able to pull other sectors of theeconomy along in its wake. Although based on a di!erent case study, it complementsFernando Rocchi’s research into industry, among other works. It overturns, at leastfor Tucuman, the old orthodoxy that contrasted the Pampa economy’s integrationinto world markets and agro-export development with the industrial and economictrajectory of the interior ; the truth is quite the opposite, as the sugar sector, withsignificant state support, took advantage of the growth of the coastal market and ofthe modernisation of the economy to become the main supplier to the domesticmarket. Of course, this argument is not entirely new. Classic studies by Jorge Balanin the 1970s, for example, showed the lobbying strength of the Tucuman elite, andthe receptivity of the national political system to certain regional demands. Similarly,

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the modernisation and growth of the sugar sector were well known. But on the backof a significantly wider literature than its introduction suggests, the book underreview provides a systematic, solid and convincing study of the development ofthis industry and its impact on the provincial economy of Tucuman. It does so byconfirming the initial assertion in a style that is both even-handed and well-founded;it does not attempt to shoehorn the argument into a given theory, but ratherpresents an historical process in all its richness, complexity and ambiguity.

The opening chapter sets out the initial stages of the sector’s economic growth inTucuman (1853–76), indicating from the start one of the main strands of the study,namely the financial mechanisms (still rudimentary at this stage) obtaining in theprovince. Chap. 2 engages with a long-standing debate about the role of railwaydevelopment, which reached the province in 1876 by dint of state construction andwas subsequently handed over to private capital. Sanchez Roman’s analysis high-lights the complexity of this development, with significant peaks a!ecting each ofthe four lines that serve the region, and involving interaction with the authorities atthe national and provincial levels as well as the sugar industry and sugar planters.His arguments minimising the impact of the railways on sugar development arenot entirely convincing, however. Although it is true that economic take-o! camesome years after the arrival of the railways, this may be said to be a predictable lagattributable to a range of factors and does not in itself contradict the importance oftransport modernisation for growth, as the author knows. The third chapter dealswith the development of a financial system in Tucuman and its links with the sugarindustry. This shows the importance of state institutions, above all in the early stagesof the industrial spurt in the 1880s, and the subsequent growth of the privatebanking sector, along with more complex mechanisms of industrial finance.

The fourth chapter engages with the crucial issue of tari! protection for thedevelopment of the sugar industry, and the role of political elites and the businesslobby in ensuring profits in an industry that was hampered by formal dis-advantage – a climate that was not ideal for growing sugarcane. This restricted thescope of the product to the protected domestic market, meaning that the 1890 crisis(chap. 5), with its accompanying currency devaluation, had a comparatively limitede!ect on the sector. By contrast, the stimulus to investment facilitated by fierceprotectionism led to an overproduction crisis in the mid-1890s and at the beginningof the twentieth century. The national government again came to the sector’s aid,even to the extent of providing export subsidies, until international norms restrictedthe practice. This led to the province trying to regulate supply by limiting pro-duction. Finally, chap. 6 deals with the mature phase of the industry at the beginningof the twentieth century, with a central state less enthusiastic in its support, althoughfar from leaving the industry out in the cold. Again, the emphasis is on the devel-opment of the financial market, which, despite reduced government benevolence,managed to sustain a further period of increased production up to 1912.

This panoramic survey is enhanced by judicious use of comparative referencethat, rather than seeking to squeeze Tucuman into a broad Latin American model,uses studies of other well-favoured regions, in both financial and productive terms,to illuminate, by way of similarities and contrasts, the process under consideration. Itis to be regretted, however, that little attention is paid to other developing sugarindustries in Argentina – in Salta, Jujuy and El Chaco – which, although smaller inscale, could provide an excellent opportunity to assess the development of Tucumanand to highlight the factors that helped or hindered the region. Admittedly this

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omission can be explained by the absence of high-quality publications on the sub-ject, but it is certainly something that ought to be rectified.

The final assessment by the author is that the active part played by the central statein the fostering of the sugar industry, mainly through railway construction, financialmechanisms and tari! protection, led to a dynamic business sector in Tucumanbeing able to establish a thriving economic hub that underpinned the developmentof the province, enabling it to outperform several of its neighbours. Against ex-pectations, this subsidised development did not give rise to excessive industrialconcentration, or to the total subordination of sugarcane growers, although neitherof these tendencies was entirely absent. Sanchez Roman, for his part, concludes thatprotectionism fostered an excessive focus on sugar production, which would in thelong term be one of the main weaknesses of the Tucuman economy.

This leads to a question that the author is unfortunately reluctant to discuss indepth. Did the possibility really exist for Tucuman to diversify production to someother equally profitable sector that would have been less dependent on the protec-tion of the state? Surely the sugar rush depended to a large extent on the existence ofa local entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, able to achieve the necessary political support toestablish an industry despite conditions not being wholly favourable. Was sugar theonly option, or were other possibilities overlooked? In any event, the subsidy thatconsumers on the coast provided to the Tucuman economy by means of stateprotection was an e"cient method of reducing regional rift, enabling the region toshare in some of the benefits of the agro-export growth of the Pampas, and wasmore e"cient than the straight injection of public funding.

E D U A R DO J O S E M I G U E ZUniversidad Nacional del Centrode la Provincia de Buenos Aires

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001215

Carlos Davila, Luis Fernando Molina, Jose Miguel Ospina and Gabriel Perez,Una mirada a la historia del mercadeo en Colombia : testimonio de Enrique Luque Carulla,1930–2006 (Bogota : Universidad de los Andes, 2008), pp. 268, $55.00, pb.

This book is part of a long-term and wider e!ort by a group of academics at theSchool of Management of the Universidad de los Andes (Bogota, Colombia) todevelop studies on Colombian business history. In a process that started decadesago, this group has made important contributions to the previously nonexistent (andstill small) academic field of business history with a series of publications and thetraining of young scholars. This volume focuses on the life of Enrique LuqueCarulla, one of the most successful pioneers of marketing in Colombia. The first halfof the book includes Gabriel Perez’s detailed chapter on how this project came tolight ; Carlos Davila’s discussion on how business historical studies can take advan-tage of theoretical advances on the study of entrepreneurship ; Jose Miguel Ospina’schapter on the evolution of marketing as a science and the main concepts readersshould consider ; and two chapters by Luis Fernando Molina, the first a descriptionof how the interviews with Luque Carulla were conducted and organised, the seconda chronology of the main events a!ecting Luque Carulla’s life. The second half ofthe book consists of a series of chapters in which Luque Carulla narrates his lifethrough interviews with the authors. These chapters are organised chronologicallyand by the industries in which Luque Carulla was involved. Two chapters focus onhis early life and the vicissitudes faced by his father, who migrated to Colombia from

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Spain just before the Civil War, and ten chapters concentrate on his life asentrepreneur.

