Journal of Latin American Studies articles from May 1998

Journal of Latin American Studies archives from May 1998

Populism and neo-populism in Latin America, especially Mexico.
May 1, 1998... 'In all matters of importance, style and not content is the important thing': Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest. Like Charles II, populism seems to be an 'unconscionably long time dying'. Or, if another cliche may be permitted,...

Embracing a suitable past: independence celebrations under Mexico's second empire, 1864-6.
May 1, 1998... As Mexico's Emperor Maximilian delivered his oration from the house where, over a half century before, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla had issued his famous grito for independence, the 32-year-old former Archduke not surprisingly experienced...

From models for the nation to model citizens: 'Indigenismo' and the 'revindication' of the Mexican Indian, 1920-40.
May 1, 1998... Few Latin American social or aesthetic movements have ever attained the power that Mexican Indigenismo enjoyed between 1920 and 1940. Reversing a century of 'liberal scorn' for the Indian, post-revolutionary Indigenismo gained prominence as...

Postrevolutionary intellectuals, rural readings and the shaping of the 'peasant problem' in Mexico: 'El Maestro Rural,' 1932-34. (periodical)
May 1, 1998... This article is part of a study analysing the construction of new social categories during the period immediately after the Mexican revolution. It draws heavily on a privileged source: the magazine El Maestro Rural, which reveals the social...

State agrarianism versus Democratic agrarianism: Adalberto Tejeda's experiment in Veracruz, 1928-32. (Veracruz, Mexico)
May 1, 1998... On 14 November 1991, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, then President of Mexico, held a key meeting with representatives of the republic's major peasant organisations. The purpose of the meeting was to obtain these organisations' consent to the...

Racial ideologies and the quest for national development: debating the agrarian problem in Ecuador (1930-50).
May 1, 1998... Racial ideologies have often informed government policies, in Latin America as elsewhere. This is perhaps clearest in regard to immigration policies, where host governments have carefully defined who could be admitted to their countries, and...

Fiction as history: the bananeras and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude.' (novel)
May 1, 1998... The subject of this article was first suggested to me by an interview Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian Nobel Laureate, gave to a Channel Four TV programme one evening in 1990. In that programme, the late Colombian journalist Julio Roca...

Liberdade por um fio: Historia dos Quilombos no Brasil.
May 1, 1998... Joao Jose Reis and Flavio dos Santos Gomes (eds.), (Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996), pp. 509, pb. This exceptional book brings together the recent scholarship of 17 authors on quilombos (runaway slave communities) in Brazil. The...

Shadows over Anahuac: An Ecological Interpretation of Crisis and Development in Central Mexico, 1730-1800.
May 1, 1998... Arij Ouweneel, (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), pp. xiii+429, $60.00. In the initial, confident flush of regionally based rural history on colonial Mexico, beginning conspicuously with the work of Francois Chevalier...

La Mesa Coja: Historia de la Proclama de la Junta Tuitiva del 16 de Julio de 1809.
May 1, 1998... Javier Mendoza Pizarro, (La Paz: Programa de Investigacion Estrategica en Bolivia (PIEB) and Dutch Foreign Ministry, 1997). Bolivia, the only South American country to belong to both MERCOSUR and the Andean Pact, is the cardiac hinge of the...

Fatal Glory: Narciso Lopez and the First Clandestine U.S. War Against Cuba.
May 1, 1998... Tom Chaffin, (Charlottesville, Va,: University Press of Virginia, 1996), pp. xii+ 282, $34.95. Chaffin's book tells the story of the Venezuelan adventurer Narciso Lopez, who between 1849 and 181 led a series of campaigns, or filibusters, to...

The City of Mexico in the Age of Diaz.
May 1, 1998... Michael Johns, (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1997), pp. 142, $25.00, $14.95 pb. During the regime of President Porfirio Diaz (1876-1911), Mexico City doubled its population, expanded its local and national communications, and...

