A City Against Empire is the history of the anti-imperialist movement in 1920s Mexico City. It combines intellectual, social, and urban history to shed light on the city’s role as an important global ...hub for anti-imperialism, exile activism, political art, and solidarity campaigns. After the Russian and the Mexican Revolution, Mexico City became a space and a symbol of global anti-imperialism. Radical politicians, artists, intellectuals, scientists, migrants, and revolutionary tourists took advantage of the urban environment to develop their visions of an anti-imperialism for the twentieth-century. These actors imagined national self-determination, international solidarity, and an emancipation from what they called “the West.” Global, local, and urban factors interacted to transform Mexico City into the most important hub for radicalism in the Americas. By weaving together the intellectual history of Mexico, the urban and social histories of Mexico City, and the global history of anti-imperialist movements in the 1920s, this books analyses the perfect storm of anti-imperialism in Mexico City.
In post-1968 Mexico a group of artists and feminist activists began to question how feminine bodies were visually constructed and politicized across media. Participation of women was increasing in ...the public sphere, and the exclusive emphasis on written culture was giving way to audio-visual communications. Motivated by a desire for self-representation both visually and in politics, female artists and activists transformed existing regimes of media and visuality.
Women Made Visible by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda uses a transnational and interdisciplinary lens to analyze the fundamental and overlooked role played by artists and feminist activists in changing the ways female bodies were viewed and appropriated. Through their concern for self-representation (both visually and in formal politics), these women played a crucial role in transforming existing regimes of media and visuality-increasingly important intellectual spheres of action. Foregrounding the work of female artists and their performative and visual, rather than written, interventions in urban space in Mexico City, Aceves Sepúlveda demonstrates that these women feminized Mexico's mediascapes and shaped the debates over the female body, gender difference, and sexual violence during the last decades of the twentieth century.
Weaving together the practices of activists, filmmakers, visual artists, videographers, and photographers, Women Made Visible questions the disciplinary boundaries that have historically undermined the practices of female artists and activists and locates the development of Mexican second-wave feminism as a meaningful actor in the contested political spaces of the era, both in Mexico City and internationally.
This book charts new directions in thinking about the construction
of new world identities... The way in which Bennett integrates race, gender, and
the tension between canon and secular law into his ...analysis will inspire
re-examination of earlier studies of marriage in Latin America and the
Caribbean. -- Judith A. Byfield Colonial Mexico was home to
the largest population of free and slave Africans in the New World. Africans in
Colonial Mexico explores how they learned to make their way in a culture of Spanish
and Roman Catholic absolutism by using the legal institutions of church and state to
create a semblance of cultural autonomy. From secular and ecclesiastical court
records, Bennett reconstructs the lives of slave and free blacks, their regulation
by the government and by the Church, the impact of the Inquisition, their legal
status in marriage, and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects. His
findings demonstrate the malleable nature of African identities in the Atlantic
world, as well as the ability of Africans to deploy their own psychological
resources to survive displacement and oppression.
A rebellious Indian proclaiming noble ancestry and entitlement, a military lieutenant foreshadowing the coming of revolution, a blasphemous Creole embroiderer in possession of a bundle of sketches ...brimming with pornography. All shared one thing in common. During the late eighteenth century, they were deemed to be mad and forcefully admitted to the Hospital de San Hipolito in Mexico City, the first hospital of the New World to specialize in the care and custody of the mentally disturbed. Christina Ramos reconstructs the history of this overlooked colonial hospital from its origins in 1567 to its transformation in the eighteenth century, when it began to admit a growing number of patients transferred from the Inquisition and secular criminal courts. Drawing on the poignant voices of patients, doctors, friars, and inquisitors, Ramos treats San Hipolito as both a microcosm and a colonial laboratory of the Hispanic Enlightenment-a site where traditional Catholicism and rationalist models of madness mingled in surprising ways. She shows how the emerging ideals of order, utility, rationalism, and the public good came to reshape the institutional and medical management of madness. While the history of psychiatry's beginnings has often been told as seated in Europe, Ramos proposes an alternative history of madness's medicalization that centers colonial Mexico and places religious figures, including inquisitors, at the pioneering forefront.
In this extraordinary new book, Andrew Konove traces the history of illicit commerce in Mexico City from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, showing how it became central to the economic and ...political life of the city. The story centers on the untold history of the Baratillo, the city's infamous thieves' market. Originating in the colonial-era Plaza Mayor, the Baratillo moved to the neighborhood of Tepito in the early twentieth century, where it grew into one of the world's largest emporiums for black-market goods. Konove uncovers the far-reaching ties between vendors in the Baratillo and political and mercantile elites in Mexico City, revealing the surprising clout of vendors who trafficked in the shadow economy and the diverse individuals who benefited from their trade.
