This study of the German community of early twentieth-century Buenos Aires is a major contribution to the literature on Argentine history and on the New World immigrant experience. Beginning with the first wave of immigration in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the outbreak of World War II, Ronald C. Newton reconstructs the growth, development, and influence of a powerful foreign population in what was then the largest city in South America.
In the three decades before World War I, Argentina became a major food-producing and exporting country. Through the port of Buenos Aires was funneled the bulk of the Pampas’ foodstuff and fiber in one direction and Europe’s capital, technology, and surplus labor in the other. The German speakers made up one of the smaller Western European communities within the Argentine metropolis, but their cultural and economic influence was far out of proportion to their numbers. Based in a large and occupationally diverse middle class, the German community was represented at all social levels. Newton analyzes the experience of this well-demarcated group during a period of rapid demographic growth and increasing pressure to assimilate. He constructs working hypotheses that may be applied and refined in further investigations.
The book draws substantially on materials from within the Buenos Aires German community—newspapers, memoirs, the records of associations and welfare agencies—to reconstruct its intense daily life. The author highlights, for instance, the sharp economic reversals German-speaking residents suffered during World War I and shows how their fortunes declined further after continued Germanic immigration in the 1920s. Especially significant is his finding that the German community, which until 1914 had seemed impervious to the currents of Argentine nationalism, became susceptible to assimilation into Argentine society. In concluding chapters Newton demonstrates the way the German economic elite came to terms with the Nazis for opportunistic reasons; thus, the volume also serves as an introduction to the question of Nazism’s diffusion in Argentina.
Doña Marina (La Malinche) ...Pocahontas ...Sacagawea—their names live on in historical memory because these women bridged the indigenous American and European worlds, opening the way for the cultural encounters, collisions, and fusions that shaped the social and even physical landscape of the modern Americas. But these famous individuals were only a few of the many thousands of people who, intentionally or otherwise, served as "go-betweens" as Europeans explored and colonized the New World.
In this innovative history, Alida Metcalf thoroughly investigates the many roles played by go-betweens in the colonization of sixteenth-century Brazil. She finds that many individuals created physical links among Europe, Africa, and Brazil—explorers, traders, settlers, and slaves circulated goods, plants, animals, and diseases. Intercultural liaisons produced mixed-race children. At the cultural level, Jesuit priests and African slaves infused native Brazilian traditions with their own religious practices, while translators became influential go-betweens, negotiating the terms of trade, interaction, and exchange. Most powerful of all, as Metcalf shows, were those go-betweens who interpreted or represented new lands and peoples through writings, maps, religion, and the oral tradition. Metcalf's convincing demonstration that colonization is always mediated by third parties has relevance far beyond the Brazilian case, even as it opens a revealing new window on the first century of Brazilian history.
The lands between Mesoamerica and the Central Andes are famed for the rich diversity of ancient cultures that inhabited them. Throughout this vast region, from about AD 700 until the sixteenth-century Spanish invasion, a rich and varied tradition of goldworking was practiced. The amount of gold produced and worn by native inhabitants was so great that Columbus dubbed the last New World shores he sailed as Costa Rica—the "Rich Coast."
Despite the long-recognized importance of the region in its contribution to Pre-Columbian culture, very few books are readily available, especially in English, on these lands of gold. Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia now fills that gap with eleven articles by leading scholars in the field. Issues of culture change, the nature of chiefdom societies, long-distance trade and transport, ideologies of value, and the technologies of goldworking are covered in these essays as are the role of metals as expressions and materializations of spiritual, political, and economic power. These topics are accompanied by new information on the role of stone statuary and lapidary work, craft and trade specialization, and many more topics, including a reevaluation of the concept of the "Intermediate Area."
Collectively, the volume provides a new perspective on the prehistory of these lands and includes articles by Latin American scholars whose writings have rarely been published in English.
One of the most persistent legends in the annals of New World exploration is that of the Land of Gold. This mythical site was located over vast areas of South America (and later, North America); the search for it drove some men mad with greed and, as often as not, to their untimely deaths.
