Ecuador virus cases plunged 37% in August, the most in South America after Brazil (40%), according to the WHO.… Read More Flattening the Curve: Ecuador and Brazil Pull Ahead in August
Indigenous elites stood at the intersection of political subjugation and cultural survival in Spanish and Portuguese America.… Read More Survival and Subjugation in Colonial Latin America
In 1503, the Spanish monarchy issued its first decree for the resettlement of indigenous groups in the Caribbean so that they would “live together” and … Read More Moving to the Suburbs: Reducciones in Recent Latin American Historiography
Charles Walker left few stones unturned in The Tupac Amaru Rebellion, an impressive analysis of Spain’s largest colonial rebellion. This essay briefly examines two original arguments and two secondary claims made by Walker that help shape our understanding of an uprising that ultimately reached levels of total violence rarely seen in human history. Walker’s “seemingly… Read More The Tupac Amaru Rebellion: Charles Walker
(Nov. 28, 2007) For anyone interested in the state of South America’s regional relations, this week was full of news. Argentina and Uruguay appear to have given up on political dialogue and have closed their borders until The Hague gives them a reply sometime in the next 2 years, Venezuela froze ties with Colombia and… Read More Is South America Sliding Into Chaos Or Is It Just Business As Usual?
(Nov. 24, 2007) Argentina’s President Elect Cristina Kirchner distanced herself from the political agenda of Venezuela President Chávez on Monday by proposing a Mercosur-Israel free trade agreement (FTA) during her visit to Brazil. The proposal is a diplomatic counter punch to Venezuela’s open support for Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the OPEC meeting in Saudi… Read More Argentina Breaks With Venezuela Over Free Trade And Middle East
Guyana Foreign Minister Rudolph Insanally announced a temporary truce on Wednesday after Venezuela’s military blew up two Guyanese mining boats on a river near the international border. The attack took place on Nov. 15th and was part of a three day military operation, called Tepuy, to remove illegal miners from the Cuyuni River basin. Although… Read More South American Border Wars Slow Regional Integration
Citation Larson, Brooke. Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s Oppressed but Not Defeated, on the struggles of Aymara and Quechua peasants in the highlands and western valleys of the Bolivian Andes, focuses on the creation of peasant unions after the 1952 revolution by the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario. Her book is a concise collection of essays written in collaboration with Bolivian peasant… Read More Oppressed But Not Defeated: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
Peter Bakewell’s Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545-1650 (1984) looks at the changing systems of labor and production used at the silver mines of Potosí in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Bakewell questions the long-held assumption that the mines were overwhelmingly worked by forced laborers, arguing instead that declining… Read More Miners of the Red Mountain: Peter Bakewell
Stern, Steve J. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Steve Stern’s Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 centers on colonial Huamanga, a strategic military and economic region along the route between Lima and Potosí. It was… Read More Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Steve Stern
Jürgen Golte’s Repartos y Rebeliones, published in German in 1977 and translated into Spanish by Carlos Degregori in 1980, analyzes the implementation, evolution, and resistance to the repartimiento de efectos, put in place by Spain’s Bourbon reformers in the eighteenth century.[1] Golte sought to revise earlier studies that overlooked the role of the repartos, a… Read More Repartos y Rebeliones: Jürgen Golte
John Murra developed his now-famous theory of the Andean “vertical archipelago” in Formaciones Económicas y Políticas del Mundo Andino (1975, trans. Economic Organization of the Inka State, 1980), which grew out of his research in the Peruvian highlands between 1958 and 1973. Murra argued that pre-Columbian societies in the Andes sought to control a range of ecological zones… Read More Economic Organization of the Inka State: John Murra
James Lockhart’s Spanish Peru (1968) looks at the first three decades of Spanish conquest in the colonial Andes. One of the first Latin American historians to mine notarial records as a window into social life in the sixteenth century, Lockhart provides a survey of Peru’s major socioeconomic and demographic categories via a series of life… Read More Spanish Peru, 1532-1560: James Lockhart
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