Author: Jeffrey L. Gould Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469616076 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 392
Book Description
This book is a carefully argued study of peasants and labor during the Somoza regime, focusing on popular movements in the economically strategic department of Chinandega in western Nicaragua. Jeffrey Gould traces the evolution of group consciousness among peasants and workers as they moved away from extreme dependency on the patron to achieve an autonomous social and political ideology. In doing so, he makes important contributions to peasant studies and theories of revolution, as well as our understanding of Nicaraguan history. According to Gould, when Anastasio Somoza first came to power in 1936, workers and peasants took the Somocista reform program seriously. Their initial acceptance of Somocismo and its early promises of labor rights and later ones of land redistribution accounts for one of the most peculiar features of the pre-Sandinista political landscape: the wide gulf separating popular movements and middle-class opposition to the government. Only the alliance of the Frente Sandinista (FSLN) and the peasant movement would knock down the wall of silence between the two forces.
Author: Kregg Hetherington Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 082235036X Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
An ethnography exploring disagreements among Paraguayan peasants, government bureaucrats, and development experts about how state bureaucracy should function, what archival documents are for, and who gets to narrate the past.
Author: Brent E. Metz Publisher: University Press of Colorado ISBN: 1646422627 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
Copublished with the Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, University of Albany In Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go? Brent E. Metz explores the complicated issue of who is Indigenous by focusing on the sociohistorical transformations over the past two millennia of the population currently known as the Ch’orti’ Maya. Epigraphers agree that the language of elite writers in Classic Maya civilization was Proto-Ch’olan, the precursor of the Maya languages Ch’orti’, Ch’olti’, Ch’ol, and Chontal. When the Spanish invaded in the early 1500s, the eastern half of this area was dominated by people speaking various dialects of Ch’olti’ and closely related Apay (Ch’orti’), but by the end of the colonial period (1524–1821) only a few pockets of Ch’orti’ speakers remained. From 2003 to 2018 Metz partnered with Indigenous leaders to conduct a historical and ethnographic survey of Ch’orti’ Maya identity in what was once the eastern side of the Classic period lowland Maya region and colonial period Ch’orti’-speaking region of eastern Guatemala, western Honduras, and northwestern El Salvador. Today only 15,000 Ch’orti’ speakers remain, concentrated in two municipalities in eastern Guatemala, but since the 1990s nearly 100,000 impoverished farmers have identified as Ch’orti’ in thirteen Guatemalan and Honduran municipalities, with signs of Indigenous revitalization in several Salvadoran municipalities as well. Indigenous movements have raised the ethnic consciousness of many non-Ch’orti’-speaking semi-subsistence farmers, or campesinos. The region’s inhabitants employ diverse measures to assess identity, referencing language, history, traditions, rurality, “blood,” lineage, discrimination, and more. Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go? approaches Indigenous identity as being grounded in historical processes, contemporary politics, and distinctive senses of place. The book is an engaged, activist ethnography not on but, rather, in collaboration with a marginalized population that will be of interest to scholars of the eastern lowland Maya region, indigeneity generally, and ethnographic experimentation.
Author: Nora Haenn Publisher: University of Arizona Press ISBN: 0816551006 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
Enduring differences between protected areas and local people have produced few happy compromises, but at the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in the southern Mexican state of Campeche, government agents and thousands of local people collaborated on an expansive program to alleviate these tensions—a conservation-development agenda that aimed to improve local people’s standard of living while preserving natural resources. Calakmul is home to numerous endangered species and raises a common question: How can environmental managers and citizens reconcile competing ecological desires? For a brief time in the 1990s, collaborations at Calakmul were heralded as a vital example of melding local management, forest conservation, and economic development. In Fields of Power, Forests of Discontent, Nora Haenn questions the rise and fall of this conservation program to examine conservation at the intersection of national-international agendas and local political-economic interests. While other assessments of such programs have typically focused on why they do or do not succeed, Haenn instead considers conservation’s encounter with people’s everyday lives—and how those experiences affect environmental management. Haenn explores conservation and development from two perspectives: first regionally, to look at how people used conservation to create a new governing entity on a tropical frontier once weakly under national rule; then locally, focusing on personal histories and aspects of community life that shape people's daily lives, farming practices, and immersion in development programs—even though those programs ultimately fail to resolve economic frustrations. She identifies how key political actors, social movements, and identity politics contributed to the instability of the Calakmul alliance. Drawing on extensive interviews with Reserve staff, including its director, she connects regional trends to village life through accounts of disputes at ejido meetings and the failure of ejido development projects. In the face of continued difficulty in creating a popular conservation in Calakmul, Haenn uses lessons from people's lives—history, livelihood, village organization, expectations—to argue for a "sustaining conservation," one that integrates social justice and local political norms with a new, more robust definition of conservation. In this way, Fields of Power, Forests of Discontent goes beyond local ethnography to encourage creative discussion of conservation's impact on both land and people.
