Proclaiming Revolution

Proclaiming Revolution

Author: Merilee Serrill Grindle

Publisher: David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13:

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The fiftieth anniversary of the 1952 Revolution in Bolivia offered an opportunity to explore contrasting visions about change in this often overlooked country from a comparative perspective. Blending the approaches of history and the social sciences, the


A Revolution for Our Rights

A Revolution for Our Rights

Author: Laura Gotkowitz

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2008-02-20

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0822390124

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A Revolution for Our Rights is a critical reassessment of the causes and significance of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. Historians have tended to view the revolution as the result of class-based movements that accompanied the rise of peasant leagues, mineworker unions, and reformist political projects in the 1930s. Laura Gotkowitz argues that the revolution had deeper roots in the indigenous struggles for land and justice that swept through Bolivia during the first half of the twentieth century. Challenging conventional wisdom, she demonstrates that rural indigenous activists fundamentally reshaped the military populist projects of the 1930s and 1940s. In so doing, she chronicles a hidden rural revolution—before the revolution of 1952—that fused appeals for equality with demands for a radical reconfiguration of political power, landholding, and rights. Gotkowitz combines an emphasis on national political debates and congresses with a sharply focused analysis of Indian communities and large estates in the department of Cochabamba. The fragmented nature of Cochabamba’s Indian communities and the pioneering significance of its peasant unions make it a propitious vantage point for exploring contests over competing visions of the nation, justice, and rights. Scrutinizing state authorities’ efforts to impose the law in what was considered a lawless countryside, Gotkowitz shows how, time and again, indigenous activists shrewdly exploited the ambiguous status of the state’s pro-Indian laws to press their demands for land and justice. Bolivian indigenous and social movements have captured worldwide attention during the past several years. By describing indigenous mobilization in the decades preceding the revolution of 1952, A Revolution for Our Rights illuminates a crucial chapter in the long history behind present-day struggles in Bolivia and contributes to an understanding of indigenous politics in modern Latin America more broadly.


Revolution and Dictatorship

Revolution and Dictatorship

Author: Steven Levitsky

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-10-29

Total Pages: 656

ISBN-13: 0691223580

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Why the world’s most resilient dictatorships are products of violent revolution Revolution and Dictatorship explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme challenges. Drawing on comparative historical analysis, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that radical efforts to transform the social and geopolitical order trigger intense counterrevolutionary conflict, which initially threatens regime survival, but ultimately fosters the unity and state-building that supports authoritarianism. Although most revolutionary governments begin weak, they challenge powerful domestic and foreign actors, often bringing about civil or external wars. These counterrevolutionary wars pose a threat that can destroy new regimes, as in the cases of Afghanistan and Cambodia. Among regimes that survive, however, prolonged conflicts give rise to a cohesive ruling elite and a powerful and loyal coercive apparatus. This leads to the downfall of rival organizations and alternative centers of power, such as armies, churches, monarchies, and landowners, and helps to inoculate revolutionary regimes against elite defection, military coups, and mass protest—three principal sources of authoritarian breakdown. Looking at a range of revolutionary and nonrevolutionary regimes from across the globe, Revolution and Dictatorship shows why governments that emerge from violent conflict endure.


Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution

Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution

Author: André Trocmé

Publisher: The Plough Publishing House

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1570755388

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André Trocmé of Le Chambon is famous for his role in saving thousands of Jews from the Nazis during World War II. But his bold deeds did not spring from a void. They were rooted in his understanding of Jesus’ way of nonviolence – an understanding that gave him the remarkable insights contained in this long out-of-print classic. In this book, you’ll encounter a Jesus you may have never met before – a Jesus who not only calls for spiritual transformation, but for practical changes that answer the most perplexing political, economic, and social problems of our time.


Revolutionary Horizons

Revolutionary Horizons

Author: Forrest Hylton

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1789603471

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In an age of military neoliberalism, social movements and center-Left coalition governments have advanced across South America, sparking hope for radical change in a period otherwise characterized by regressive imperial and anti-imperial politics. Nowhere do the limits and possibilities of popular advance stand out as they do in Bolivia, the most heavily indigenous country in the Americas. Revolutionary Horizons traces the rise to power of Evo Morales's new administration, whose announced goals are to end imperial domination and internal colonialism through nationalization of the country's oil and gas reserves, and to forge a new system of political representation. In doing so, Hylton and Thomson provide an excavation of Andean revolution, whose successive layers of historical sedimentation comprise the subsoil, loam, landscape, and vistas for current political struggles in Bolivia. Revolutionary Horizons offers a unique and timely window onto the challenges faced by Morales's government and by the South American continent alike.


