The Mexican Revolution has most often been characterized as the revolt of the oppressed rural masses against the conservative regime of Porfirio Díaz. In Ranchero Revolt Ian Jacobs challenges this populist interpretation of the Revolution by exploring the crucial role played by the rural middle class—rancheros—in the organization and final victory of the Revolution.

Jacobs focuses on the Revolution as it developed in Guerrero, the rebellious Mexican state still frequently at odds with central authority. His is the first account in English of the genesis and development of the Revolution in this important Mexican state and the first detailed history in any language of Guerrero in the period 1876 to 1940.

Stressing as it does the conservative tendencies of the Revolution in Mexico, Ranchero Revolt is a major contribution to revisionist history. It is a striking example of the trend toward local and regional studies of Mexican history that are transforming much of the conventional wisdom about modern Mexico.

Among these studies, however, Ranchero Revolt is unusual in its chronological scope, embracing not only the origins and military struggle of the Revolution but also the emergence of a new revolutionary state in the 1920s and 1930s. Especially valuable are Jacobs' descriptions of the agrarian developments that preceded and followed the Revolution; the vagaries of local factions; and the process of political centralization that took place first under Díaz and later under the revolutionary regimes.

Recently, scholars of Olmec visual culture have identified symbols for umbilical cords, bundles, and cave-wombs, as well as a significant number of women portrayed on monuments and as figurines. In this groundbreaking study, Carolyn Tate demonstrates that these subjects were part of a major emphasis on gestational imagery in Formative Period Mesoamerica. In Reconsidering Olmec Visual Culture, she identifies the presence of women, human embryos, and fetuses in monuments and portable objects dating from 1400 to 400 BC and originating throughout much of Mesoamerica. This highly original study sheds new light on the prominent roles that women and gestational beings played in Early Formative societies, revealing female shamanic practices, the generative concepts that motivated caching and bundling, and the expression of feminine knowledge in the 260-day cycle and related divinatory and ritual activities.

Reconsidering Olmec Visual Culture is the first study that situates the unique hollow babies of Formative Mesoamerica within the context of prominent females and the prevalent imagery of gestation and birth. It is also the first major art historical study of La Venta and the first to identify Mesoamerica's earliest creation narrative. It provides a more nuanced understanding of how later societies, including Teotihuacan and West Mexico, as well as the Maya, either rejected certain Formative Period visual forms, rituals, social roles, and concepts or adopted and transformed them into the enduring themes of Mesoamerican symbol systems.

Economic development has been an challenge facing the countries of Latin America. Because the United States, from the very nature of its geographic and economic relationship with its southern neighbors, must inevitably exercise a strong influence on the course which that development takes, it is important that North Americans understand conditions in Latin America and the attitudes of its peoples. Roberto de Oliveira Campos, former Brazilian Minister of Economic Planning, is in a unique position to evaluate both past accomplishments and future problems.

In this group of essays, Campos gives a comprehensive analysis of many aspects of Latin American development in the mid-twentieth century. He examines relations between the United States and Latin America from a variety of angles, and he outlines the basic problems of economic development, of governmental policy, and of public and private administration. He gives particular attention in several essays to the relationship of foreign trade and foreign aid to economic development, and he presents a long discussion of the Alliance for Progress—its history, its purposes, its accomplishments, and its failures.

Campos’s philosophy regarding the role of the state in economic development and other questions emerges clearly from these pithy essays. “The valid distinction I see on the basis of my analysis of men and things is between pragmatic or functional nationalists and romantic or temperamental nationalists,” he writes. “The latter confuse intention with results. They start with enthusiasm and end in fanaticism, this being, according to Santayana, ‘the art of redoubling efforts after losing sight of objectives.’ . . . Many [romantic nationalists], though they do not confess it, favor the dangerous purgery of revolution.

“The pragmatic nationalist seeks to operate within the frame of democratic institutions and prefers reform to revolution. As to myself, I shall continue considering myself a pragmatic nationalist. I renounce the temptation of mobilizing resentment in order to gain the authority to plan development. I would rather strengthen the national entrepreneur than merely antagonize the foreigner. I would want the state not to do what it cannot do in order to do what it should do. I prefer to love my own country rather than to hate the others’.”

Latin American women have long written essays on topics ranging from gender identity and the female experience to social injustice, political oppression, lack of educational opportunities, and the need for female solidarity in a patriarchal environment. But this rich vein of writing has often been ignored and is rarely studied.

