Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Latin American Studies

A 'regional' political economy which makes its own contribution to the theory of the state.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Buenos Aires was one of the major commercial entrepots of the Spanish American empire. Chief among the beneficiaries of the new prosperity of the area were the wholesale merchants, a group of men who came to control the commerce of the entire Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata. This study, a contribution to the fields of social history and group biography, looks at the formation of the merchant group, and at the social patterns which assured the merchants' primacy in the economic and social life of the colony. Origin, education, recruitment, group perpetuation and social mobility are treated in depth. The role of women and marriage in recruiting individual merchants into mercantile families and clans is a central issue. Professor Socolow also looks at the merchants' roles in commerce and society, lay religious institutions and local government. A biography of one merchant, Gaspar de Santa Coloma, provides a case study of the multiple roles of a porteno merchant.

This study is concerned with the forty-year period before 1930, when Argentina experienced rapid economic and social growth broken only by the First World War. The Radical Civic Union appeared in the 1912 elections and in 1916 its leader, Hipolito Yrigoyen, became President. Dr Rock discusses the origins and course of this experiment in representative government, and the distribution of power and political benefits under the new system in the light of the society created by the growth of the primary export economy: how it came about that the established political elite ceded control to the Radicals; whom they represented and towards which groups they directed their attentions. The work also deals with the methods of organization and mobilization used by them in a complex urban environment to develop and uphold their political support. It examines in some detail the class conflicts of the wartime period, the strikes whereby the workers sought to guard against the erosion of their wages by inflation, and the counter-mobilization of elite and middle-class groups, most notably in the bloody 'Tragic Week' of 1919.

Since its first appearance in Brazil in 1949, Victor Nunes Leal's Coronelismo, Enxada e Voto, here entitled Coronelismo: the Municipality and Representative Government in Brazil, has come to be recognized as a classic analysis of the system that emerges from 'the superimposition of structural forms evolved through the representative process on an inadequate social and economic structure'. The text is here published without any substantial change or addition, according to the author's wish. His insights and approach remain as suggestive as when they first appeared; as Barbosa Lima Sobrinho pointed out in the preface to the second Brazilian edition, the work is not only the analysis of a structure, but the record of that structure and of the arguments about it at a certain time, a record important in itself. Its place in the development of political analysis in Brazil is set out in Alberto Venancio Filho's introduction: 'a divide in the history of political science in Brazil... the first landmark of the study of politics in our Universities'. The work is recognized everywhere as an essential text for the student of that country.

Almost invariably, late-colonial Caracas has been described as a society full of tensions and a colony at odds with the imperial order. This study, in contrast, portrays a colony, which grew, prospered and matured within the confines of Empire. It depicts the late 1700s as the golden age of caraqueno colonial society and suggests that it was no accident that this late renaissance created an environment which bred the self-confident men who led much of Spanish America to independence. The causes of the independence struggle, and the violence, which accompanied it, are considered in the context of the imperial crisis provoked by Napoleon's invasion of Spain. The findings of this study are based on an exceptionally varied array of new data on the economy and society of late eighteenth-century Caracas, of which a collection of 800 wills is the most impressive.

An examination of silver mining and society in Colonial Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating upon Zacatecas, the centre of the principal silver-mining region. In the first half of the book, the author describes the discovery of the mines, the establishment of the town, its role in the northward advance of the Spanish occupation of Mexico, its administration, and the sources of its supplies of essential food and materials. The remainder of the book is devoted to an analysis of the mining industry of the Zacatecas district. The author discusses techniques, labour and raw materials. He also provides statistics for silver production, suggesting reasons for their fluctuation, and explores sources of capital for the industry. Based on detailed study of archives in both Spain and Mexico, Dr Bakewell is able to provide an entirely new chronology for the development of Zacatecas and the Mexican maining industry up to 1700.

An analysis of marriage patterns in nineteenth-century Cuba, a society with a large black population the majority of which was held in slavery but which also included considerable numbers of freedmen. Dr Martinez-Alier uses as her main source of evidence the records in Havana of administrative and judicial proceedings of cases in which parents opposed a marriage, of cases involving elopement, and of cases of interracial marriage. Dr Martinez-Alier develops a model of the relation between sexual values and social inequality. She considers the importance of the value of virginity in supporting the hierarchy of Cuban society, based on ascription rather than achievement. As a consequence of the high evaluation of virginity, elopement was often a successful means of overcoming parental dissent to an unequal marriage. However, in cases of interracial elopement, the seduced coloured woman had little chance of redress through marriage. In this battle of the sexes and the races, the free coloured women and men played roles and acquired values which explain why matrifocality became characteristic of black free families.

Contrary to claims that socialism opposed the family unit, Rachel Hynson argues that the revolutionary Cuban government engaged in social engineering to redefine the nuclear family and organize citizens to serve the state. Drawing on Cuban newspapers and periodicals, government documents and speeches, long-overlooked laws, and oral histories, Hynson reveals that by 1961, and increasingly throughout this decade, revolutionary citizenship was earned through labor. While men were to work outside the home in state-approved jobs, women found their citizenship tied to affording the state control over their reproduction and sexual labor. Through all four campaigns examined in this book - the projects to control women's reproduction, promote marriage, end prostitution, and compel men into state-sanctioned employment - Hynson shows that the state's progression toward authoritarianism and its attendant monopolization of morality were met with resistance and counter-narratives by citizens who so opposed the mandates of these campaigns that Cuban leadership has since reconfigured or effaced these programs from the Revolution's grand narrative.

