For over a hundred years, Venezuelans have referred to themselves as a café con leche (coffee with milk) people. This colorful expression well describes the racial composition of Venezuelan society, in which European, African, and Indian peoples have intermingled to produce a population in which almost everyone is of mixed blood. It also expresses a popular belief that within their blended society Venezuelans have achieved a racial democracy in which people of all races live free ...

During the nineteenth century, British-owned railways grew under the protection of an Argentine ruling elite that considered railways both instruments and symbols of progress. Under this program of support for foreign enterprise, Argentina had by 1914 built the largest railway network in Latin America.During the first decades of the twentieth century, the railways were successful in following a policy of calculated disregard for Argentine interests in general. However, following th...

A passionate argument for the geopolitical autonomy of Latin America, Carlos Fuentes's 1984 CBC Massey lectures trace the region's unique historical and cultural tensions and call upon foreign powers to cease interference in a sphere of influence they rarely fully understand.Fuentes sees the turbulence in Latin America ending not with political solutions, but economic ones. Foreshadowing the end of the Cold War, the signing and expansion of NAFTA, and the Mexican peso crisis of 199...

On the fortieth anniversary of revolution and rebellion in Chile, a searching history of the rise and fall of the world's first and only democratically elected Marxist president.On September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende of Chile was deposed in a violent coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. The coup had been in the works for months, even years. Shortly after giving a farewell speech to his people, Allende died of gunshot wounds-whether inflicted by his own ...

Rio de Janeiro’s is a lush, complex history that spans five centuries, and Marvelous City is the first full length retelling of that history written in English. From the beach life of the Ipanema and Copacabana to the struggles of the Rio’s infamous favelas, this is a story of contrast and contradiction. We are offered a glimpse into Rio’s high society and rich culture and are shown the endemic violence, corruption, and social disparity with which it struggles to this day. With its populist p...

Earth Beings is the fruit of Marisol de la Cadena's decade-long conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, runakuna or Quechua people. Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and nonindigenous worlds, and the partial connections between them, de la Cadena presents how the Turpos' indigenous ways of knowing and being include and exceed modern and nonmodern practices. Her discussion of indigenous political strategies—a realm that need not ab...

For almost a hundred years, a nation of fugitive Africans, Indians, whites, and mixed races fought off the world’s most powerful empires in a struggle to survive in freedom. Over the span of the 17th century, the Quilombo dos Palmares melded several cultures to form its own language, religion, government, values, and way of life. Its population may have exceeded 20,000. Its last king is believed to have been an educated descendant of slaves. He took the name Zumbi—Lord of War—and b...

After joining the Australian Merchant Navy at the age of sixteen, Dick Jolly trained as an engineer before joining the Australian National Line as a cadet. After a four-year apprenticeship, he gradually gained promotion while travelling around the Australian coast. Fascinated by the world of commercial deep-sea tugs and salvage, his first real break came in Portsmouth in 1963 when he landed a job on RFA Typhoon. Relocating to Singapore and with a Foreign Going tugmaster's qualification und...

How does globalization work? Focusing on Latin America, Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth show that exports of expertise and ideals from the United States to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico have played a crucial role in transforming their state forms and economies since World War II.Based on more than 300 extensive interviews with major players in governments, foundations, law firms, universities, and think tanks, Dezalay and Garth examine both the production of northern export...

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brazil’s dictatorship arrested, tortured, and interrogated many people it suspected of subversion; hundreds of those arrested were killed in prison. In May 1970, Marcos P. S. Arruda, a young political activist, was seized in São Paulo, imprisoned, and tortured. A Mother’s Cry is the harrowing story of Marcos’s incarceration and his family’s efforts to locate him and obtain his release. Marcos’s mother, Lina Penna Sattamini, was living in the ...

Focusing on one of the most fascinating and debated figures in the history of modern Brazil, Stringing Together a Nation is the first full-length study of the life and career of Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon (1865–1958) to be published in English. In the early twentieth century, Rondon, a military engineer, led what became known as the Rondon Commission in a massive undertaking: the building of telegraph lines and roads connecting Brazil’s vast interior with its coast. Todd A. D...

This ambitious interdisciplinary study is the first to examine the interlinked economic uses and cultural practices and beliefs surrounding cattle in Western Amazonia, where cattle raising is at the center of debates about economic development and environWinner, Brazil Section Book Award, Latin American Studies Association, 2016The opening of the Amazon to colonization in the 1970s brought cattle, land conflict, and widespread deforestation...