Journal of Latin American Studies articles from October 1995

Journal of Latin American Studies archives from October 1995

The lawyers and New Granada's late colonial state.
October 1, 1995... The typical elite families of colonial Latin America were large clans whose members strengthened the clan's potential by entering diverse economic and political activities (the legal profession, the religious life, the bureaucracy, the...

Physicians, the state and public health in Chile, 1881-1891.
October 1, 1995... The coffin of don Floridor Flores was buried on 22 September 1883, in the public cemetery of Melipilla, a town of 3,000 people in Chile's central valley. Following the funeral ceremony, a rumour spread through the congregation that the body of...

Bringing the countryside back in: a case study of military intervention as state building in Brazilian Old Republic.
October 1, 1995... In October of 1914 Francisco Pires visited the headquarters of the 58th Battalion camped near Curitibanos, Santa Catarina (Fig. 1). There was a war on, and the 58th was a small part of the 7,000 man federal army force currently fighting some...

An historical critique of the emergence and evolution of Ernesto Che Guevara's 'foco' theory. (guerrilla warfare)
October 1, 1995... Scholarly analysis of the Cuban Revolution, both inside and outside Cuba, describes the role the sierra (guerrillas) and llano (urban underground) played in the overthrow of Batista. Maurice Halperin, in his recently published memoirs, points...

Explaining bureaucratic independence in Brazil: the experience of the National Economic Development Bank.
October 1, 1995... Recent scholarship on Latin America has focused on the contribution to economic development of state bureaucracies, operating independently of narrow interests. Most agree that bureaucratic independence is necessary for the implementation of...

Central-bank 'distress' and hyperinflation in Argentina, 1989-90.
October 1, 1995... During 1989 and 1990 Argentina underwent a series of hyperinflationary episodes. The first, which followed the failure of the August 1988 `Primavera Plan' stabilisation effort, ran from February 1989 through the first week of July 1989. Largely...

Policy-induced disincentives to financial sector development: selected examples from Latin America in the 1980s.
October 1, 1995... Governments in Latin America have generally had an interventionist approach to economic policy-making. This was supported by the belief in pervasive market failures and coordination problems, often with more than a tinge of...

Satire in Colonial Spanish America: Turning the New World Upside Down.
October 1, 1995... Julie Greer Johnson (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1993), pp. xvii + 203, $32.50. The claim made by the author for this study, that it offers the first comprehensive treatment of satire in Colonial Spanish America, is certainly...

The Economic History of Latin America since Independence.
October 1, 1995... Victor Bulmer-Thomas (New York and Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. xv + 485, 40.00 [pounds sterling], $14.95 pb. Bulmer-Thomas has written an extraordinary book. It is the first general economic history of modern Latin...

Indian Population Decline: The Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687-1840.
October 1, 1995... Robert H. Jackson, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), pp. xii + 228, $29.95. In recent years mission studies in Latin America have shifted away from being chronological accounts of missionary endeavours drawing on official...

Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor Among Lima's Slaves, 1800-1854.
October 1, 1995... Christine Hunefeldt, (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. xi + 269, $42.00, $16.00 pb. Christine Hunefeldt's bright book brims with fresh research and a hotchpotch of ideas. It forms part of a late-comer...

Independence in Spanish America: Civil Wars, Revolutions and Underdevelopment.
October 1, 1995... Jay Kinsbruner, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), pp. xxi + 178. This is a revised and enlarged edition of a book first published in 1973 as The Spanish American Independence Movement. The new title reflects changing...

The Central Republic in Mexico, 1835-1846: Hombres de Bien in the Age of Santa Anna.
October 1, 1995... Michael P. Costeloe, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. xiii + 324, $59.95, 35.00 [pounds sterling]. This is the first detailed study in English of a period which scholars have tended to dismiss as an inglorious,...

Estado y mercado: La economia publica del liberalismo mexicano, 1850-1911.
October 1, 1995... Marcello Carmagnani, (Mexico DF: El Colegio de Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1994), pp. 439. This is an extremely thorough and exhaustive study of the birth and development of the public economy of Mexico during the second half of the...

Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's 'Fictitious Prosperity' of Guano, 1840-1880.
October 1, 1995... Paul Gootenberg, (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993), pp. ix + 243, $45.00, $20.00 pb. In August 1876, shortly after General Prado had succeeded the civilista leader, Manuel Pardo, in the Peruvian presidency, a riot...

Business Interest Groups in Nineteenth-Century Brazil.
October 1, 1995... Eugene Ridings, (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. xiv + 377, $59.95, 35.00 [pounds sterling]. Merchants have long been recognised as key linking agents between Latin America and foreign ports; yet they have been...

Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894-1987.
October 1, 1995... Charles R. Hale, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. ix+296, 35.00 [pounds sterling]. This is a well-written, thought-provoking book about a subject -- the Miskitu Indians of Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast -- which created...

The Popular Use of Popular Religion in Latin America.
October 1, 1995... Susanna Rostas and Andre Droogers (eds.), (Amsterdam: CEDLA, Latin American Studies, no. 70, 1993), pp. vi+233, $31.2,, DFL 42.50 pb. From a book replete with the ironies and ambiguities which suffuse its subject matter, one vignette, from...

Samba in the Night: Spiritism in Brazil.
October 1, 1995... David J. Hess, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. xv+214, $27.50, 17.95 [pounds sterling]. This volume is a welcome companion-piece to Hess's Spirits and Scientists (1991). The earlier volume -- based on his PhD dissertation --...

After the Trees: Living on the Transamazon Highway.
October 1, 1995... Douglas Ian Stewart, (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. xv+183, $30.00, $12.95. It is difficult to know what to make of this book and hard to review it without seeming to damn with faint praise. As a narrative account of...

Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question.
October 1, 1995... Jeffrey Lesser, (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. xviii + 280, $42.00, $18.00 pb. There has been a small but expanding stream of research on Brazil's Jews during recent decades. Just as in other cases of...

The Political Ecology of the Modern Peasant: Calculation and Community.
October 1, 1995... Leslie E. Anderson, (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. xv + 208, $35.00. Are peasants naturally submissive and quiescent, or are they potential revolutionaries at all times and everywhere? Are they coldly...

Rebellion in Chiapas: Rural reforms, Campesino Radicalism, and the Limits to Salinismo.
October 1, 1995... Neil Harvey, (San Diego: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, Ejido Reform Research Project, Transformation of Rural Mexico Series, Number 5, 1994), pp. vi+69. Despite this being a slim volume, there is a wealth of information here about the...

Popular Mobilization in Mexico: The Teachers' Movement, 1977-87.
October 1, 1995... Joe Foweraker, (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. iii+204, $59.95, 35.00 [pounds sterling]. Over the past years the debates surrounding the impact of social movements on Latin American politics has swung from...

Cultural Capital: Mountain Zapotec Migrant Associations in Mexico City.
October 1, 1995... Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, (Tucson, Arizona and London: University of Arizona Press, 1993), pp. xiv+157, $35.00. In the early 1950s, Oscar Lewis was the first anthropologist to study rural migrants in urban Mexico. At least initially, he concluded...

Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century.
October 1, 1995... Diane E. Davis, (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994), pp. xiii+391, $49.95, $24.95 pb. The view on the front cover of Urban Leviathan says much about the contents therein. An aerial photograph shows the Torre Latinoamericana...

Sistemas hidraulicos, modernizacion de la agricutura y migracion.
October 1, 1995... Carmen Viqueira Landa and Lydia Torre Medina Mora (eds.), (Toluca, Mexico: El Colegio Mexiquense and Universidad Iberoamericana, 1994), pp. 459. This collection addresses the social impact of irrigation policies. The authors write mostly...

Cultivating Crisis: The Human Cost of Pesticides in Latin America.
October 1, 1995... Douglas L. Murray, (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1995), pp. xi + 177, $35.00, $17.95 pb. This is an extremely stimulating account of the role which pesticides have played in recent Latin American rural development. Beginning with...

Bolivia and Coca: A Study in Dependency.
October 1, 1995... James Painter, (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994), pp. xiv + 192, 31.50 [pounds sterling]. James Painter, who worked in Bolivia as a journalist for three years, has written a compact study which can serve effectively as an...

Argentina in the Crisis Years, 1983-1990: From Alfonsin to Menem.
October 1, 1995... Colin M. Lewis and Nissa Torrents (eds.), From Alfonsin to Menem (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1993), pp. 203, 10.00 [pounds sterling], $20.00. This book tells a sad story. What adds poignancy to the criticisms of the...

Oil and Development in Venezuela during the Twentieth Century.
October 1, 1995... Jorge Salazar-Carrillo, (Westport and London: Praeger, 1994), pp. ix + 280, 67.50 [pounds sterling]. The avowed objective of this book is to tackle a question that has fuelled an intense debate in the field of development economics for some...

The Failure of Presidential Democracy.
October 1, 1995... Juan J. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela (eds.), (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. xvi + 436, 54.00 [pounds sterling]. This recent edition of the by now well-known debate on presidentialism versus parliamentarism is highly...

The United States, Honduras, and the Crisis in Central America.
October 1, 1995... Donald E. Schulz and Deborah Sundloff Schulz, (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994), pp. xv + 368, 44.50 [pounds sterling], 12.95 [pounds sterling] pb. At the start of the 1980s, prompted by the Carter and later the Reagan...

The United States and the Caribbean.
October 1, 1995... Anthony P. Maingot, (Basingstoke: Macmillan Caribbean, 1994), pp. xi + 260, 13.95 [pounds sterling]. Brief, heavily presentist, and sometimes opinionated, sociologist Anthony Maingot's historical account of the relationship between the...

Security, Democracy, and Development in U.S.-Latin American Relations.
October 1, 1995... Lars Schoultz, William C. Smith, and Augusto Varas (eds.), (New Brunwick and London: North-South Center University of Miami, Transaction Publishers, T994), pp. xiv+284, $22-99, pb. Had this book been published in Latin America rather than the...

Safety Nets, Politics, and the Poor: Transitions to Market Economies.
October 1, 1995... Carol Graham, (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994), pp. viii+378, $28.95. Among neo-liberal critiques of structural adjustment there is a tendency to gloss over social issues and ignore political considerations. Graham's book...

The Chilean Economy: Policy Lessons and Challenges.
October 1, 1995... Barry P. Bosworth, Rudiger Dornbusch and Raul Laban (eds.), (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1994), pp. xiv+441, $44.95, $19.95 pb. This book comprises revised versions of eight papers presented at a conference, sponsored by the...

Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
October 1, 1995... Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, (Wilmington: SR Books, 1994), pp. 278, $45.00, $15.95 pb While both these two books contribute to the now burgeoning literature on the sociology, politics, history and anthropology of women in Latin America, they...

Precarious Dependencies: Gender, Class, and Domestic Service in Bolivia.
October 1, 1995... Lesley Gill, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. viii+ 175. While both these two books contribute to the now burgeoning literature on the sociology, politics, history and anthropology of women in Latin America, they are very...

Allende: A Novel.
October 1, 1995... Fernando Alegria, Allende: (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. xiv+ 303, 9 95 [pounds sterling], pb. As Jerod Diamond has observed, `nothing is so fascinating or complicated as the trajectory of a human life'. Add to that the...