Author: Clara Nieto Publisher: Seven Stories Press ISBN: 1609800494 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 628
Book Description
In Masters of War, Clara Nieto adeptly presents the parallel histories of the countries of Latin America, histories that are intertwined, each reflecting the United States’ "coherent policy of intervention" set into motion by the Monroe Doctrine. As the value of this continued policy comes increasingly into question, Nieto argues for the need to evaluate the alarming precedent set in Latin America: the institution of client dictatorships, the roles played by the interests of U.S. corporations, the enormous tolls taken on civilian populations, and the irreversible disruption of regional stability. Drawing from an impressive array of documents and sources as well as from her unique first-hand insights as a participant in crucial meetings and negotiations in the region from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, Nieto chronicles the Cuban Revolution, the CIA-sponsored coup against popularly elected President Allende in Chile, the U.S. invasions of Panama and Grenada, U.S. support for the cultivation and training of paramilitary death squads in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Colombia, as well as similarly severe but less well-known situations in other countries such as Uruguay, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Honduras, and Guatemala. Masters of War offers, from an informed perspective, perhaps for the first time, a distanced, objective analysis of recent Latin American history. Clara Nieto’s depth of knowledge and understanding is an invaluable resource at a time when the media is seen as unapologetically aligned with the interests of major corporations and policymakers, and the American public has reached a new height of apprehension regarding the intentions behind and consequences of its government’s policies.
Author: Heidi Tinsman Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822383780 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 390
Book Description
Partners in Conflict examines the importance of sexuality and gender to rural labor and agrarian politics during the last days of Chile’s latifundia system of traditional landed estates and throughout the governments of Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende. Heidi Tinsman analyzes differences between men’s and women’s participation in Chile’s Agrarian Reform movement and considers how conflicts over gender and sexuality shape the contours of working-class struggles and national politics. Tinsman restores women to a scholarly narrative that has been almost exclusively about men, recounting the centrality of women’s labor to the pre-Agrarian Reform world of the hacienda during the 1950s and recovering women’s critical roles in union struggles and land occupations during the Agrarian Reform itself. Providing a theoretical framework for understanding why the Agrarian Reform ultimately empowered men more than women, Tinsman argues that women were marginalized not because the Agrarian Reform ignored women but because, under both the Frei and Allende governments, it promoted the male-headed household as the cornerstone of a new society. Although this emphasis on gender cooperation stressed that men should have more respect for their wives and funneled unprecedented amounts of resources into women’s hands, the reform defined men as its protagonists and affirmed their authority over women. This is the first monographic social history of Chile’s Agrarian Reform in either English or Spanish, and the first historical work to make sexuality and gender central to the analysis of the reforms.
Author: Richard Newbold Adams Publisher: University of Texas Press ISBN: 0292732783 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 570
Book Description
"Quite the contrary of old generals, nations do not fade away; they have to be killed." Richard Adams' view of the nation as a basic social unit is central to this pioneering study in social anthropology. The result of many years of research in Guatemala, this volume utilizes the author's fieldwork as well as that of his colleagues and students to construct a set of concepts explaining how Guatemala reached the difficult circumstances in which it found itself in the 1960s—and still finds itself today. With the breakup of the great colonial empires after the Second World War, the curtain that had been drawn around Marx by Western social scientists fell away; countries once called "primitive" began to be seen as "underdeveloped," while those once thought to be stable and advanced began to appear predatory and conflict ridden. The theme of Mr. Adams' book is that, in the world as a whole, there is a structural escalation of power concentration. The author believes that Guatemala, as a small nation within the general domain of the United States, is caught in the developmental hinterland of that powerful neighbor and that the United States, within its own capitalistic development pattern and in competition with other leading world powers, cannot allow the smaller nation to resolve its own political and social problems. Thus Guatemala, he declares, finds itself crucified by unyielding and uncontrollable power plays beyond its national borders. As a background for the study of specific sectors in Guatemalan society, the author discusses the theoretical nature of complex societies. He shows the cohesive force of a nation to be its power structure and then examines mechanisms whereby this structure is kept intact in Guatemala. Special emphasis is given to the lack of access to power by the poor, the development of the military, the organization of power within the Catholic Church, and the expansion of upper-sector interest groups. While there was important growth in the power of upper-sector Guatemalan society over the two decades of the study, there was no comparable increase in distribution; the position of the lower sectors within the power structure has therefore changed very slightly. "Development," then, in Guatemala was principally in terms of what was advantageous to the major powers.