Luque Carulla’s first-person accounts focus mostly on the development of theCarulla supermarket, the first of its kind in Colombia. He shows how this chainintroduced the concept of self-service in Colombia in the 1950s and used for thefirst time the latest advances in inventory management technology and marketing.For Luque Carulla, the introduction of the supermarket in Colombia and theadoption of cutting-edge marketing techniques contributed to the overall modern-isation of the country. His contributions in marketing, however, had to adapt to theparticularities of Colombia, such as the existence of the hordes of street vendors thatare present in most Latin American cities, especially in bus stations or at tra"clights. Luque Carulla shows how some of the early promotions of goods that hiscompany wanted to introduce were carried out through these members of the in-formal economy. His narrative about the evolution of his supermarket also showsthe social changes taking place in Colombia in the second half of the twentiethcentury, such as the increasing number of adult women joining the labourforce (therefore reducing the number of people shopping during o"ce hours),the increasing literacy and urbanisation rates that made marketing campaignsmore e!ective, and the increasing capacity of working-class people to shop atsupermarkets instead of the traditional marketplaces. His story also shows thee!ects of economic policy, from protectionism before the 1980s (which limitedthe diversity of goods available in the supermarket, but made subsidised credit formodernisation available) to an open market after the 1980s (which increasedthe number of imported goods available in the stores and allowed stores to buynew equipment abroad). The success of the Carulla supermarkets made LuqueCarulla a very influential person in the business world, in academia and in politicalcircles, and he used this to promote his vision of improving the formal training ofpeople in charge of sales and marketing in order to contribute to the country’sdevelopment.

The authors could have exploited even better the wealth of information providedin Luque Carulla’s personal story with a stronger connection between the theoreticaldiscussions provided by Davila’s and Ospina’s opening chapters and the second halfof the book. The book could also have benefited from footnotes in Luque Carulla’spersonal story to guide an international audience not familiar with Colombia’sgeography, cultural characteristics or political history (a shortcoming also present inMolina’s chronology). These limitations do not reduce the value of this volume,however.

Scholars interested in Latin American business history can benefit from this bookin di!erent ways. The personal accounts of Luque Carulla can provide a wonderfuloral-history primary source by one of Colombia’s main entrepreneurs in the secondhalf of the twentieth century. The book includes some images of the material Carullaused in its early years to teach Colombians how to use a supermarket, and these willbe valuable to scholars interested in the evolution of consumer culture in LatinAmerica. This company and its leader created changes in Colombian’s consumerpatterns that can be contrasted with Julio Moreno’s findings for the case of Sears inMexico in his book Yankee Don’t Go Home (2007).

Una mirada a la historia del mercadeo en Colombia covers a period of dramatic econ-omic changes that also occurred in the rest of Latin America, such as the adoption ofprotectionist policies and their subsequent abandonment in the 1980s, therefore

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providing a first-person account of these changes from a member of the Colombianbusiness elite. In short, this is a welcome addition to the narrow but rapidly growingfield of business history in Latin America.

M A R C E L O B U CH E L IUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001227

Christoph Rosenmuller, Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues : The Court Societyof Colonial Mexico, 1702–1710 (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2008),pp. x+278, $34.95 ; £23.50, pb.

On his accession to the Spanish throne in 1700, Philip V, the first Bourbon monarchof Spain, appointed as his first non-interim viceroy of New Spain the tenth Dukeof Alburquerque, Francisco Fernandez de la Cueva Enrıquez. Alburquerque’s vice-regency (1702–10) and the political culture of court society are the focus ofChristoph Rosenmuller’s significant and insightful study. The author scrutinises theworkings of viceregal patronage at the Mexican court, the alliances and networksthe duke forged, the conflicts within which he became embroiled and his ultimatedownfall. As Rosenmuller observes correctly, viceroys and their courts in theSpanish empire remain understudied in the historical literature. The choice of thisparticular viceroy is especially interesting given that he functioned as a transitionalfigure in the change from Habsburg to Bourbon rule and the early e!orts (albeitfrustrated) to expand Spanish imperial control. Rosenmuller draws on wide-rangingsources including viceregal correspondence and diaries, listings of the viceroy’sretainers who travelled with him to New Spain, the juicio de residencia or inquiry intothe viceroy’s term of o"ce, and records of the media anata.

Following a brief introductory chapter, Rosenmuller provides a solid overview ofthe economic and political culture of the Spanish empire in the early eighteenthcentury. Chap. 3 explores the problem of corruption and the spatial politics ofthe viceregal palace. Chap. 4 analyses the duke’s ‘clients and creatures ’ and hisconstruction of patronage. Chaps. 5 to 7 address alliances and enmities (contrabandtrade, the power of the Mexican consulado, the conflict with the powerful Sanchez deTagle family), the ‘ faux ’ Habsburg conspiracy against the new Bourbon dynasty andthe deflection of royal reform policies (focused on the alcabala in Puebla and thesecularisation of Dominican parishes in Oaxaca). Chap. 8 traces the duke’s downfallafter his return to Spain, where he was subjected to a number of charges buteventually absolved by the king of all of them (including toleration of contrabandtrade). Such absolution was dispensed after payment of an indemnity of a massive700,000 pesos by the duke, although as Rosenmuller observes, ‘one has to see thetrial of the duke as a part of a general cleanup’ (p. 158).

Two main arguments stand out in this study. Firstly, the viceroy ‘ retained vastpatronage privileges and used them to secure his hold over the colony ’ (p. 78). Theauthor provides a wealth of information on the viceroy’s ‘clients ’ and networks, andthis constitutes the core and contribution of the study. When Alburquerque travelledfrom Spain to Mexico to take up his position, about 100 criados (retainers)accompanied him o"cially ; others would join him surreptitiously in New Spain. Wealso learn, for example, that the duke appointed about 281 alcaldes mayores, corregidoresand governors (more than half of all vacant district posts in New Spain) ; 11 of theappointments to the wealthiest districts went to his criados. Rosenmuller providesrevealing compilations of the duke’s other appointments of his ‘clients ’ to positions

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in the treasury, the military, and the Church, as well as detailing relationships withAudiencia ministers and the duration of appointments.

