HISTORY 608

INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF

LATIN AMERICA, 1821- PRESENT

FALL 2004 W 1-3:30

Lowell Gudmundson

Email: lgudmund@mtholyoke.edu

Telephones: office at MHC 538-2378; home 535-1430

Office Hours: TBA

This course introduces the student to many of the major issues, theoretical approaches, and thematic concerns in the study of Latin American history in the nearly two centuries since most of the region became independent. Various conceptualizations of the region’s history, sources, methods, and their evolution over the past half century or more will be the focus of our discussions. The course organization is far more topical or thematic than chronological or geographical. The individual nation state is fairly rarely the subject or point of our reading, even though many readings will have their “setting” in a single nation or two of course. The first three weeks’ readings will explore different theoretical approaches and concerns applicable to the entire region, followed by two weeks on Independence, nation-state formation and Liberalism in the 19^th century. Then we will devote two weeks to race and gender as organizing principles for historical research, followed by three weeks on comparative history organized by commodities, labor, and environmental concerns. The final two weeks deal with the region’s highly conflictive and complex relationship with the U.S. and the lessons of two great revolutionary experiences in the 20^th century: Mexico and Cuba.

The format for our discussions will be varied. Many weeks we will have common readings and general discussions involving everyone equally. Other weeks we will “split” readings among the group and discussions will follow what amounts to a “report back to the group” opening presentation. Occasionally we will combine these approaches as the need arises, trying to maintain a reasonably balanced weekly reading load for all participants. Seven paperbacks have been ordered (Bulmer-Thomas, Huber, Mallon, Andrews, Franco, Pérez-Stable, Viotti da Costa); these and all other materials are on reserve in the Library, while many of the weekly article/chapter readings are also available in a course packet.

Written work required for the course is of four kinds. The first to come due is a 5-8 page essay that deals with some of the major issues raised by the readings for weeks 2-4, to be turned in by Wednesday September 29^th. One (single) “book review” and one “review essay” (similar to the Latin American Research Review format, several of which we will be reading in the course) combining various readings for a particular week, to be chosen by the student and due by December 8th. Finally, a more substantial, 10-20 page paper, due December 15^th, that pursues a broad area or “field,” assessing its strengths and weaknesses, in effect discussing why you might want to place your own dissertation research within that general area. By field or area I have in mind something like Latin America’s experience with “Liberalism,” “Revolution,” Post-Colonial or Cultural Studies,” “Labor,” etc., rather than a very specific, finite problem such as “why the Perón regime fell when it did,” etc. Such an exploration or situating of an area and set of problems could be useful to you when drafting your thesis project statement and later the dreaded “introductory chapter” of the thesis. The book review and review essay exercises are also intended as practice for what we do as working historians outside the classroom.

For those who feel they have less background in Latin American history than they would like, reviewing one or two textbooks that “introduce” the region, especially its pre-colonial and colonial past, would be advisable. There are half a dozen or more currently fighting it out for what, by U.S. or Western Civ. “industry standards,” are slim pickings in terms of course adoption sales. I have my favorites but they need not be yours. Mine are the books by Lyman Johnson and Mark Burkholder (Colonial Latin America, Oxford University Press, 1990), or Lewis Hanke and Jane Rausch, People and Issues in Latin American History: The Colonial Experience, Sources and Interpretations; M. Wiener, 1993). An older offering without updating that is still useful is by James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz (Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil; Cambridge University Press, 1983). “All in one,” modern or national period textbooks often try to provide a chapter or two of “background” on pre-1800 history and thus are not much help. Thomas Skidmore and Peter Smith (Modern Latin America; Oxford University Press, 1992) is probably the weakest of them and Benjamin Keen and Mark Wasserman (A History of Latin America; Houghton Mifflin, 1988) the strongest. Perhaps the most weighted toward the Colonial period of all the single-volume textbooks is Peter Bakewell’s, A History of Latin America: c. 1450 to the Present (Blackwell, 2004). A topically organized two-volume study that I would also recommend is by Susan Migden Socolow and Louisa Schell Hoberman, (Cities and Society in Colonial Latin America; and The Countryside in Colonial Latin America; University of New Mexico Press, 1986 and 1996).

Paperbacks for sale (Jeffrey Amherst Bookstore):

Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America Since Independence (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Evelyne Huber and Frank Safford, eds. Agrarian Structure and Political Power: Landlord and Peasant in the Making of Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995)

Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Post-Colonial Mexico and Peru (University of California Press, 1995)

George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (Columbia University Press, 1989)

Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course and Legacy (Oxford University Press, 1993)

Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myth and History (University of North Carolina Press, 1999)

9/8 Introduction to the course

9/15 Distinctiveness, “Dependency,” and Economic Explanations Generated from within Latin America

All read: Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History …

Steve J. Stern, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean,” American Historical Review, 93:4 (1988); Immanuel Wallerstein, "Comments on Stem's Critical Tests," AHR, Oct. 1988. Steve J. Stern, "Reply: Ever More Solitary," AHR, Oct. 1988.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Chs. 1-2, Dependency and Development in Latin America (University of California Press, 1979), pp. 1-29.