Gender Politics in Latin America: Debates in Theory and Practice.
May 1, 1998... Elizabeth Dore, (ed.), (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), pp. 251, $38.00, $18.00 pb. This is a book that should inspire enthusiasm in even the most weary or impatient student of gender. No facile assumption goes unexamined nor partial...

The Fertility Transition in Latin America.
May 1, 1998... Jose Miguel Guzman, Susheela Singh, German Rodriguez, Edith A. Pantelides (eds.), (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. xxxi+ 449, [pounds]50,000. The completed fertility of Latin American women in the 1950s ranged from 7.4 births per woman...

Technopols: Freeing Politics and Markets in Latin America in the 1990s.
May 1, 1998... Jorge I. Dominguez (ed.), (University Park, PA: Penn. State University Press, 1997), pp. xiv + 287, [pounds]49.50 16.95 pb. This book is an attempt to examine the importance of a group of individuals that tried in the early 1990s to use...

Fast Forward: Latin America on the Edge of the 21st Century.
May 1, 1998... Scott B. MacDonald and Georges A. Fauriol, (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 1997), pp. viii + 318, $44.95. Has Latin America at last found the 'fast forward' button? At first sight the authors of this assessment of...

Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America.
May 1, 1998... Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Soberg Shugart (eds.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. ix+493, [pounds]55.oo, [pounds]18.95 pb. Mainwaring and Shugart open this volume with a justified claim to represent a second, more...

Politician's Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America.
May 1, 1998... Barbara Geddes, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), pp. xiii+246, [pounds]13.95 pb. Politician's Dilemma is a sophisticated and well documented study of the intractable problem of building competent government bureaucracies...

Small Towns and Beyond: Rural Transformation and Small Urban Centres in Latin America.
May 1, 1998... Paul van Lindert and Otto Verkoren (eds.), (Amsterdam: Thela Publishers, 1997), pp. 145, [pounds]12.95 pb. Small and intermediate urban centres have long been given a central role in various models of regional development planning. These, in...

Mexico City's Alternative Futures.
May 1, 1998... Bruce Nord, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), pp. xvii+ 200, $29.50. The author claims on page xvi that: 'The goals of this volume are at least three in number. First, to summarise materials on Mexico City which might be...

Thirty Years of Latin American Studies in the United Kingdom: 1965-1995.
May 1, 1998... Victor Bulmer-Thomas (ed.), (London: University of London, Institute of Latin American Studies, 1996), pp. 152, $15.00, [pounds]10.00 pb. Anyone concerned with Latin American studies will find this slim but rewarding collection of essays of...

The Once and Future Country.
May 1, 1998... Marshall Eakin, (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997), PP. xiii + 301, [pounds]30.00. Written for non-Brazilians, Brazil The Once and Future Country aims to 'translate the world and worldview of Brazilians into terms comprehensible to...

Manufacturing Insecurity: The Rise and Fall of Brazil's Military-Industrial Complex.
May 1, 1998... Ken Conca, (Boulder, CO, and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997), pp. xi+ 283, $55.00. The so-called threat of arms production by developing countries was a recurrent theme in the arms trade and arms control literature in the 1970s and...

The Brazilian Economy: Structure and Performance in Recent Decades.
May 1, 1998... Maria J. F. Willumsen and Eduardo Giannetti da Fonseca (eds.), (Miami: University of Miami, North-South Center Press, 1997), pp. vii+288, $21.95 pb. Despite growing interest in the subject - not least among the business community - the...

External Economies and Co-operation in Industrial Districts: A Comparison of Italy and Mexico.
May 1, 1998... Roberta Rabellotti, (Basingstoke: MacMillan Press, 1997), pp. xiii+ 213, [pounds]45.00. In recent years there has been a substantial literature based around the notion of 'flexible specialisation'. Put crudely, the argument is that...

Polling for Democracy: Public Opinion and Political Liberalization in Mexico.
May 1, 1998... Roderic Ai Camp (ed.), (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1996), pp. viii+ 186, $45.00. Like many books that grew out of conferences, Polling for Democracy is a collection of essays connected more by the practice of polling than by any dependent...