Transpacific Revolutionaries

Transpacific Revolutionaries

Author: Matthew D. Rothwell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 0415656176

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This book shows how Maoism was globalized during the 1949-1976 period, highlighting the agency of both Latin American and Chinese actors. While Maoism has long been known to have been influential in many social movements and guerrilla groups in Latin America, author Matthew Rothwell is the first to establish the way in which Latin American communists domesticated Maoism to Latin American conditions and turned Maoism into an influential political trend in many countries. By utilizing case studies of the formation of Maoist guerrilla groups and political parties in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia, the book shows how the movement of Chinese communist ideas to Latin America was the product of a highly organized effort that involved formal connections between Latin American activists and the Peoplee(tm)s Republic of China. It represents a major contribution to three developing fields of historical inquiry: Latin America in the Cold War, the global 1960s, and Chinese Maoist foreign relations.


Fields of Revolution

Fields of Revolution

Author: Carmen Soliz

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2021-04-20

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0822988100

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Fields of Revolution examines the second largest case of peasant land redistribution in Latin America and agrarian reform—arguably the most important policy to arise out of Bolivia’s 1952 revolution. Competing understandings of agrarian reform shaped ideas of property, productivity, welfare, and justice. Peasants embraced the nationalist slogan of “land for those who work it” and rehabilitated national union structures. Indigenous communities proclaimed instead “land to its original owners” and sought to link the ruling party discourse on nationalism with their own long-standing demands for restitution. Landowners, for their part, embraced the principle of “land for those who improve it” to protect at least portions of their former properties from expropriation. Carmen Soliz combines analysis of governmental policies and national discourse with everyday local actors’ struggles and interactions with the state to draw out the deep connections between land and people as a material reality and as the object of political contention in the period surrounding the revolution.


An Open Secret

An Open Secret

Author: Natalie L. Kimball

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2020-06-12

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 0813590752

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Many women throughout the world face the challenge of confronting an unexpected or an unwanted pregnancy, yet these experiences are often shrouded in silence. An Open Secret draws on personal interviews and medical records to uncover the history of women’s experiences with unwanted pregnancy and abortion in the South American country of Bolivia. This Andean nation is home to a diverse population of indigenous and mixed-race individuals who practice a range of medical traditions. Centering on the cities of La Paz and El Alto, the book explores how women decided whether to continue or terminate their pregnancies and the medical practices to which women recurred in their search for reproductive health care between the early 1950s and 2010. It demonstrates that, far from constituting private events with little impact on the public sphere, women’s intimate experiences with pregnancy contributed to changing policies and services in reproductive health in Bolivia.


Che's Travels

Che's Travels

Author: Paulo Drinot

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2010-09-01

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0822391805

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Ernesto “Che” Guevara twice traveled across Latin America in the early 1950s. Based on his accounts of those trips (published in English as The Motorcycle Diaries and Back on the Road), as well as other historical sources, Che’s Travels follows Guevara, country by country, from his native Argentina through Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, and then from Argentina through Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico. Each essay is focused on a single country and written by an expert in its history. Taken together, the essays shed new light on Che’s formative years by analyzing the distinctive societies, histories, politics, and cultures he encountered on these two trips, the ways they affected him, and the ways he represented them in his travelogues. In addition to offering new insights into Guevara, the essays provide a fresh perspective on Latin America’s experience of the Cold War and the interplay of nationalism and anti-imperialism in the crucial but relatively understudied 1950s. Assessing Che’s legacies in the countries he visited during the two journeys, the contributors examine how he is remembered or memorialized; how he is invoked for political, cultural, and religious purposes; and how perceptions of him affect ideas about the revolutions and counterrevolutions fought in Latin America from the 1960s through the 1980s. Contributors Malcolm Deas Paulo Drinot Eduardo Elena Judith Ewell Cindy Forster Patience A. Schell Eric Zolov Ann Zulawski


A Long Walk, a Gradual Ascent

A Long Walk, a Gradual Ascent

Author: Nancy J. Thomas

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2019-12-05

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 1532679750

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A Long Walk, a Gradual Ascent tells the one-hundred-year story of the development of the Friends Church (INELA) among the Aymara peoples of the Bolivian Andes. It stretches from the beginnings of the INELA on the shores of Lake Titicaca around 1915 until the present time (2017), along with the story of the Oregon Friends Mission that accompanied the church for seventy-two years. Today the INELA spreads over fifteen districts with some two hundred congregations. The church is still predominately Aymara. The book considers the influence of history and culture on each phase of the church’s development, exploring the complexity of planting a “peace church” such as the Quakers in a setting of so much conflict. The book also explores the missiological significance of the changing relationship between church and mission, and wrestles with denominational emphases and how they impacted the expression of an indigenous Aymara church.