Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval
Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval

Author: Allen Wells

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9781503616110

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This book addresses a central problem often ignored by students of twentieth-century Mexico: the breakdown of the old order during the first years of the revolutionary era. That process was more contested and gradual in Yucatan than in any other Mexican region, and this close examination of the Yucatan experience sheds light on an issue of particular relevance to students of Central America, South America's southern cone, and other postcolonial societies: the capacity of national oligarchies to "hang on" in the face of escalating social change, the outbreak of local rebellions, and the mobilization of multiclass coalitions. Latin American historiography has generally failed to integrate the study of popular movements and rebellions with examinations of the determined efforts of elite establishments to prevent, contain, crush, and, ultimately, ideologically appropriate such rebellions. Most often, these problems are treated separately. This volume seeks to redress this imbalance by probing a set of linkages that is central to the study of Mexico's modern past: the complex, reciprocal relationship between modes of contestation and structures and discourses of power.

Gender and the Mexican Revolution
Gender and the Mexican Revolution

Author: Stephanie J. Smith

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2009-06-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0807888656

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The state of Yucatan is commonly considered to have been a hotbed of radical feminism during the Mexican Revolution. Challenging this romanticized view, Stephanie Smith examines the revolutionary reforms designed to break women's ties to tradition and religion, as well as the ways in which women shaped these developments. Smith analyzes the various regulations introduced by Yucatan's two revolution-era governors, Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Like many revolutionary leaders throughout Mexico, the Yucatan policy makers professed allegiance to women's rights and socialist principles. Yet they, too, passed laws and condoned legal practices that excluded women from equal participation and reinforced their inferior status. Using court cases brought by ordinary women, including those of Mayan descent, Smith demonstrates the importance of women's agency during the Mexican Revolution. But, she says, despite the intervention of women at many levels of Yucatecan society, the rigid definition of women's social roles as strictly that of wives and mothers within the Mexican nation guaranteed that long-term, substantial gains remained out of reach for most women for years to come.

Bound in Twine
Bound in Twine

Author: Sterling D. Evans

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2013-01-14

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1622880013

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Before the invention of the combine, the binder was an essential harvesting implement that cut grain and bound the stalks in bundles tied with twine that could then be hand-gathered into shocks for threshing. Hundreds of thousands of farmers across the United States and Canada relied on binders and the twine required for the machine’s operation. Implement manufacturers discovered that the best binder twine was made from henequen and sisal—spiny, fibrous plants native to the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. The double dependency that subsequently developed between Mexico and the Great Plains of the United States and Canada affected the agriculture, ecology, and economy of all three nations in ways that have historically been little understood. These interlocking dependencies—identified by author Sterling Evans as the “henequen-wheat complex”—initiated or furthered major ecological, social, and political changes in each of these agricultural regions. Drawing on extensive archival work as well as the existing secondary literature, Evans has woven an intricate story that will change our understanding of the complex, transnational history of the North American continent.

Outside the Hacienda Walls
Outside the Hacienda Walls

Author: Allan Meyers

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2012-11-01

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0816599610

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The Mexican Revolution was a tumultuous struggle for social and political reform that ousted an autocrat and paved the way for a new national constitution. The conflict, however, came late to Yucatán, where a network of elite families with largely European roots held the reins of government. This privileged group reaped spectacular wealth from haciendas, cash-crop plantations tended by debt-ridden servants of Maya descent. When a revolutionary army from central Mexico finally gained a foothold in Yucatán in 1915, the local custom of agrarian servitude met its demise. Drawing on a dozen years of archaeological and historical investigation, Allan Meyers breaks new ground in the study of Yucatán haciendas. He explores a plantation village called San Juan Bautista Tabi, which once stood at the heart of a vast sugar estate. Occupied for only a few generations, the village was abandoned during the revolutionary upheaval. Its ruins now lie within a state-owned ecological reserve. Through oral histories, archival records, and physical remains, Meyers examines various facets of the plantation landscape. He presents original data and fresh interpretations on settlement organization, social stratification, and spatial relationships. His systematic approach to "things underfoot," small everyday objects that are now buried in the tropical forest, offers views of the hacienda experience that are often missing in official written sources. In this way, he raises the voices of rural, mostly illiterate Maya speakers who toiled as laborers. What emerges is a portrait of hacienda social life that transcends depictions gleaned from historical methods alone. Students, researchers, and travelers to Mexico will all find something of interest in Meyers's lively presentation. Readers will see the old haciendas—once forsaken but now experiencing a rebirth as tourist destinations—in a new light. These heritage sites not only testify to social conditions that prevailed before the Mexican Revolution, but also remind us that the human geography of modern Yucatán is as much a product of plantation times as it is of more ancient periods.