A second argument emphasises that Philip V’s choice of the duke owed less tothe desire to appoint a loyal and e"cient administrator than it did to the need to‘appease the aristocratic party at home that opposed the new dynasty and its Frenchcounselors ’ (p. 163). When the king attempted to increase control over the treasury,trade and the Church, much of the opposition to such attempts came from his ownviceroy. Rosenmuller builds an interesting case here. He challenges AlejandroCaneque’s recent arguments about the ahistorical usage of the term ‘corruption ’(The King’s Living Image, 2004). Rosenmuller agrees that patron–client relationshipspervaded the early modern state. He cautions, however, that such clientelism had itslimits, and that contemporaries understood when those limits had been trans-gressed, as demonstrated by the viceroy’s temporary exile and trial. At the same time,there is something ultimately dissatisfying, at least for this reader, about the author’ssomewhat one-dimensional portrayal of Alburquerque. He is careful to point outthat a complete discussion of all of Alburquerque’s activities is beyond the book’sscope, but one is still left wondering if the corrupt figure that emerges is really allthere was to the duke. The most extensive comment about the viceroy’s politicalviews is that : ‘Policies designed to heighten monarchic authority a!ected his estate’sprivileges too. The duke followed the argumentation of those defending their pri-vileges by emphasising the legitimacy of tradition ’ (p. 128). This is probably so, but abit more digging into the viceroy’s political philosophy, given his family backgroundand service to the crown (which would continue with his descendants), would haveprovided a more nuanced analysis. Without a better understanding of this it seemsthat if, as Rosenmuller asserts, the duke’s politics ‘helped to keep the colony loyal tothe Bourbons ’ (p. 163), they did so as an accidental by-product of his opportunitiesfor graft. There are also some beguiling but brief insights into the vicereine’s role –when she appears, it is because of references to disagreements with her husband –which leave one longing for a more substantive discussion or at least greatercuriosity about her influence in the shaping of viceregal power and patronage.

Despite Rosenmuller’s perceptive analysis of the viceregal palace and court inchap. 3, he appears oddly reticent to engage with some of the most recent andsophisticated literature on the topic. He confines his engagement with AlejandroCaneque’s recent study to the issue of corruption as discussed earlier, yet Canequehas much to say about the construction of viceregal power through image and ritual.Spanish scholars such as Victor Mınguez Cornelles and Inmaculada Rodrıguez Moyawho have addressed this topic are surprisingly absent from his bibliography. Readerswill also want to consult Michael Schre#er’s perceptive analysis of the Royal Palaceand viceregal display of power in The Art of Allegiance (this probably appeared too latein 2007 to be integrated into Rosenmuller’s study). Finally, in his discussion ofpleasure and patronage building in the gardens and haciendas of Mexico’s elites,Rosenmuller makes reference to Alburquerque’s boat ride (with small entourage) toIxtalcalco sponsored by Francisco de Medina Picazo, the treasurer of the tribunal ofaccounts. It is worth noting that this trip was captured in a charming painting byPedro de Villegas (active c. 1706–23). Rosenmuller has written an important studythat advances our understanding of the networks that shaped imperial rule. It is alsoa reminder of how much and how little we know about viceroys, their courts andtheir exercise of power.

S U S A N D E AN S -S M I T HUniversity of Texas at Austin

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J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001239

Juan Javier Pescador, Crossing Borders with the Santo Nino de Atocha (AlbuquerqueNM: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), pp. xxiv+256, $34.95, hb.

Juan Javier Pescador’s most recent book is a journey into both past and present. Ina quest to understand his family’s and his community’s devotion to the Santo Nino,a sacred image of Jesus as a child, Pescador follows the origin of the image and itscult in early modern Spain, its development in nineteenth-century Mexico and itspenetration into the United States during the twentieth century. Mixing autobio-graphical anecdotes with historical research, the final aim is to discover why theSanto Nino has gained such an important place and what this accumulation tells usabout the community that worships him. Finding the answers to these questions isnot easy. The Santo Nino was initially a secondary image in a statue devoted to ourLady of Atocha, a representation of Mary first celebrated by poor Castilian peasantsand then made into a patron of the Spanish royal family and indeed of Spain and itsempire. Sent to Spanish America, during most of the colonial period the imagecontinued to function very much as it did in Spain. In the late eighteenth century andespecially after Mexico gained its independence in the early nineteenth century,however, the worship of our Lady of Atocha became separate from that of the babychild she was holding in her hands. As the importance of the baby grew, so did theseparation between the two cults. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Santo Ninowas transformed into a wandering saint who, dressed with sandals and a pilgrim’sattire, protected travellers and immigrants. Thereafter, and without the aid of theo"cial Church (and, on occasions, despite its hostility), the cult of the Nino spread.Mostly worshipped in the domestic sphere, he was considered an additional memberof the family. Fuelled by the immigration of Mexicans to the United States, the cultof the Nino spread north. Gradually, a chain of shrines appeared along the CaminoReal (de Tierra Adentro), crossing the border and going as far as Chicago, to takejust one example. Giving families strength against the perils of the social andeconomic changes that they had experienced, the Santo Nino also protected im-migrants by allowing them to feel related to, and indeed part of, a transnationalMexican community that ignored the border altogether.

If, on the one hand, the story with which Pescador presents us is concerned withthe type of support individuals, families and communities need as they face newchallenges, on the other, it is also about the malleability of religious icons and theability of their worshippers to fit them to changing circumstances, in the processalso appropriating them from others. The cult of the Santo Nino was successfulprecisely because of its ‘ability to adapt and respond to new situations and chal-lenges ’ (p. 200). As such, it is surely one example of many demonstrating the way inwhich religious traditions migrate and change over time. Nevertheless, Pescador’stale is extremely important. Besides being based on a wide array of materials heldin public and private hands in Spain, Mexico and the United States, it is also aninteresting experiment in writing a history that is both personal and impersonal,both a tale about a community and a voyage to one’s roots. Linking his narrative tosubaltern studies, Pescador insists that he cares not only about religion : his quest isalso to understand how his community coped with cultural domination and withdi"cult and deteriorating living conditions. From a methodological point of view,and continuing the work he had already begun in a previous volume (The New WorldInside a Basque Village : The Oizartun Valley and its Atlantic Emigrants, 1550–1800, 2004),Pescador insists on the importance of conducting transatlantic research and of tying

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communities of origin to communities of reception. Moving from Spanish toSpanish American and then to Latino and Chicano history, he demonstrates thatnothing Mexican (even when Mexican-American) can be properly understoodwithout gaining an insight into what had happened in Spain in the early modernperiod, and what followed in Mexico thereafter. Although sotto voce, Pescador thusa"rms what should perhaps be (though is not always) obvious to most : that Latinoand Chicano studies may be a field within American (US) history, but that theycannot be fully explored without giving proper attention to what once happened,and still happens, in Spain and Spanish America.