Mexican Politics: The Dynamics of Change.
May 1, 1998... Howard Handelman, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997, pp. vii+ 200, [pounds]13.99 pb. The rapid pace of political change in Mexico has fueled a constant search for up-to-date textbooks accessible to undergraduates. Mexican Politics targets...

Decentralization and Rural Development in Mexico: Community Participation in Oaxaca's Municipal Funds Program.
May 1, 1998... Jonathan Fox and Josefina Aranda, (San Diego, CA: Center for US-Mexican Studies, University of California, Monograph Series 42, 1996), pp. xx + 74, $11.95 pb. Oaxaca is one of Mexico's most impoverished states. With 40 per cent of its three...

Indigenous Revolts in Chiapas and the Andean Highlands.
May 1, 1998... Kevin Gosner and Arij Ouweneel (eds.), (Amsterdam: CEDLA - Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation, 1996), pp. vii+ 282, $25.oo pb. This volume arose out of a one-day multi-disciplinary conference held in 1994 at the Centre for...

Mexico's Second Agrarian Reform: Household and Community Responses.
May 1, 1998... Alain de Janvry, Gustavo Gordillo and Elisabeth Sadoulet, (La Jolla, CA: Center for US-Mexican Studies, 1997), pp. xv+ 222, pb. Reporting on a pair of surveys of the ejidal sector in Mexico in 1990 and 1994, this book offers 'to identify...

Social Exclusion and Inequality in Peru.
May 1, 1998... Adolfo Figueroa, Teofilo Altamirano and Denis Sulmont, (Geneva: International Labour Organisation, 1996), pp. x + 96, Swiss Ft. 17.50 pb. This slim monograph is a contribution to the Social Exclusion and Development Policy Series published...

Democratic Transitions in Central America.
May 1, 1998... Jorge I. Dominguez and Marc Lindenberg (eds.), (Gainesville, FI: University of Florida Press, 1997), pp. xx+210, $49.95; [pounds]45.00. The deluge of transitologia for Latin America as a whole stands in contrast to the relative paucity of...

Supporting Civil Society: The Political Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in Central America.
May 1, 1998... Laura Macdonald, (Basingstoke: MacMillan Press, 1997), pp. xv+ 195, [pounds]35.00. Although many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) see themselves as contributing substantially to development in the South, this book suggests that their...

Sustainable Agriculture in Central America.
May 1, 1998... Jan P. de Groot and Ruerd Ruben (eds.), (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997), pp. viii + 234, [pounds]47.50. Agriculture is a sector in which the aim of sustainability has special significance for the Central American economies. Its...

El Salvador in the Eighties: Counterinsurgency and Revolution.
May 1, 1998... Mario Lungo Ucles, (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996), pp. vi+240, $54.95, $19.95 pb. This is a translation of Mario Lungo's useful addition to the rather meagre literature on El Salvador, originally published in 1990 by the...

Zona Rebelde: La Diplomacia Espanola ante la Revolucion Cubana (1957-1960).
May 1, 1998... Manuel de Paz-Sanchez, (Tenerife: Gobierno de Canarias, Cabildo Insular de Fuerteventura, Ayuntamiento de la Laguna, Ayuntamiento de Icod de los Vinos, Centro de la Cultura Popular Canaria, 1997), pp. 401, pb. The link between Spain and Cuba...

Pombo: A Man of Che's Guerrilla: With Che Guevara in Bolivia, 1966-68.
May 1, 1998... Harry Villegas (Pombo), (London: Pathfinder Press, 1997), pp. 365, [pounds]39.00, [pounds]14.45 pb. There are two quite different books between the covers of Pombo: a man of Che's Guerrilla. The first is an honest and undemonstrative account...

Mas alla de la pantalla: Cine argentino, historia y politica.
May 1, 1998... Alberto Ciria, (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1995), pp. xiii + 287. As the first chapter of this book reveals through an interesting personal memoir, Alberto Ciria has always been a film buff. He describes with relish and nostalgia...