In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries northwestern Mexico was the scene of ongoing conflict among three distinct social groups—Indians, religious orders of priests, and settlers. Priests hoped ...to pacify Indians, who in turn resisted the missionary clergy. Settlers, who often encountered opposition from priests, sought to dominate Indians, take over their land, and, when convenient, exploit them as servants and laborers. Indians struggled to maintain control of their traditional lands and their cultures and persevere in their ancient enmities with competing peoples, with whom they were often at war. The missionaries faced conflicts within their own orders, between orders, and between the orders and secular clergy. Some settlers championed Indian rights against the clergy, while others viewed Indians as ongoing impediments to economic development and viewed the priests as obstructionists. In this study, Yetman, distinguished scholar of Sonoran history and culture, examines seven separate instances of such conflict, each of which reveals a different perspective on this complicated world. Based on extensive archival research, Yetman's account shows how the settlers, due to their persistence in these conflicts, emerged triumphant, with the Jesuits disappearing from the scene and Indians pushed into the background.
To understand contemporary Mexico, it is absolutely necessary to examine its level of development and its relationship with the rest of the world. The level of development will, most likely, be ...related to the world system network, although the concepts are not identical. In Mexico and Mexico City in the World Economy, the authors aim to determine Mexico's level of development and how Mexico fits into the world system.
Through their research, the authors provide outcomes that will develop a more refined world systems approach. The book features cluster analyses of Mexican economic development levels; selected case studies including specific spatial analyses and maps of trends in Mexico; a systematic theoretic framework encompassing world, national, and regional levels; and recent data presented through maps, tables, charts, and statistical summaries. The book will prove to be useful and practical for researchers, academics, and others interested in Mexico and its international linkages.
Why have Latin American democracies proven unable to confront the structural inequalities that cripple their economies and stymie social mobility? Brian Palmer-Rubin contends that we may lay the ...blame on these countries’ systems of interest representation, which exhibit “biased pluralism,” a system in which the demands of organizations representing economic elites—especially large corporations—predominate. A more inclusive model of representation would not only require a more encompassing and empowered set of institutions to represent workers, but would also feature spaces for non-eliteproducers—such as farmers and small-business owners to have a say in sectoral economic policies. With analysis drawing on over 100 interviews, an original survey, and official government data, this book focuses on such organizations and develops an account of biased pluralism in developing countries typified by the centrality of patronage—discretionarily allocated state benefits. Rather than serving as conduits for demand-making about development models, political parties and interest organizations often broker state subsidies or social programs, augmenting the short-term income of beneficiaries, but doing little to improve their long-term economic prospects. When organizations become diverted into patronage politics, the economic demands of the masses go unheard in the policies that most affect their lives, and along the way, their economic interests go unrepresented.
By contextualizing classes and their kinship behavior within the overall political economy, Crafting Prehispanic Maya Kinship provides an example of how archaeology can help to explain the formation ...of disparate classes and kinship patterns within an ancient state-level society.Bradley E. Ensor provides a new theoretical contribution to Maya ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological research. Rather than operating solely as a symbolic order unobservable to archaeologists, kinship, according to Ensor, forms concrete social relations that structure daily life and can be reflected in the material remains of a society. Ensor argues that the use of cross-culturally identified and confirmed material indicators of postmarital residence and descent group organization enable archaeologists-those with the most direct material evidence on prehispanic Maya social organization-to overturn a traditional reliance on competing and problematic ethnohistorical models. Using recent data from an arch aeological project within the Chontalpa Maya region of Tabasco, Mexico, Ensor illustrates how archaeologists can interpret and explain the diversity of kinship behavior and its influence on gender within any given Maya social formation.
Borderlands Histories Carpenter, John Philip; Pailes, Matthew
2022, 2022-07-31
eBook
What are the connections between past and present peoples in the U.S. Southwest and Northwest Mexico? How were the ancient societies that occupied this landscape interconnected? Contributors leverage ...diverse source materials rooted in classic ethnography, oral tradition, and historical documents to offer novel answers to these questions. Running throughout the discussions is a metanarrative that reflects the tensions between disciplines such as anthropology and history and the rapidly evolving dynamic between scholars and the Indigenous subjects of past and present research. With chapters written by scholars from the U.S. and Mexico, including Indigenous coauthors, Borderlands Histories offers diverse perspectives and illustrates the range of methods and interpretive approaches employed by some of the most respected and experienced names in the field of borderlands archaeology today.
This book presents a new explanation of the rise, development and demise of social movements and cycles of protest in autocracies; the conditions under which protest becomes rebellion; and the impact ...of protest and rebellion on democratization. Focusing on poor indigenous villages in Mexico's authoritarian regime, the book shows that the spread of US Protestant missionaries and the competition for indigenous souls motivated the Catholic Church to become a major promoter of indigenous movements for land redistribution and indigenous rights. The book explains why the outbreak of local rebellions, the transformation of indigenous claims for land into demands for ethnic autonomy and self-determination, and the threat of a generalized social uprising motivated national elites to democratize. Drawing on an original dataset of indigenous collective action and on extensive fieldwork, the empirical analysis of the book combines quantitative evidence with case studies and life histories.