This volume of twenty-one original studies by noted experts in Latin American literature seeks to recover and celebrate the accomplishments of Latin American women essayists. Taking a variety of critical approaches, the authors look at the way women writers have interpreted the essay genre, molded it to their expression, and created an intellectual tradition of their own. Some of the writers they treat are Flora Tristan, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Victoria Ocampo, Alfonsina Storni, Rosario Ferré, Christina Peri Rossi, and Elena Poniatowska.

This book is the first of a two-volume project that reexamines the Latin American essay from a feminist perspective. The second volume, also edited by Doris Meyer, contains thirty-six essays in translation by twenty-two women authors.

Through close readings of the painted images in a major sixteenth-century illustrated manuscript, this book demonstrates the critical role that images played in ethnic identity formation and politics in colonial Mexico.

The Relación de Michoacán (1539–1541) is one of the earliest surviving illustrated manuscripts from colonial Mexico. Commissioned by the Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, the Relación was produced by a Franciscan friar together with indigenous noble informants and anonymous native artists who created its forty-four illustrations. To this day, the Relación remains the primary source for studying the pre-Columbian practices and history of the people known as Tarascans or P’urhépecha. However, much remains to be said about how the Relación’s colonial setting shaped its final form.

By looking at the Relación in its colonial context, this study reveals how it presented the indigenous collaborators a unique opportunity to shape European perceptions of them while settling conflicting agendas, outshining competing ethnic groups, and carving a place for themselves in the new colonial society. Through archival research and careful visual analysis, Angélica Afanador-Pujol provides a new and fascinating account that situates the manuscript’s images within the colonial conflicts that engulfed the indigenous collaborators. These conflicts ranged from disputes over political posts among indigenous factions to labor and land disputes against Spanish newcomers. Afanador-Pujol explores how these tensions are physically expressed in the manuscript’s production and in its many contradictions between text and images, as well as in numerous emendations to the images. By studying representations of justice, landscape, conquest narratives, and genealogy within the Relación, Afanador-Pujol clearly demonstrates the visual construction of identity, its malleability, and its political possibilities.

REMEX presents the first comprehensive examination of artistic responses and contributions to an era defined by the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994–2008). Marshaling over a decade’s worth of archival research, interviews, and participant observation in Mexico City and the Mexico–US borderlands, Amy Sara Carroll considers individual and collective art practices, recasting NAFTA as the most fantastical inter-American allegory of the turn of the millennium. Carroll organizes her interpretations of performance, installation, documentary film, built environment, and body, conceptual, and Internet art around three key coordinates—City, Woman, and Border. She links the rise of 1990s Mexico City art in the global market to the period’s consolidation of Mexico–US border art as a genre. She then interrupts this transnational art history with a sustained analysis of chilanga and Chicana artists’ remapping of the figure of Mexico as Woman.

A tour de force that depicts a feedback loop of art and public policy—what Carroll terms the “allegorical performative”—REMEX adds context to the long-term effects of the post-1968 intersection of D.F. performance and conceptualism, centralizes women artists’ embodied critiques of national and global master narratives, and tracks post-1984 border art’s “undocumentation” of racialized and sexualized reconfigurations of North American labor pools. The book’s featured artwork becomes the lens through which Carroll rereads a range of events and phenomenon from California’s Proposition 187 to Zapatismo, US immigration policy, 9/11 (1973/2001), femicide in Ciudad Juárez, and Mexico’s war on drugs.

Latin American intellectual history is largely founded on essayistic writing. Women's essays have always formed a part of this rich tradition, yet they have seldom received the respect they merit and are often omitted entirely from anthologies.

This volume and its earlier companion, Reinterpreting the Spanish American Essay: Women Writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries, seek to remedy that neglect. This book collects thirty-six notable essays by twenty-two women writers, including Flora Tristan, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Victoria Ocampo, Alfonsina Storni, Rosario Ferré, Christina Peri Rossi, and Elena Poniatowska. All of the essays are here translated into English for the first time, many by the same scholars who wrote critical studies of the authors in the first volume. Each author's work is also prefaced by a brief biographical sketch.

Honorable Mention, ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association of Latin American Art
Finalist, 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association

How Mexican artists and intellectuals created a new identity for modern Mexico City through its ties to Aztec Tenochtitlan.