Everyday Forms of State Formation
Everyday Forms of State Formation

Author: Gilbert Michael Joseph

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 9780822314677

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Everyday Forms of State Formation is the first book to systematically examine the relationship between popular cultures and state formation in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico. While most accounts have emphasized either the role of peasants and peasant rebellions or that of state formation in Mexico's past, these original essays reveal the state's day-to-day engagement with grassroots society by examining popular cultures and forms of the state simultaneously and in relation to one another. Structured in the form of a dialogue between a distinguished array of Mexicanists and comparative social theorists, this volume boldly reassesses past analyses of the Mexican revolution and suggests new directions for future study. Showcasing a wealth of original archival and ethnographic research, this collection provides a new and deeper understanding of Mexico's revolutionary experience. It also speaks more broadly to a problem of extraordinary contemporary relevance: the manner in which local societies and self-proclaimed "revolutionary" states are articulated historically. The result is a unique collection bridging social history, anthropology, historical sociology, and cultural studies in its formulation of new approaches for rethinking the multifaceted relationship between power, culture, and resistance. Contributors. Ana María Alonso, Armando Bartra, Marjorie Becker, Barry Carr, Philip Corrigan, Romana Falcón, Gilbert M. Joseph, Alan Knight, Florencia E. Mallon, Daniel Nugent, Elsie Rockwell, William Roseberry, Jan Rus, Derek Sayer, James C. Scott

Native Diasporas
Native Diasporas

Author: Gregory D. Smithers

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 604

ISBN-13: 0803255306

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The arrival of European settlers in the Americas disrupted indigenous lifeways, and the effects of colonialism shattered Native communities. Forced migration and human trafficking created a diaspora of cultures, languages, and people. Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman have gathered the work of leading scholars, including Bill Anthes, Duane Champagne, Daniel Cobb, Donald Fixico, and Joy Porter, among others, in examining an expansive range of Native peoples and the extent of their influences through reaggregation. These diverse and wide-ranging essays uncover indigenous understandings of self-identification, community, and culture through the speeches, cultural products, intimate relations, and political and legal practices of Native peoples. "Native Diasporas" explores how indigenous peoples forged a sense of identity and community amid the changes wrought by European colonialism in the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, and the mainland Americas from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. Broad in scope and groundbreaking in the topics it explores, this volume presents fresh insights from scholars devoted to understanding Native American identity in meaningful and methodologically innovative ways.

The Blood Contingent
The Blood Contingent

Author: Stephen B. Neufeld

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2017-04-15

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0826358063

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This innovative social and cultural history explores the daily lives of the lowest echelons in president Porfirio Díaz’s army through the decades leading up to the 1910 Revolution. The author shows how life in the barracks—not just combat and drill but also leisure, vice, and intimacy—reveals the basic power relations that made Mexico into a modern society. The Porfirian regime sought to control and direct violence, to impose scientific hygiene and patriotic zeal, and to build an army to rival that of the European powers. The barracks community enacted these objectives in times of war or peace, but never perfectly, and never as expected. The fault lines within the process of creating the ideal army echoed the challenges of constructing an ideal society. This insightful history of life, love, and war in turn-of-the-century Mexico sheds useful light on the troubled state of the Mexican military more than a century later.

Blazing Cane
Blazing Cane

Author: Gillian McGillivray

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2009-11-23

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0822391058

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Sugar was Cuba’s principal export from the late eighteenth century throughout much of the twentieth, and during that time, the majority of the island’s population depended on sugar production for its livelihood. In Blazing Cane, Gillian McGillivray examines the development of social classes linked to sugar production, and their contribution to the formation and transformation of the state, from the first Cuban Revolution for Independence in 1868 through the Cuban Revolution of 1959. She describes how cane burning became a powerful way for farmers, workers, and revolutionaries to commit sabotage, take control of the harvest season, improve working conditions, protest political repression, attack colonialism and imperialism, nationalize sugarmills, and, ultimately, acquire greater political and economic power. Focusing on sugar communities in eastern and central Cuba, McGillivray recounts how farmers and workers pushed the Cuban government to move from exclusive to inclusive politics and back again. The revolutionary caudillo networks that formed between 1895 and 1898, the farmer alliances that coalesced in the 1920s, and the working-class groups of the 1930s affected both day-to-day local politics and larger state-building efforts. Not limiting her analysis to the island, McGillivray shows that twentieth-century Cuban history reflected broader trends in the Western Hemisphere, from modernity to popular nationalism to Cold War repression.

Cuban Studies 38
Cuban Studies 38

Author: Louis A. Perez, Jr.

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2008-01-27

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0822971127

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Cuban Studies 38 examines topics that include: liberalism emanating from Havana in the early 1800s; Jose Martí's theory of psychocoloniality; the relationship between sugar planters, insurgents, and the Spanish military during the revolution; new aesthetics in Cuban cinema, the “recovery” of poet José Angel Buesa, and the meaning of Elián Gonzales in the context of life in Miami.

The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology
The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology

Author: Deborah L. Nichols

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-08-22

Total Pages: 996

ISBN-13: 0199875006

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The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology provides a current and comprehensive guide to the recent and on-going archaeology of Mesoamerica. Though the emphasis is on prehispanic societies, this Handbook also includes coverage of important new work by archaeologists on the Colonial and Republican periods. Unique among recent works, the text brings together in a single volume article-length regional syntheses and topical overviews written by active scholars in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology. The first section of the Handbook provides an overview of recent history and trends of Mesoamerica and articles on national archaeology programs and practice in Central America and Mexico written by archaeologists from these countries. These are followed by regional syntheses organized by time period, beginning with early hunter-gatherer societies and the first farmers of Mesoamerica and concluding with a discussion of the Spanish Conquest and frontiers and peripheries of Mesoamerica. Topical and comparative articles comprise the remainder of Handbook. They cover important dimensions of prehispanic societies--from ecology, economy, and environment to social and political relations--and discuss significant methodological contributions, such as geo-chemical source studies, as well as new theories and diverse theoretical perspectives. The Handbook concludes with a section on the archaeology of the Spanish conquest and the Colonial and Republican periods to connect the prehispanic, proto-historic, and historic periods. This volume will be a must-read for students and professional archaeologists, as well as other scholars including historians, art historians, geographers, and ethnographers with an interest in Mesoamerica.