T A M A R H E R Z OGStanford University

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001240

Justine M. Shaw, White Roads of the Yucatan : Changing Social Landscapes of theYucatec Maya (Tucson AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2008), pp. xi+226,$45.00, hb.

Among the Native American civilisations noted for their roadways are the Inca(and their Nasca predecessors), the Anasazi and the Maya. What student of ancientAmerican culture has not encountered the popular question : why did these peoplebuild roads if they did not have a wheel ? Save for a special section of the journalAncient Mesoamerica in 2001, only the Maya roadways, the so-called sacbe (literally‘white road ’ in Yucatec Maya, plural sacbeob), have lacked thorough treatment,until now.

Archaeologist Justine Shaw’s White Roads of the Yucatan focuses on the Cochuahregion of the east-central portion of north Yucatan, where a large number of thesestraight, elevated, plastered causeways dart across the landscape. They can be up to110 kilometres in length and up to 15 metres in width, and they are elevated as muchas three meters above the surrounding terrain. Bringing together archaeological datafrom Ichmul and Yo’okop, two regional capitals, Shaw addresses the general ques-tion of why the Maya needed to build, modify and alter such structures at di!erenttimes.

Two descriptive chapters on the archaeology of the two sites follow an openingchapter that reviews previous studies. At Ichmul, two sets of roadways radiateout from the centre. These were constructed during the Terminal Classic period(850–1100 CE), when the site had reached peak population, accompanied by aconsequent e!ort to integrate outliers that previously may not have been closelyrelated to the regional capital. The same appears to hold true for Yo’okop, which lieson the south-eastern periphery of the Cochuah region, although the arrangement ofsacbeob is somewhat di!erent.

Three chapters deal, respectively, with sacbe construction, types and variations.There are inter-site causeways that leave one site, pass through lower-densityoccupation zones and arrive at another site, as well as intra-site causeways that covera short distance within a given zone of occupation. Shaw attributes the sacbeob’sdead-straightness, mirrored in many contemporary roads in north Yucatan, to puree"ciency in transporting goods. Excavating along the inter-site causeways breatheslife into these overgrown lines of communication, revealing resting places, shrines,equipment storage facilities and even an ancient five-ton stone roller once usedby a road repair gang of corvee labourers. Systemic variations range from linear

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(non-hierarchical or implying an equal relationship among loci) and cruciform(appropriating the cardinal directions) to radial and dendritic systems, the latterresembling the radial except that interconnected sides are positioned in concentricrings about the point of emanation.

The next two chapters deal with function and the issue of why some cities builtsacbeob and others did not. To transport ideas, people and goods – that is, foreconomic reasons – would seem to be the obvious explanation, at least for thenarrower, dendritic road plan. Another would be that politics are manifested andpower exerted through controlling territory and setting up tribute routes. Watermanagement also figures in the picture. Early colonial observers had alluded toritual, especially processionals and pilgrimages, as a major function of sacbeob.Like some of the Nasca lines and certain Anasazi roads, these are often widerthan they need to be for basic transport of goods. The short intra-site causewaythat slices through Labna and the kilometric Uxmal–Kabah inter-site sacbe, eachending in a great arch, come to mind. Like the grand plan of Teotihuacan, Cuzco,and even Washington DC, such roadways and axes often incorporated celestiallybased referents, thus serving as an expression of the integration of social and cosmicorder.

Shaw is modest about the capacity of her database to address the presence/absence question, which is complicated by the fact that there may be overgrowncauseways that have gone undetected in many areas and consequently have not yetbeen surveyed. Rather, she wisely deploys her evidence to answer a more accessiblequestion, which she deals with in the final two chapters : when a sacbe was‘built, used and maintained, what factors may have conditioned this investment? ’(p. 134).

Taken together, the chronological, ceramic, epigraphic and climatological evi-dence points to the Terminal Classic as a time of rapid change. The rulers of Ichmuland Yo’okop needed to build causeways as a mechanism of social integration. Inhard times, sacbeob could o!er a means of transport of agricultural products. Theycould also assist in revivifying a political environment in which the regional capitalhad begun to lose its influence. Finally, a symbolic function connecting core andperiphery seems evident, especially in a large burial-related complex at Ichmul ; thepresence of sacbeob here suggests that it likely functioned as a ritual centre dedi-cated to ancestor worship. In like manner, when their empire had become unwieldy,the Aztecs reached out to peripheral tributaries around the Lake Texcoco basin bypermitting segments of their rituals dedicated to the months of the year to beconducted at these outliers. For this they needed no roadways, as water transportacross the lakes served their purpose. Ichmul’s capacity for innovation likely elev-ated that site to greater importance than Yo’okop, which maintained a more ‘ in-ternational ’ outlook (p. 165), importing more ceramics and elements of architecturalstyle, Shaw concludes.

In both cases the regional centres of Cochuah depended on sacbeob to success-fully navigate their rather depressed populace through di!erent kinds of troubledwaters. White Roads of the Yucatan thus exhibits considerable appeal to those inter-ested in the study of road systems of other civilisations and in core and peripheryrelations as a vehicle for social integration in general.

A N T HON Y F. A V E N IColgate University

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J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001252

John Lynch, San Martın : Argentine Soldier, American Hero (New Haven CT andLondon: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. xiv+265, £25.00, hb.

John Lynch’s engaging book on the life of Argentinian liberator Jose de San Martınanticipates the imminent appearance in Latin America of several biographic studiesbased on the lives of political actors also linked with the process of SpanishAmerican independence. The increasing interest in this type of book is, of course,related to the celebration this year of the bicentenary of the independence of manyLatin American nations, Argentina among them.