In this history of quest and adventure, Robert Silverberg traces the fate of Old World explorers lured westward by the myth of El Dorado. From the German conquistadores licensed by the Spanish king to operate out of Venezuela, to the journeys of Gonzalo Pizarro in the Amazon basin, and to the nearly miraculous voyage of Francisco Orellana to the mouth of the Amazon River, encountering the warlike women who gave the river its name, violence and bloodshed accompanied the determined adventurers. Sir Walter Raleigh and a host of other explorers spent small fortunes and many lives trying to locate Manoa, a city that was rumored to be El Dorado—City of Gold. Celebrated science fiction author Robert Silverberg recreates these legendary quests in The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado.
One contributor shows how the Spanish colonial powers and the traditional Maya nobility in the Yucatán struggled over alphabetic literacy and the continued use of hieroglyphics. Another contributor documents how the Natick speakers of Martha’s Vineyard adopted alphabetic literacy for their own purposes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, incorporating writing as a tool of traditional governance. In another article, a Spanish translation is compared to the original Nahua text to show how the two versions provide very different views of the Spanish conquest of the city-state of Mexico-Tenochtitlán. Yet another contributor examines how competing language ideologies in the Andes were used to characterize khipus (Andean knotted strings) and alphabetic script.
This highly readable study addresses a range of fundamental questions about the interaction of politics and economics, from a grassroots perspective in post-transition Argentina. Nancy R. Powers looks at the lives and political views of Argentines of little to modest means to examine systematically how their political interests, and their evaluations of democracy, are formed. Based on the author’s fieldwork in Argentina, the analysis extends to countries of Latin America and Eastern Europe facing similarly difficult political and economic changes.
Powers uses in-depth interviews to examine how (not simply what) ordinary people think about their standard of living, their government, and the democratic regime. She explains why they sometimes do, but more often do not, see their material conditions as political problems, arguing that the type of hardship and the possibilities for coping with it are more politically significant than the degree of hardship. She analyzes alternative ways in which people define democracy and judge its legitimacy.
Not only does Powers demonstrate contradictions and gaps in the existing scholarship on economic voting, social movements, and populism, she also shows how those literatures are addressing similar questions but are failing to “talk” to one another. Powers goes on to build a more comprehensive theory of how people at the grassroots form their political interests. To analyze why people perceive only some of their material hardships as political problems, she brings into the study of politics ideas drawn from Amartya Sen and other scholars of poverty.
The authors present a multilevel analysis encompassing institutions and individuals within the government—at national, state, and local levels—as well as the activists, interest groups, and nongovernmental organizations that operate outside formal political channels. They emphasize the importance of networks linking committed actors in the government bureaucracy with activists in civil society. Portraying a gradual process marked by periods of rapid advance, Hochstetler and Keck show how political opportunities have arisen from major political transformations such as the transition to democracy and from critical events, including the well-publicized murders of environmental activists in 1988 and 2004. Rather than view foreign governments and organizations as the instigators of environmental policy change in Brazil, the authors point to their importance at key moments as sources of leverage and support.
To many foreigners, Colombia is a nightmare of drugs and violence. Yet normal life goes on there, and, in Bogotá, it's even possible to forget that war still ravages the countryside. This paradox of perceptions—outsiders' fears versus insiders' realities—drew June Carolyn Erlick back to Bogotá for a year's stay in 2005. She wanted to understand how the city she first came to love in 1975 has made such strides toward building a peaceful civil society in the midst of ongoing violence. The complex reality she found comes to life in this compelling memoir.
Erlick creates her portrait of Bogotá through a series of vivid vignettes that cover many aspects of city life. As an experienced journalist, she lets the things she observes lead her to larger conclusions. The courtesy of people on buses, the absence of packs of stray dogs and street trash, and the willingness of strangers to help her cross an overpass when vertigo overwhelms her all become signs of convivencia—the desire of Bogotanos to live together in harmony despite decades of war. But as Erlick settles further into city life, she finds that "war in the city is invisible, but constantly present in subtle ways, almost like the constant mist that used to drip down from the Bogotá skies so many years ago."
Shattering stereotypes with its lively reporting, A Gringa in Bogotá is must-reading for going beyond the headlines about the drug war and bloody conflict.
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