In this political history of twentieth-century Mexico, Gladys McCormick argues that the key to understanding the immense power of the long-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) is to be ...found in the countryside. Using newly available sources, including declassified secret police files and oral histories, McCormick looks at large-scale sugar cooperatives in Morelos and Puebla, two major agricultural regions that serve as microcosms of events across the nation. She argues that Mexico's rural peoples, despite shouldering much of the financial burden of modernization policies, formed the PRI regime's most fervent base of support.McCormick demonstrates how the PRI exploited this support, using key parts of the countryside to test and refine instruments of control--including the regulation of protest, manipulation of collective memories of rural communities, and selective application of violence against critics--that it later employed in other areas, both rural and urban. With three peasant leaders, brothers named Ruben, Porfirio, and Antonio Jaramillo, at the heart of her story, McCormick draws a capacious picture of peasant activism, disillusion, and compromise in state formation, revealing the basis for an enduring political culture dominated by the PRI. On a broader level, McCormick demonstrates the connections among modern state building in Latin America, the consolidation of new forms of authoritarian rule, and the deployment of violence on all sides.
History is not just about great personalities, wars, and revolutions; it is also about the subtle aspects of more ordinary matters. On a day-to-day basis the aspects of life that most preoccupied ...people in late eighteenth- through mid nineteenth-century Mexico were not the political machinations of generals or politicians but whether they themselves could make a living, whether others accorded them the respect they deserved, whether they were safe from an abusive husband, whether their wives and children would obey them-in short, the minutiae of daily life.
Sonya Lipsett-Rivera'sGender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750-1856explores the relationships between Mexicans, their environment, and one another, as well as their negotiation of the cultural values of everyday life. By examining the value systems that governed Mexican thinking of the period, Lipsett-Rivera examines the ephemeral daily experiences and interactions of the people and illuminates how gender and honor systems governed these quotidian negotiations. Bodies and the built environment were inscribed with cultural values, and the relationship of Mexicans to and between space and bodies determined the way ordinary people acted out their culture.
Migration is typically seen as a transnational phenomenon, but
it happens within borders, too. Oaxaca in Motion documents
a revealing irony in the latter sort: internal migration often is
global in ...character, motivated by foreign affairs and international
economic integration, and it is no less transformative than its
cross-border analogue.
Iván Sandoval-Cervantes spent nearly two years observing and
interviewing migrants from the rural Oaxacan town of Santa Ana
Zegache. Many women from the area travel to Mexico City to work as
domestics, and men are encouraged to join the Mexican military to
fight the US-instigated "war on drugs" or else leave their fields
to labor in industries serving global supply chains. Placing these
moves in their historical and cultural context, Sandoval-Cervantes
discovers that migrants' experiences dramatically alter their
conceptions of gender, upsetting their traditional notions of
masculinity and femininity. And some migrants bring their revised
views with them when they return home, influencing their families
and community of origin. Comparing Oaxacans moving within Mexico to
those living along the US West Coast, Sandoval-Cervantes clearly
demonstrates the multiplicity of answers to the question, "Who is a
migrant?"
After the conquest of Mexico, colonial authorities attempted to enforce Christian beliefs among indigenous peoples-a project they envisioned as spiritual warfare.The Invisible War assesses this ...immense but dislocated project by examining all known efforts in Central Mexico to obliterate native devotions of Mesoamerican origin between the 1530s and the late eighteenth century.
The author's innovative interpretation of these efforts is punctuated by three events: the creation of an Inquisition tribunal in Mexico in 1571; the native rebellion of Tehuantepec in 1660; and the emergence of eerily modern strategies for isolating idolaters, teaching Spanish to natives, and obtaining medical proof of sorcery from the 1720s onwards. Rather than depicting native devotions solely from the viewpoint of their colonial codifiers, this book rescues indigenous perspectives on their own beliefs. This is achieved by an analysis of previously unknown or rare ritual texts that circulated in secrecy in Nahua and Zapotec communities through an astute appropriation of European literacy. Tavárez contends that native responses gave rise to a colonial archipelago of faith in which local cosmologies merged insights from Mesoamerican and European beliefs. In the end, idolatry eradication inspired distinct reactions: while Nahua responses focused on epistemological dissent against Christianity, Zapotec strategies privileged confrontations in defense of native cosmologies.
In the Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico's Southern Highland region, three facets of sociocultural life have been interconnected and interactive from colonial times to the present: first, community land as ...a space to live and work; second, a civil-religious system managed by reciprocity and market activity wherein obligations of citizenship, office, and festive sponsorships are met by expenditures of labor-time and money; and third, livelihood. In this book, noted Oaxacan scholar Scott Cook draws on thirty-five years of fieldwork (1965–1990) in the region to present a masterful ethnographic historical account of how nine communities in the Oaxaca Valley have striven to maintain land, livelihood, and civility in the face of transformational and cumulative change across five centuries.Drawing on an extensive database that he accumulated through participant observation, household surveys, interviews, case studies, and archival work in more than twenty Oaxacan communities, Cook documents and explains how peasant-artisan villagers in the Oaxaca Valley have endeavored over centuries to secure and/or defend land, worked and negotiated to subsist and earn a living, and striven to meet expectations and obligations of local citizenship. His findings identify elements and processes that operate across communities or distinguish some from others. They also underscore the fact that landholding is crucial for the sociocultural life of the valley. Without land for agriculture and resource extraction, occupational options are restricted, livelihood is precarious and contingent, and civility is jeopardized.