Not since J. C. J. Metford’s San Martın the Liberator, published by OxfordUniversity Press in 1950, has there been a book on San Martın by an Englishhistorian. Lynch’s decision to write about the life and times of this prominent figureof Argentinian history is not surprising, however, given the fact that most of hisacademic work during the last four decades has centred on Spanish American in-dependence and, more specifically, on Argentina. It is worth recalling that Lynch’sprevious work was a biography about the other great South American liberator,Simon Bolıvar, published by Yale University Press in 2007, and it is therefore re-vealing when Lynch states in the prologue of the book under review that it was amuch more demanding task to write about the life of San Martın :

We should judge [San Martın] on his own merits, not by constant comparison with theother great leader of South American independence, Simon Bolıvar. Comparisons areinvidious but inevitable. It is not di"cult to write a life of Bolıvar. Given half a chancehe will write it for you himself. The historian has to defend himself against Bolıvarand to preserve his own version of independence against the torrent of wordswith which Bolıvar seeks to explain and persuade. San Martın is di!erent. He lacks thestyle and panache of Bolıvar, preserves a decent reticence about his private life andmaintains a natural reserve about his role in the revolutions of independence. So it is achallenge for the historian, to bring him out and discover the man behind the silence(Preface, xii).

It is interesting to note that Lynch makes little attempt to indulge in the mythologicaldimension of his object of study. When Bartolome Mitre decided to write hismonumental biographies on the lives of Manuel Belgrano and San Martın, on theeve of the first centenary of Argentinian independence, he no doubt foresawthat both these leading characters of the emancipation process would soon be ac-claimed as the most indisputable heroes of the history of their nation. In thecase of San Martın, it is not an exaggeration to a"rm that the consolidation ofhis image during the last century or so has transformed him into some kind of‘untouchable ’ for most people in Argentina. Since most of the latest works basedon San Martın have essentially focused on topics related to the construction of themyth (Martın Kohan’s original study Narrar a San Martın, published in 2005, beingone of the best of its kind), it may sound somewhat paradoxical to suggest thatthe omission of this aspect in Lynch’s book could be considered one of its mostappealing features.

The fluent chronological narrative that characterises this study, which is packedwith revealing details about the liberator’s life and career, will surely appeal to a widevariety of readers. In this respect, Lynch’s book is visibly in line with the legacy ofthe classic British biographical tradition : it is an articulate and detailed account,containing all the essential information on San Martın’s life, which the authorrecollects from the numerous edited works on the subject, interwoven with his own

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comments and conclusions. The e"cient manner in which this strategy is put intoe!ect is clear evidence of Lynch’s undeniable craftsmanship.

As was the case with his previous works on Juan Manuel de Rosas and Bolıvar,Lynch’s study on San Martın is essentially political and is therefore structured verymuch like those two biographies, a significant common feature being the severalpages of meticulous descriptions of the political and social context that surroundedhis chosen characters. In the San Martın book Lynch paints a clear picture of thestate of a!airs in such diverse regions as Spain, the River Plate, Chile and Peruduring the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to give the readeran idea of the range of complexities that awaited the future liberator.

Another notable aspect of the book is its successful attempt to decipher the mainlineaments of San Martın’s political thought, a dimension that has not received muchattention in previous studies. The theme is central in the four chapters that deal withSan Martın’s traumatic experience as liberator and protector of Peru, as is evidentfrom the titles of chaps. 7 (‘A Monarchist in a World of Republics ’) and 8 (‘Liberalin a Conservative Society ’). In Lynch’s analytical speculations on this topic, thecomparisons between the ideological inclinations of San Martın and Bolıvar inevi-tably reappear. With regard to this specific question, Lynch concludes that ‘althoughthe political thought of the two liberators was expressed in di!erent terms, there wasa striking similarity in their basic ideas. Both began with similar republican ideals.Both saw these eroded by circumstances ’ (p. 224). Two paragraphs later, Lynchsummarises what was, in his opinion, the main dilemma that tormented theArgentinian liberator regarding his ideological orientation : ‘his political thought wasalways finely balanced between a need for absolute power and a preference forliberal government. In San Martın’s mind authority and liberty were indivisible, eacha response to excess in the other ’ (p. 225).

Like San Martın, many other actors engaged in the complicated Latin Americanpolitical scenario of the time were confronted with the problem of adopting eithermonarchism or republicanism as the most e"cient form of government in the newlyformed nations. In this respect, Lynch hints at the truth when he stresses, in theconclusions, that San Martın’s political strategies evidenced a complete detachmentfrom the powerful political interest groups that were dominant in the regions wherehe operated : ‘Throughout his active career in America he was driven above all bypolitical objectives and ideas. His only power base was the army that he himselfcreated through his determination and organising genius ’ (p. 226).

It is also in this last part of the book that Lynch makes brief references to themuch-debated issue of the existence, or not, of a ‘national project ’ in San Martın’sliberating quest : ‘ In this sense his strategy was Americanist rather than nationalistin inspiration, because American collaboration was the surest way to expandand complete the revolution for independence. These were strategies for war andrevolution, not concepts for the future direction of the continent. His Americanismwas left unadorned without a theoretical framework, or a comparative analysis ’(p. 227). Lynch correctly points out that, in spite of his self-proclaimed‘Americanism’, San Martın never remotely contemplated any ideas of continentalunion, as was the case with Bolıvar.

In conclusion, Professor Lynch’s latest biographical contribution is a fluent andvivid portrayal of the Argentinian national hero that concentrates on the mainhighlights of his life, containing also a considerable amount of information as well asinteresting analytical insights. One of the virtues of the book is the way in which

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Lynch succeeds in ‘humanising ’ the figure of San Martın by frequently quotinga diversity of anecdotes and testimonies that reflect the doubts, contradictionsand weaknesses that also formed part of his personality. This last aspect may bewelcomed by many a reader, especially those sceptical and weary of the marmorealdimension that all too often surrounds the image of San Martın.

K L A U S G A L L OUniversidad Torcuato Di Tella

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001264

James P. Woodard, A Place in Politics : Sao Paulo, Brazil, from SeigneurialRepublicanism to Regionalist Revolt (Durham NC and London: Duke UniversityPress, 2009), pp. xi+403, £62.00, £15.99 pb.

This book focuses on some of the main incidents and episodes in the politics of theimportant Brazilian state of Sao Paulo from the beginning of the Brazilian republicin 1889 to the revolt of Sao Paulo against the national government in 1932. Itincludes an immense amount of information from primary sources. I hesitate to callthis data ‘evidence ’, because that term is usually linked to information arrayed insupport of analysis, or an interpretation.

Here there is little evidence of an interpretation, nor of an overall thesis,other than the truism that politics, society, economics, ideologies and institutionalstructures are connected. The emphasis is on what contemporary participants andobservers said about what happened, rather than on the events themselves or howwe today might understand them. As one moves through one lengthy but undigestedquotation after another (in translations too often littered with false cognates andoverly literal word order) and turns in frustration to endnotes that often pile on 20 or30 discrete citations in support of a single paragraph (rendering such notes essen-tially useless, except to impress the reader with the considerable research e!ort thatwent into this compilation), one is frequently left to wonder about the author’s mainpoint, in the sense of building an empirical case for an explanation of what this allmeans in the light of research questions relevant today.