This book analyzes the extent and forms of violence in one of the most significant indigenous rural revolts in nineteenth-century Latin America. Combining historical, anthropological, and sociological research, it shows how violence played a role in the establishment and maintenance of order and leadership within the contending parties.

An essential text for those interested in the history of Native Americans and Mexico. It offers a novel approach to understanding cross-cultural encounters and colonialism in the early modern period, combining environmental history with Spanish and native-language sources to explain socioeconomic and cultural continuities.

Examines the religious beliefs and practices of a generation of Catholics who came of age in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. It centers on Jose de Leon Toral, who killed revolutionary leader Alvaro Obregon to combat anticlerical laws and bring on a millenarian vision of the Kingdom of Christ.

The Mexican Mission presents the most complex social history of the mission enterprise in sixteenth-century Mexico to date. Despite the crippling illness and socio-political upheaval that accompanied the Spanish conquest, the book finds that indigenous communities used the mission as a vehicle to reassert and reconstruct local sovereignty.

This book provides the first detailed analysis of the evolving concept of corruption in colonial Mexico. Drawing on fresh archival material from historical, legal, religious, and political documents, Christoph Rosenmuller explores the enigma of corruption, its meanings, and its temporal differences.

Professors Barbara Weinstein and James Woodard have translated John M. Monteiro's field-defining work from its original Portuguese into English. The book engages with themes central to slavery studies and ethnohistory and makes clear the degree to which native peoples shaped the colonial history of southeastern Brazil.

Argues that laywomen participated in and shaped religious culture in colonial Mexico through their own interpretations of ideas about women, sin, and guilt and through their daily interactions with the church. Reveals important aspects of the faith cultures and social contracts that shaped the church's role in society.

Using the city of Puebla de los Angeles, the second-largest urban center in colonial Mexico, Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva investigates the experiences of slaves in the seventeenth century. As a social and cultural history, it addresses how enslaved people formed families and social networks to contest their bondage.

A social and political history of regional socialist parties that set critical precedents for the creation of Mexico's single-party system following the Mexican Revolution. For scholars and students of modern Latin America across disciplines.

Using the case of Mexico, this book examines how the concept of caste evolved by studying the most extreme racial mixtures in society. By arguing that the experiences of these individuals laid important foundations for the future, this book will be of interest to readers studying race, race relations, caste, racial mixture, mestizaje, Mexico, and colonial Latin America.

The book explores the creation of the post-colonial Mexican state by comparing the legal culture of mestizo towns, indigenous towns and agricultural estates (haciendas). More broadly, it is for readers interested in the social origins of liberalism and authoritarianism in the nineteenth-century world.

Modern Mexico derives many symbols of identity and heritage from its Aztec legacy. This book demonstrates that such emotional links to the native past originated in part among colonial-era indigenous leaders who adapted ancestral memories following the Spanish conquest, eventually enabling American-born Spaniards to likewise identify with this ancient legacy.

Marcela Echeverri draws a picture of the royalist region of Popayan (modern-day Colombia) that reveals deep chronological layers and multiple social and spatial textures. She uses royalism as a lens to rethink the temporal, spatial, and conceptual boundaries that conventionally structure historical narratives about the Age of Revolution.

This is the first scholarly study of the life and cult of the black Peruvian saint, Martin de Porres (1579-1639), the son of a Spaniard and a freed slavewoman from Panama. It traces the evolution of his cult and the events in Peru, the United States and Rome that led to his canonization in 1962.

This book tracks the complex history of Asian slaves who journeyed to Mexico on the ships of the Manila Galleon in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tatiana Seijas examines the implications of these individuals' change in legal status from the bondage of chino slavery to the freedom of the Mexico City streets as liberated Indians.

This book is an ethnographic study of the Parakana, a little-known indigenous people of Amazonia, who inhabit the Xingu-Tocantins interfluve in the state of Para, Brazil. Carlos Fausto analyzes the relationship between warfare and shamanism in Parakana society from the late nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century.

This study covers the economic history of Latin America from independence in the 1820s to the present, stressing the differences between Latin American countries while recognizing the external influences to which the whole region has been subject. This revised third edition contains a wealth of new material that draws on the new research in this area.

This book, originally published in 1987, is a socio-cultural analysis of a tropical belle epoque: Rio de Janeiro between 1898 and 1914. It relates how the city's elite evolved from the semi-rural, slave-owning patriarchy of the coffee-port seat of a monarchy into an urbane, professional, rentier upper crust dominating the centre of a 'modernising' oligarchical republic.

The Juzgado de Capellanias was the most important fiscal institution within the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico. It operated in each diocese as a type of bank, receiving clerical revenues from various sources and investing them by way of loans at interest.

Ian Roxborough challenges conventional wisdom, arguing that control over Mexican unions has been more fragile and problematic than appears at first sight. Taking the car industry as a case study, he discusses the upsurge of industrial militancy in the 1970s and explores its possible implications for continued political stability.

This book examines how transformations in Brazil's social, economic and political organization affect the demographic behaviour of people who live in different parts of the country and who occupy different positions in the social system. Using data from the 1970 and 1980 censuses, they show how the Brazilian style of economic growth unequally affected different population subgroups.

During the eighteenth century the Bajio emerged from its frontier condition to become the pace-maker of the Mexican economy. Silver mining boomed and population increased rapidly. It is the aim of this book to examine the impact of these dramatic changes on the structure of agricultural production and the pattern of rural society.