Often translated as "revolt," apronunciamientowas a formal, written protest, typically drafted as a list of grievances or demands, that could result in an armed rebellion. This common ...nineteenth-century Hispano-Mexican extraconstitutional practice was used by soldiers and civilians to forcefully lobby, negotiate, or petition for political change. Although the majority of these petitions failed to achieve their aims, many leading political changes in nineteenth-century Mexico were caused or provoked by one of the more than fifteen hundred pronunciamientos filed between 1821 and 1876.
The first of three volumes on the phenomenon of the pronunciamiento, this collection brings together leading scholars to investigate the origins of these forceful petitions. From both a regional and a national perspective, the essays examine specific pronunciamientos, such as the Plan of Iguala, and explore the contexts that gave rise to the use of the pronunciamiento as a catalyst for change.Forceful Negotiationsoffers a better understanding of the civil conflicts that erupted with remarkable and tragic consistency following the achievement of independence, as well as of the ways in which Mexican political culture legitimized the threat of armed rebellion as a means of effecting political change during this turbulent period.
From Christopher Columbus to "first anthropologist" Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers, conquistadors, clerics, scientists, and travelers wrote about the "Indian" ...dances they encountered throughout the New World. This was especially true of Spanish missionaries who intensively studied and documented native dances in an attempt to identify and eradicate the "idolatrous" behaviors of the Aztec, the largest indigenous empire in Mesoamerica at the time of its European discovery.
Dancing the New Worldtraces the transformation of the Aztec empire into a Spanish colony through written and visual representations of dance in colonial discourse-the vast constellation of chronicles, histories, letters, and travel books by Europeans in and about the New World. Scolieri analyzes how the chroniclers used the Indian dancing body to represent their own experiences of wonder and terror in the New World, as well as to justify, lament, and/or deny their role in its political, spiritual, and physical conquest. He also reveals that Spaniards and Aztecs shared an understanding that dance played an important role in the formation, maintenance, and representation of imperial power, and describes how Spaniards compelled Indians to perform dances that dramatized their own conquest, thereby transforming them into colonial subjects. Scolieri's pathfinding analysis of the vast colonial "dance archive" conclusively demonstrates that dance played a crucial role in one of the defining moments in modern history-the European colonization of the Americas.
Mexico and the United States exist in a symbiotic relationship: Mexico frequently provides the United States with cheap labor, illegal goods, and, for criminal offenders, a refuge from the law. In ...turn, the U.S. offers Mexican laborers the American dream: the possibility of a better livelihood through hard work. To supply each other's demands, Americans and Mexicans have to cross their shared border from both sides. Despite this relationship, U.S. immigration reform debates tend to be security-focused and center on the idea of menacing Mexicans heading north to steal abundant American resources. Further, Congress tends to approach reform unilaterally, without engaging with Mexico or other feeder countries, and, disturbingly, without acknowledging problematic southern crossings that Americans routinely make into Mexico. In Run for the Border, Steven W. Bender offers a framework for a more comprehensive border policy through a historical analysis of border crossings, both Mexico to U.S. and U.S. to Mexico. In contrast to recent reform proposals, this book urges reform as the product of negotiation and implementation by cross-border accord; reform that honors the shared economic and cultural legacy of the U.S. and Mexico. Covering everything from the history of Anglo crossings into Mexico to escape law authorities, to vice tourism and retirement in Mexico, to today's focus on Mexican border-crossing immigrants and drug traffickers, Bender takes lessons from the past 150 years to argue for more explicit and compassionate cross-border cooperation. Steeped in several disciplines, Run for the Border is a blend of historical, cultural, and legal perspectives, as well as those from literature and cinema, that reflect Bender's cultural background and legal expertise.
The Roots of Conservatism is the first attempt to ask why over the past two centuries so many Mexican peasants have opted to ally with conservative groups rather than their radical counterparts. ...Blending socioeconomic history, cultural analysis, and political narrative, Smith's study begins with the late Bourbon period and moves through the early republic, the mid-nineteenth- century Reforma, the Porfiriato, and the Revolution, when the Mixtecs rejected Zapatista offers of land distribution, ending with the armed religious uprising known as the "last Cristiada, " a desperate Cold War bid to rid the region of impious "communist" governance. In recounting this long tradition of regional conservatism, Smith emphasizes the influence of religious belief, church ritual, and lay-clerical relations both on social relations and on political affiliation. He posits that many Mexican peasants embraced provincial conservatism, a variant of elite or metropolitan conservatism, which not only comprised ideas on property, hierarchy, and the state, but also the overwhelming import of the church to maintaining this system.