There is an impressive display of bibliographic name-dropping, without muchdiscernible connection between those passing references to the body of the text, yetthere is often no citation of the relevant bibliography. Instances of this includeprimitive rebels with no reference to Eric Hobsbawm, imagined communities withno reference to Benedict Anderson, and solids melting in air with no reference toMarshall Berman. From this book, one might conclude that the concept of the‘public sphere ’ originated with Argentinian historian Hilda Sabato, because JurgenHabermas is nowhere mentioned. Given the eventual presentation of a sizeablebody of information focusing on the trajectory of the Partido Democratico Paulista andits e!orts to challenge the hegemony of the Partido Republicano Paulista in the late1920s, however, the most egregious gap in the bibliography is the work of MauricioFont, mentioned neither in the text nor in the notes.

It turns out that the omission is deliberate. In 2005 Woodard published an articlein this journal that is primarily a critique of Font’s 1990 book, Co!ee, Contention, andChange.7 In an epigram introducing that criticism of Font’s thesis and the empirical

7 James P. Woodard, ‘History, Sociology, and the Political Conflicts of the 1920s in SaoPaulo, Brazil ’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 37, no. 2 (2005), pp. 333–49.

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basis for it, Woodard invoked Barrington Moore on the essentials of historicalanalysis : ‘To discover what is important it is necessary to ascertain all the forcesat work, to assess on the basis of specific evidence their relative importance andrelationship to each other ’.8 In view of the importance he apparently attaches tosuch precepts, one would have thought that in his book-length study of these topicsWoodard would have provided his own interpretation of the trajectory of SaoPaulo’s Partido Democratico by ascertaining the forces at work, assessing their relativeimportance and their relationship to each other, and then clearly presenting theresults of that analysis. By pretending in this book that the work of Mauricio Fontand the debates surrounding it never happened, Woodard does the standards ofprofessionalism a disservice, and misses an opportunity.9

Challenging not only Font (here implicitly) but also the cataloguing sta! ofBrazil’s National Library (explicitly, on p. 4) and reams of prior scholarship,Woodard finds that ‘co!ee oligarchy ’ is not a particularly useful category of analysis.To shift the focus, the book’s introduction suggests instead that ‘ the structure ofpolitics in Sao Paulo during these years was characterized by patronage and per-sonalism, fraud and favor, corruption and clientele-building ’ (p. 8). Furthermore,there was a ‘ thorough interweaving of party and government ’ in Sao Paulo’s one-party state. Sao Paulo politics also ‘ involved a far greater number and variety ofplayers than has heretofore been imagined ’, and ‘ the relationships that tied theseplayers together involved complex processes of give and take ’. With these assertionswe might agree with Woodard that he has succeeded in his e!ort to ‘ resist thetemptation to claim conceptual or methodological novelty ’ (p. 12), but they might atleast have served as the basis for structuring an interpretive conclusion. The author’spurpose would be better served if the conclusion and epilogue, rather than going onabout the personal hygiene of Janio Quadros or the kleptocratic e"ciency ofAdhemar de Barros in the 1950s, had been dedicated to bringing together the peri-ods and themes treated in earlier chapters in some sort of coherent analysis of SaoPaulo politics in the Old Republic. In fact, the period from 1889 to the early 1920s,three-quarters of the time period that the book covers and which takes up much ofthe first half of the text, is not mentioned in the conclusion and epilogue.

Of the analytical trilogy essential to understanding his topic, Woodard is strongeston the political and the social, while economic mechanisms are too often taken forgranted or misunderstood. To give one example, although it is marginal to suchmajor issues as agriculture versus industry or the economic e!ects of co!ee pricesupport policy, his take on economic mechanisms becomes unintentionally funnywhen he suggests that the colonato labour arrangement that became standard in thepost-abolition co!ee plantations in the west of Sao Paulo state involved profitsharing (p. 25). That would have come as a surprise to both planters and immigrantworkers alike.

This book, presenting voluminous raw material related to questions that studentsof the history of Brazil consider important, is unsatisfactory. When all is said anddone, we are not much closer to understanding the issues it treats than was the case

8 Barrington Moore, Injustice : The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains NY, 1978),p. 88.

9 For the debate on Font, see for example the forum on Font’s work in the Latin AmericanResearch Review, vol. 24, no. 3 (1989), pp. 127–57.

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some 30 years ago, when the analyses of these issues by Boris Fausto and JosephLove appeared in print.

T H OMA S HO L L OWA YUniversity of California, Davis

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001276

Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristine Hu"ne and Kevin Sheehan (eds.),Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 2009), pp. xxiii+427, £60.95, hb.

In this important, original and well-conceived volume, Daniela Bleichmar and herco-editors o!er an impressive overview of Iberian and Ibero-Atlantic scientific ac-tivity in the early modern period. Science is a capacious category, encompassingcosmography, medicine, pharmacology, metallurgy, natural science, nautical scienceand cartography as well as other related disciplines. The editors of this book havebrought together well-established as well as up-and-coming scholars in a volumethat o!ers helpful broad-brush accounts of the existing historiography as well asnarrower case studies. The diversity and pervasiveness of science’s function withinthe Iberian empires is clearly conveyed, and the book has been beautifully producedby Stanford University Press.

The book’s main purpose is to ‘show that the Spanish and Portuguese empireswere active participants in the practices of science during the early modern period ’,a subject that has been relatively neglected in the Anglophone literature or at leastnot fully integrated into the historiographical mainstream. As Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, one of the scholars who has been most responsible for the renaissance ofIbero-American scholarship on the history of science, shows in his introductoryessay, science was the ‘handmaiden of the Iberian empires ’ (p. 1). Moreover, theAmericas had a sizeable impact on the development of European science andmedicine, and the interaction, instead of a unilateral flow, between the ‘core ’ andthe ‘periphery ’ needs to be more fully appreciated. The 15 essays cannot betreated individually in a review of this length, but the uniformly high quality of thecontributions should be noted. Several of the essays are especially innovative orstimulating and deserve extended treatment.

