Latin American History

For twenty-five years, Kendall Brown studied Potosí, Spanish America's greatest silver producer and perhaps the world's most famous mining district. He read about the flood of silver that flowed from its Cerro Rico and learned of the toil of its miners. Potosí symbolized fabulous wealth and unbelievable suffering. New World bullion stimulated the formation of the first world economy but at the same time it had profound consequences for labor, as mine operators and refiners resorted to extreme forms of coercion to secure workers. In many cases the environment also suffered devastating harm. All of this occurred in the name of wealth for individual entrepreneurs, companies, and the ruling states. Yet the question remains of how much economic development mining managed to produce in Latin America and what were its social and ecological consequences.

Introduced in the sixteenth century by the Spanish, cannabis came to Mexico as an industrial fiber and symbol of European empire. But, Campos demonstrates, as it gradually spread to indigenous pharmacopoeias, then prisons and soldiers' barracks, it took on both a Mexican name--marijuana--and identity as a quintessentially "Mexican" drug. A century ago, Mexicans believed that marijuana could instantly trigger madness and violence in its users, and the drug was outlawed nationwide in 1920. Home Grown thus traces the deep roots of the antidrug ideology and prohibitionist policies that anchor the drug-war violence that engulfs Mexico today.

Anthropologist Christine Eber met 'Antonia' in 1986 and has followed her life's journey ever since. In this book, they recount Antonia's life story and also reflect on challenges and rewards they have experienced in working together, offering insight into the role of friendship in anthropological research, as well as into the transnational movement of solidarity with the indigenous people of Chiapas that began with the Zapatista uprising. Antonia was born in 1962 in San Pedro Chenalhâo, a Tzotzil-Maya township in highland Chiapas. Her story begins with memories of childhood and progresses to young adulthood, when Antonia began working with women in her community to form weaving cooperatives while also becoming involved in the Word of God, the progressive Catholic movement known elsewhere as Liberation Theology. In 1994, as a wife and mother of six children, she joined a support base for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Recounting her experiences in these three interwoven movements, Antonia offers a vivid and nuanced picture of working for social justice while trying to remain true to her people's traditions.

The third in a series of volumes intended to republish the primary data and interpretive studies produced by archaeologists and anthropologists in the Maya region under the umbrella of the Carnegie Institute of Washington's Division of Historical Research, The Carnegie Maya IIImakes available the series Notes on Middle American Archaeology and Ethnology. The series began in 1940 as an outlet for information that may have been considered too unimportant, brief, or restricted to be submitted for formal publication. However, these notes are often of great interest to the specialists for whom they are designed and to whom their distribution is restricted. The majority of the essays--most of which are on the Maya--are on archaeological subjects, epigraphy, ethnohistory and ethnography, and linguistics. As few original copies of the Notes series are known to exist in U.S. and Canadian libraries, the book will make these essays easily accessible to students, academics, and researchers in the field.

With the goal of opening up dialogue and debate, Feminism presents a critical and deeply personal history of Mexican feminism in the last thirty five years. Drawing from her many years of activism and anthropological scholarship, influential thinker Marta Lamas covers topics such as the political development of the feminist movement, affirmative action in the workplace, conceptual advances in regard to gender, and the nuances of disagreements among feminists. Here in English for the first time, this work offers invaluable insight into the theoretical and political tensions that have shaped Mexican feminism and the world at large.

The Illusion of Ignorance examines the cultural politics of the American encounter with Porfirian Mexico as a precursor and model for the twentieth-century American encounter with the world. Detailed discussions of the logistics of conducting diplomacy, doing business, or traveling abroad in the era give readers a vivid picture of how Americans experienced this age of international expansion, while contrasting Mexican and American visions of the changing relationship. In the end, Mexico's efforts to promote Mexico as a partner in progress with the U.S. was lost to an American illusion schizophrenically divided between fantasies of American leadership toward, and refuge from, modernity.

In the past two decades, changes in the Mexican government's policies toward the 30 million Mexican migrants living in the United States highlight the importance of the Mexican diaspora in both countries given its size, its economic power, and its growing political participation across borders. This work examines how the Mexican government's assessment of the possibilities and consequences of implementing certain emigration policies from 1848 to 2010 has been tied to changes in the bilateral relationship, which remains a key factor in Mexico's current development of strategies and policies in relation to migrants in the United States.