Paul Gootenberg, “Between a Rock and a Softer Place: Reflections on Some Recent Economic History of Latin America,” Latin American Research Review, 39:2 (2004) 239-57.

9/22 Post-Modern, Post-Colonial, Subaltern and Cultural Studies Approaches: The Reality of the Imagined, or Anti-Materialist Identity Politics?

All read: Florencia Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemna of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History,” American Historical Review, (1994), 1491-1515.

Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, “Founding Statement,” boundary 2, 20 (1993), special issue, 110-121.

Patricia Seed, "Colonial and Post-Colonial Discourse," Latin American Research Review, 26, 1991. (along with respondents): Hernán Vidal, "The Concept of Colonial and Post-Colonial Discourse: A Perspective from Literary Criticism," LARR 28(3),1993,113-119’ Walter D. Mignolo, "Colonial and Post-colonial Discourse: Cultural Critique or Academic Colonialism," LARR 28(3), 1993, 120-134; Rolena Adorno, "Reconsidering Colonial Discourse for Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Spanish America, LARR, 28(3), 1993, 135-145; Patricia Seed, "More Colonial and Post-colonial Discourses," LARR, 28(3), 146-152.

Marc Edelman, Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica, (Stanford University Press, 1999), chapter 1.

9/29 Why Study Latin America? Some Political Questions/Answers

All read: Evelyne Huber and Frank Safford, eds. Agrarian Structure and Political Power

Alan Knight, “Democratic and Revolutionary Traditions in Latin America,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, 20:2 (2001) 147-86.

10/6 The 19^th Century as Passageway (1): Spanish American Nations and Brazilian Empire,

All read: Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire

George Reid Andrews, "Spanish American Independence: A Structural Analysis," Latin American Perspectives. Issue 44, Vol. 12, No.1, Winter 1985, 105-132.

Eric Van Young, "Recent Anglophone Scholarship on Mexico and Central America in the Age of Revolution (1750-1850), Hispanic American Historical Review. 65:4 (1985) 725-743.

10/20 The 19^th Century as Passageway (2): The Strange Career of Liberalism in Spanish America

All read: Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation

Charles Hale, The Transformation of Mexican Liberalism in the late 19^th Century (Princeton University Press, 1988)

10/27 History, Race, Ethnicity

All read: George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000.

Split readings: Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (Pluto Press, 1997).

Joanne Rappaport, Cumbe Reborn: An Andean Ethnography of History (University of Chicago Press, 1994)

Joanne Rappaport, The Politics of Memory (University of Chicago, 1990).

Jeffrey Gould, To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Nicaragua Mestiza (Duke University Press, 1998).

11/3 History and Gender

All read: Jean Franco, Plotting Women

Sandra McGee-Deutsch, "Gender and Sociopolitical Change in Latin America," Hispanic American Historical Review, 71:2 (1991) 259-306.

Sylvia Chant, “Researching Gender, Families and Households in Latin America: From the 20^th into the 21^st Century,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, 21:4 (2002) 545-75

Maryssa Navarro, “Against Marianismo,” in Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier, and Janise Hurtig, eds., Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America (Palgrave, 2002), 257-72.

11/10 Comparative History via Commodities

Split readings:

Coffee: William Roseberry, Lowell Gudmundson, and Mario Samper, eds. Coffee, Society and Power in Latin America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)

William Roseberry, “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States,” American Anthropologist, 98:4 (1996) 762-75.

Steven Topik, “Coffee Anyone?: Recent Research on Latin American Coffee Societies,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 80:2 (May 2000), 225-266

Bananas: Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg, Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003).

Sugar: César Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in the Modern World (Viking 1985; Penguin 1986).

11/17 History via the Peculiar Commodity: Labor

Split readings:

Charles Bergquist, Labor in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 1986)

Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905-1960 (Duke University Press, 2000).

Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class. 1946-1976. (Cambridge University Press, 1988)

Joel Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men: Sao Paulo and the Rise of Brazil’s Industrial Working Class, 1900-1955 (Duke University Press, 1993).

11/24 History via the Environment

All read: John Soluri, “Banana Cultures in Comparative Perspective,” (manuscript)

Steve Marquardt, “’Green Havoc’: Panama Disease, Environmental Change, and Labor Process in the Central American Banana Industry,” American Historical Review, 106:1 (2001) 49-80.

Steve Marquardt, “Pesticides, Parakeets, and Unions in The Costa Rican Banana Industry:, 1938-1962,” Latin American Research Review, 37:2 (2001), 3-36

Split readings:

Warren Dean, With Broadaxe and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (University of California Press, 1995)

Stuart McCook, States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and the Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940 (University of Texas Press, 2002)

12/1 Latin America’s Peculiar History: So Far From God, So Near the United States

All read: Mark T. Berger, “Civilising the South: The U.S. Rise to Hegemony in the Americas and the Roots of ‘Latin American Studies’: 1898-1945,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 12:1 (1993), 1-48.

Split readings: Frederick Pike, The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature (University of Texas Press, 1992)

John J. Johnson, Latin America in Caricature (University of Texas Press, 1980).

12/8 Latin American Revolutions: Mexico and Cuba

All read: Cuba: Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution

Split readings:

Mexico: John Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution. (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1989)

Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

Longer papers due December 15^th.