Martha Few’s essay ‘Medical Mestizaje and the Politics of Pregnancy in ColonialGuatemala, 1660–1730 ’ shows how indigenous and European medical traditionsinteracted, came into conflict with each other and were often reshaped under co-lonialism. Pregnancy, she notes, was approached in terms of ‘ local understandingsof illness causation and conceptions of health and healing [were] neither whollyEuropean nor Mesoamerican, nor completely religious or scientific ’ (p. 146).Timothy Walker’s ‘Acquisition and Circulation of Medical Knowledge within theEarly Modern Portuguese Colonial Empire ’, also pays attention to the collaborativeinteraction of indigenous healers and European physicians, surgeons and pharma-cists. As he demonstrates convincingly, ‘ Indigenous people of the Portuguesecolonies thus made important contributions to ‘‘Western medicine ’’ ’ (p. 248). Theessays by Few and Walker reveal how the development of European science hadmore than a casual or indirect connection to overseas empire. Moreover, theseessays show how scientific practices, like religious ones, emerged from syncreticprocesses resulting from inter-cultural encounters.

Perhaps the most interesting essay in the collection reveals the way in whichscientific discourses often intersected with, and were inextricably linked to, areas

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of human endeavour that the modern world does not consider intimatelyconnected. Daniela Bleichmar’s brilliant chapter ‘A Visible and Useful Empire :Visual Culture and Colonial Natural History in the Eighteenth-century SpanishWorld ’ shows how drawing and illustration were a tremendous, and under-appreciated, aspect of early modern science. Focusing on the scientific expeditionsof the late eighteenth century, Bleichmar shows how every expedition, ‘whether itwas focused on natural history, astronomy, geography, navigation, exploration, orcartography, employed draughtsmen and produced numerous images as part of itsstated goals _ Images were not ornamental secondary products but the centralconcern of many expeditions, at times the most important : the bulk of Spanishexpeditions ’ output consisted of illustrations’ (p. 308). As Bleichmar persuasivelydemonstrates, ‘visuality made the empire’s nature identifiable, transferable, andappropriable ’ (p. 309).

Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires is a well-conceived, well-editedvolume which o!ers a glimpse into the exciting transformation that is under wayin the field of the history of science in the Ibero-Atlantic. The lion’s share of theessays are well-written and not jargon-laden, and it is imaginable that many ofthe essays could find their way into postgraduate and even advanced undergraduatesyllabi.

G A B R I E L P A Q U E T T ETrinity College, Cambridge

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X10001288

Kathleen Weaver, Peruvian Rebel : The World of Magda Portal, with a Selection ofHer Poems (University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009),pp. xi+309, $60.00, hb.

Peruvian Rebel is a welcome biography of Magda Portal, one of twentieth-centuryPeru’s most important political activists, poets and feminists. Kathleen Weavertraces Portal’s personal and political life from her birth in 1901 until her death fromarteriosclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease in 1989. Based on Portal’s extensive writingsand various periodicals, the book also draws on Weaver’s interviews with Portal andseveral of the activist’s relatives and friends. Throughout the book, Weaver ablymelds a discussion of Portal’s familial and romantic relationships with an explo-ration of Portal’s work as both a leading member of the populist Alianza PopularRevolucionaria Americana (APRA) party and a champion of women’s political rights.Weaver closes the book with a selection of 33 of Portal’s poems, provided in theiroriginal Spanish and in English translation.

Weaver o!ers an engaging look at Portal’s personal life as a daughter, wife, sisterand mother. The reader gets an intimate view of Portal’s childhood, even learning ofher feelings of loss at the death of the family dog. Weaver’s discussion of the suicideof Portal’s daughter Gloria in 1947 is particularly moving, and the fact that Weavermanaged to provide such an exploration while also respecting Portal’s unwillingnessto discuss her daughter’s death is impressive. Weaver’s discussion of Portal’sseparation from her first husband, Federico Bolanos, is less successful ; Weaverinforms the reader that Portal’s subsequent romance with Bolanos’ brotherReynaldo (better known by his pen name, Serafın Delmar) was scandalous, but sheo!ers us no sense of the scale of that scandal or of its repercussions for Portaland Delmar.

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Weaver’s treatment of Portal’s political work is e!ective. The book excels in itsdiscussion of Portal’s international e!orts during APRA’s formative period in the1920s. We follow Portal through her exile in Cuba and Mexico, and her subsequenttravels to Bolivia, Costa Rica, Colombia and Chile. The section on Portal’s 1929lecture tour of the Caribbean is especially strong. We learn not only what Portalsaid and did in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba, but also how heraudiences responded to her ideas and assertions. Weaver then explores tensionsinside the APRA from its first electoral run in 1931 until Portal’s definitive breakwith APRA in 1950. Portal was critical of APRA leader Vıctor Raul Haya de laTorre’s decision to run for the presidency in 1931, and she grew increasingly uneasywith APRA’s softening attitude toward US imperialism. Portal’s disillusionmentwith APRA grew pronounced during the 1940s, especially after Haya retracted hissupport for women’s political rights. It seems surprising that Portal did not breakwith APRA sooner, and Weaver does a good job of explaining Portal’s prolongedloyalty to the party.

Peruvian Rebel is relatively weak in its discussion of Portal’s political work after1950. Weaver notes that Portal joined the pro-Soviet wing of the PeruvianCommunist Party in 1967, ran for political o"ce in 1978 and again in 1985, andtravelled to the Soviet Union in 1985, but this significant period of Portal’s politicallife receives only cursory treatment. Similarly, Weaver informs us of Portal’s workwith feminist organisations during the 1970s, but o!ers few details about thecharacter or extent of this engagement. Portal had long criticised feminism asbourgeois, even as she advocated for women’s equality, and her late embrace ofPeru’s feminist movement warrants more attention. Had Weaver further developedthis section of the book, eliminating lengthy and unnecessary asides about DiegoRivera, Haya’s trip to the Soviet Union and international communism in earliersections of the study, this would have been a stronger book.

Although Weaver began this project with a focus on translating Portal’s poetry,the book does not provide a literary analysis of the activist’s poetry or prose. PeruvianRebel is thus distinct from Daniel Reedy’s intellectual biography of Portal, La pasio-naria peruana. Weaver does, however, o!er readers a fascinating portrayal of Portal’sattitude toward her own writing. We see Portal’s earliest forays into writing as ayoung child, as well as her friendship with poet Cesar Vallejo and the leftist intel-lectual Jose Carlos Mariategui. Portal regularly contributed poems to Mariategui’sfamous journal Amauta, and Weaver examines Portal’s shifting attitudes towardMariategui and his work. Following Haya’s admonition that poetry was an impedi-ment to her political development, Portal renounced poetry during the late 1920sand focused on prose instead. Portal returned to creative writing after her break withAPRA, and Weaver explores how Portal’s 1957 novel La trampa (The Trap) was athinly disguised memoir of her time in APRA. The selection of poems in Englishtranslation at the end of the book makes a nice complement to this biography, andwill make Portal’s literary work far more accessible to undergraduate students andnon-experts than ever before.