Author: Jaymie Heilman Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804775788 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
From 1980 to 1992, Maoist Shining Path rebels, Peruvian state forces, and Andean peasants waged a bitter civil war that left some 69,000 people dead. Using archival research and oral interviews, Before the Shining Path is the first long-term historical examination of the Shining Path's political, economic, and social antecedents in Ayacucho, the department where the Shining Path initiated its war. This study uncovers rural Ayacucho's vibrant but largely unstudied twentieth-century political history and contends that the Shining Path was the last and most extreme of a series of radical political movements that indigenous peasants pursued. The Shining Path's violence against rural indigenous populations exposed the tight hold of anti-Indian prejudice inside Peru, as rebels reproduced the same hatreds they aimed to defeat. But, this was nothing new. Heilman reveals that minute divides inside rural indigenous communities repeatedly led to violent conflict across the twentieth century.
Author: Michael Gorkin Publisher: University of Arizona Press ISBN: 0816548595 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
In 1980 El Salvador was plunged into a bloody civil war, and Luis Campos, a peasant farmer, found himself drawn into a deadly political maelstrom of guerrilla fighting for twelve years. In this collection of fascinating and revealing oral histories, Gorkin and Pineda portray the personal and social lives of Luis and his family, who for the past eighteen years have been working to rebuild their lives in their new community beneath the Guazapa volcano. Luis, his mother, his wife, his in-laws, his children, and some neighbors recall in a simple and often eloquent manner their experiences of everyday life before, during, and after the civil war. Nina Bonafacia, Luis’s mother, tells of the days before the war when two of her daughters were murdered and she fled with her family to a refugee camp. Julia, Luis’s wife, recounts her life as a guerrillera during which, incidentally, she gave birth to the first two of her eight children. Joaquin, a neighbor and comrade-in-arms, discusses how he and others took control of the land of Comunidad Guazapa and began rebuilding in those turbulent days and months right after the war. Margarita and Francisco, the two oldest children, with candor and insight discuss the trajectory of their lives and that of the postwar generation. And at the center of all these stories stands Luis, the guerrillero, farmer, neighbor, husband, father—and raconteur par excellence. In sum, the multiple voices in From Beneath the Volcano combine to form a rich tapestry displaying a story of war, family, and community and provide a never-before-seen view of both the past and present El Salvador.
Author: Manuel Llamojha Mitma Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822373750 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
Born in 1921, Manuel Llamojha Mitma became one of Peru's most creative and inspiring indigenous political activists. Now Peru Is Mine combines extensive oral history interviews with archival research to chronicle his struggles for indigenous land rights and political inclusion as well as his fight against anti-Indian racism. His compelling story—framed by Jaymie Patricia Heilman's historical contextualization—covers nearly eight decades, from the poverty of his youth and teaching himself to read, to becoming an internationally known activist. Llamojha also recounts his life's tragedies, such as being forced to flee his home and the disappearance of his son during the war between the Shining Path and the government. His life gives insight into many key developments in Peru's tumultuous twentieth-century history, among them urbanization, poverty, racism, agrarian reform, political organizing, the demise of the hacienda system, and the Shining Path. The centrality of his embrace of his campesino identity forces a rethinking of how indigenous identity works inside Peru, while the implications of his activism broaden our understanding of political mobilization in Cold War Latin America.
Author: Jeffrey L. Gould
Author: Kregg Hetherington
Author: Brent E. Metz
Author: Nora Haenn
Author: Clara Nieto
Author: Heidi Tinsman
Author: Richard Newbold Adams
Author: Jaymie Heilman
Author: Michael Gorkin
Author: Manuel Llamojha Mitma