After archaeologists rediscovered a corner of the Templo Mayor in 1914, artists, intellectuals, and government officials attempted to revive Tenochtitlan as an instrument for reassessing Mexican national identity in the wake of the Revolution of 1910. What followed was a conceptual excavation of the original Mexica capital in relation to the transforming urban landscape of modern Mexico City.

Revolutionary-era scholars took a renewed interest in sixteenth century maps as they recognized an intersection between Tenochtitlan and the foundation of a Spanish colonial settlement directly over it. Meanwhile, Mexico City developed with modern roads and expanded civic areas as agents of nationalism promoted concepts like indigenismo, the embrace of Indigenous cultural expressions. The promotion of artworks and new architectural projects such as Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli Museum helped to make real the notion of a modern Tenochtitlan. Employing archival materials, newspaper reports, and art criticism from 1914 to 1964, Resurrecting Tenochtitlan connects art history with urban studies to reveal the construction of a complex physical and cultural layout for Mexico’s modern capital.

In two of the most fateful months of Mexican history, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1916–1917 came to grips with the basic problem of twentieth-century Mexico. They hammered out pragmatic solutions to establish the legal foundations of the Mexican Revolution, the definitive break between the old Mexico and the new, the constitutional bases for the socioeconomic changes from 1917 onward. Honored and obeyed, dishonored and disobeyed, many times amended, the constitution they wrote still serves as the instrument for achieving the national purpose.

Revolution at Querétaro is the first book in English to study in depth the remarkable convention that produced the Constitution of 1917. It chronicles the unfolding of ideas expressed in the debates on the most significant articles of the constitution, those that have given it a revolutionary flavor and have served the groundwork for the emergence of Mexico as a modern nation. These articles concern the Catholic church and its role in the sphere of education (Article 3); the relationship of the church to the state (Articles 24 and 130); the attack on vested interest and the establishment of guidelines for agrarian reform (Article 27); the drafting of a detailed labor code (Article 123); and attempts to implement municipal reform (Article 114). Other debates described in the book concern unsuccessful attempts to institute prohibition, outlaw bullfights, abolish capital punishment, and grant suffrage to women.

This study also sheds light on the delegates themselves, who they were and where they came from, their idiosyncrasies and attitudes, and their individual contributions to the writing of the constitution. Much material is taken from unpublished albums in which the delegates recorded their sentiments during the convention.

Rubén Darío (1867–1916), the undisputed standard-bearer of the Modernist movement in Hispanic letters, was born in Nicaragua. In 1886 he went to Chile, where he published Azul (1888), his first important book of poems and stories. Later he lived for extended periods in Argentina, Spain, and France, and in these countries produced his best work: compelling poems of beauty, style, and dignity, especially Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905). The perfection of form, exotic essences, and rich ornamentation of his earlier work give way in his most mature poems to self-probings and doubts, the anguish so characteristic of twentieth-century literature. But the hedonistic note, the quenchless appetite for life, dominating Azul and Prosas profanas (1896) never die out, and are magnificently present in El poema del otoño (1910). Darío has had a tremendous impact on Hispanic literature. He is one of the best examples of the poet who is true to his art as determined by his innermost impulses. His poetry has fertilized a whole generation of writers in Spanish America and in Spain, and even now his influence continues to be felt.

Modernism was the major Spanish American literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Leader of that influential movement was Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan now recognized as one of the most important Hispanic poets of all time.

Like the Romantics in England and the Symbolists on the Continent, Darío and other Modernists were strongly influenced by occultist thought. But, as the poet Octavio Paz has written, "academic criticism has ... preferred to close its eyes to the stream of occultism that runs throughout Darío's work. This silence damages our comprehension of his poetry."

Cathy Login Jrade's groundbreaking study corrects this critical oversight. Her work clearly demonstrates that esoteric tradition is central to Modernism and that an understanding of this centrality clarifies both the nature of the movement and its relationship to earlier European literature.

After placing Modernism in a broad historical and literary perspective, Jrade examines the impact of esoteric beliefs upon Darío's view of the world and the role of poetry in it. Through detailed and insightful analyses of key poems, she explores the poet's quest for solutions to the nineteenth-century crisis of belief.

The movement that Ruben Darío headed brought Hispanic poetry into the mainstream of the "modern tradition," with its sense of fragmentation and alienation and its hope for integration and reconciliation with nature. Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity enriches our understanding of that movement and the work of its leading poet.