Peruvian Rebel is not a definitive discussion of Portal’s life and work. Weaverdid not conduct research in Peru’s national archive, nor did she explore the exten-sive holdings of Peru’s departmental and municipal archives. As various Peruviangovernments monitored Portal’s activities, jailed her and even sent her into exile,there is no doubt that scholars could find a great deal of material about Portal inPeru’s archives. It would also be fascinating to explore the Apristas’ shifting attitudes

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toward Portal. APRA slowly but definitively marginalised Portal across the1940s, and lambasted her as a traitor following her 1950 denunciation of the party.Weaver informs us that Portal faced intimidation, harassment and death threatsfrom Apristas ; future studies of Portal would do well to explore such treatmentin detail.

An English-language exploration of Portal’s life as a political activist, feminist andpoet is long overdue. Although Weaver’s unorthodox citation style makes PeruvianRebel’s notes unwieldy, the book is otherwise straightforward and clear. Weaver’srespect and admiration for Portal is evident, and her study will surely bring Portalmore of the historical attention she so clearly deserves.

J A Y M I E P A T R I C I A H E I L M ANUniversity of Alberta

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 42 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0022216X1000129X

Marteen van Delden and Ivon Grenier, Gunshots at the Fiesta : Literature andPolitics in Latin America (Nashville TN: Vanderbilt University press, 2009),pp. xiv+294, £38.50, hb.

Inter-disciplinary endeavours of reading literature carried out by social scientistsand literary critics do not usually have happy endings. Generally, the questionsthat social scientists raise when reading novels are grounded in their need for in-formation, whereas for literary critics raw information is the less importantaspect of a novel. Despite these di!erences, Latin American literature is a politicaland sociological archive of sorts, providing possible answers for questionsfrom either discipline. Maarten van Delden and Ivon Grenier approach thisarchive with a genuine commitment to engaging readers from the di!erentfields, providing answers, understanding the nature of the tensions between art andpolitics, and most of all, recognising the political agenda of certain literary andcritical works.

The appealing title of the book suggests that its authors are dealing withcontemporary issues of violence and literature, exploring the tension betweenrepresentation and fear and examining issues of trauma, gang activity, corruptionand organised crime as well as the proliferation of paid assassins who currentlycrowd many Latin American novels. These are, among others, the salient elementsof the region’s recent political dramas, but Gunshots at the Fiesta deals with a fiesta thatis over. The book o!ers an insightful historical perspective into the relationshipbetween politics and literature. With the exception of three contemporary criticsdiscussed in chap. 3 (‘The Politics of Contemporary Latinamericanism’), the authorso!er a thorough reflection on the work of authors that shaped the Latin Americanliterary field during previous decades.

The book begins with an introductory essay in which Grenier o!ers some con-ceptual tools for reading. The author describes politics as a race for power, incontrast with the realm of art, which presents a ‘multiperspectival approach tohuman situations ’ (p. 5). Grenier makes a distinction between political art and artthat is not considered political, with the former pertaining to events such as wars andrevolutions and the latter dealing with ‘ the bureaucracy and the tyranny of smalldecisions ’ (p. 4). Instead of going beyond this arbitrary and traditional definitionof the political, Grenier reinforces it. One could appeal to the work of severalfeminists from the field of political science who have argued extensively against this

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conception of politics, to claim that such a schema reproduces divisions between thepublic and the private and o!ers a limited definition of the political.10

Leaving the debate aside, the weak point of Grenier’s proposal is that it leaveslittle room for establishing a dialogue with other fields of knowledge. The texts andauthors Van Delden and Grenier chose to analyse do not do justice to several of thecontemporary debates and tensions between politics and literature in the contem-porary Latin American context.

While in many respects one could agree with Grenier when he states that one ofthe ‘chief political contributions of art is arguably to be found in the questions itraises rather that its answers ’ (p. 8), it is also true that those questions are raised invery specific contexts that go beyond the search for political leadership. Politics, asVan Delden suggests towards the end of the book, is also a realm of domination,exclusion and other forms of power that do not necessarily comply with the tra-ditional description Grenier uses.

In the second chapter, Van Delden o!ers a more productive perspective onpolitics. He is less concerned with the definition of the political than with tracing thepolitical agenda of three literary critics, Walter Mignolo, Alberto Moreiras and JohnBeverly, whose works have shaped the field of literary and cultural studies in LatinAmerica during the past decade. From then on, the book goes to the past, beginningwith Jose Martı, to an exegesis of the various readings of la Malinche, to an analysisof the works of Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa. These latterthree authors together take up more than a half of the entire book. The readings ofPaz and Fuentes, authors whom Van Delden has analysed thoroughly in previousbooks, as well as of Vargas Llosa show the preoccupations these writers had duringthe worst years of the Cold War : the tensions between Right and Left, democracyand totalitarianism, and, obviously, art and politics. The final chapter focuses on theplace that Paris occupies in the imaginary of two works, one from Claribel Alegrıaand the second from Ricardo Piglia. The essay serves to reflect on the cosmopoli-tanism of Latin American literature.

It is pretty clear which essays were written by the political scientist and which bythe literary critic. This, of course, is not a problem per se ; it only shows a lack ofinteraction between the two perspectives. It is also the product of the uneasy alliancebetween social scientists and literary critics when it comes to reading literary works.In the conclusions, however, the authors have decided to write their views onpolitics and literature in the format of a dialogue, and perhaps here lies the real andmost significant contribution of Gunshots at the Fiesta. The exchange of ideas presentsreal challenges to both literary critics and political scientists looking for innovativeand inter-disciplinary approaches to the study of politics and literature in the region.In this last section the authors not only signal the dangers of reading literature froma social science perspective but also indicate the risks that literary critics run whenimposing a political agenda on a given text. I would have liked to begin my readingof Van Delden and Grenier’s book from the conclusions. This section of the book iswhat could really help set a standard for future endeavours in reading politics inliterary works.

G A B R I E L A P O L I T -D U E N A SUniversity of Texas at Austin

10 I am thinking of Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self : Gender, Community and Postmodernism inContemporary Ethics (New York, 1992) ; and Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornelland Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions : A Philosophical Exchange (New York, 1994).

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