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The Mexican Mission presents the most complex social history of the mission enterprise in sixteenth-century Mexico to date. Despite the crippling illness and socio-political upheaval that accompanied the Spanish conquest, the book finds that indigenous communities used the mission as a vehicle to reassert and reconstruct local sovereignty.

Examines the religious beliefs and practices of a generation of Catholics who came of age in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. It centers on Jose de Leon Toral, who killed revolutionary leader Alvaro Obregon to combat anticlerical laws and bring on a millenarian vision of the Kingdom of Christ.

An essential text for those interested in the history of Native Americans and Mexico. It offers a novel approach to understanding cross-cultural encounters and colonialism in the early modern period, combining environmental history with Spanish and native-language sources to explain socioeconomic and cultural continuities.

This book analyzes the extent and forms of violence in one of the most significant indigenous rural revolts in nineteenth-century Latin America. Combining historical, anthropological, and sociological research, it shows how violence played a role in the establishment and maintenance of order and leadership within the contending parties.

Islanders and Empire is a pioneering and comprehensive examination of the role smuggling played in the economic and socio-political transformation of Hispaniola from the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries that will interest students and scholars of the Caribbean, colonial Latin American, and the Atlantic World.

Contrary to claims that socialism opposed the family unit, Rachel Hynson argues that the revolutionary Cuban government engaged in social engineering to redefine the nuclear family and organize citizens to serve the state. Drawing on Cuban newspapers and periodicals, government documents and speeches, long-overlooked laws, and oral histories, Hynson reveals that by 1961, and increasingly throughout this decade, revolutionary citizenship was earned through labor. While men were to work outside the home in state-approved jobs, women found their citizenship tied to affording the state control over their reproduction and sexual labor. Through all four campaigns examined in this book - the projects to control women's reproduction, promote marriage, end prostitution, and compel men into state-sanctioned employment - Hynson shows that the state's progression toward authoritarianism and its attendant monopolization of morality were met with resistance and counter-narratives by citizens who so opposed the mandates of these campaigns that Cuban leadership has since reconfigured or effaced these programs from the Revolution's grand narrative.

The great many shrines of New Spain have become long-lived sites of shared devotion and contestation across social groups. They have provided a lasting sense of enchantment, of divine immanence in the present, and a hunger for epiphanies in daily life. This is a story of consolidation and growth during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than one of rise and decline in the face of early stages of modernization. Based on research in a wide array of manuscript and printed primary sources, and informed by recent scholarship in art history, religious studies, anthropology, and history, this is the first comprehensive study of shrines and miraculous images in any part of early modern Latin America.

An analysis of marriage patterns in nineteenth-century Cuba, a society with a large black population the majority of which was held in slavery but which also included considerable numbers of freedmen. Dr Martinez-Alier uses as her main source of evidence the records in Havana of administrative and judicial proceedings of cases in which parents opposed a marriage, of cases involving elopement, and of cases of interracial marriage. Dr Martinez-Alier develops a model of the relation between sexual values and social inequality. She considers the importance of the value of virginity in supporting the hierarchy of Cuban society, based on ascription rather than achievement. As a consequence of the high evaluation of virginity, elopement was often a successful means of overcoming parental dissent to an unequal marriage. However, in cases of interracial elopement, the seduced coloured woman had little chance of redress through marriage. In this battle of the sexes and the races, the free coloured women and men played roles and acquired values which explain why matrifocality became characteristic of black free families.

An examination of silver mining and society in Colonial Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating upon Zacatecas, the centre of the principal silver-mining region. In the first half of the book, the author describes the discovery of the mines, the establishment of the town, its role in the northward advance of the Spanish occupation of Mexico, its administration, and the sources of its supplies of essential food and materials. The remainder of the book is devoted to an analysis of the mining industry of the Zacatecas district. The author discusses techniques, labour and raw materials. He also provides statistics for silver production, suggesting reasons for their fluctuation, and explores sources of capital for the industry. Based on detailed study of archives in both Spain and Mexico, Dr Bakewell is able to provide an entirely new chronology for the development of Zacatecas and the Mexican maining industry up to 1700.

Almost invariably, late-colonial Caracas has been described as a society full of tensions and a colony at odds with the imperial order. This study, in contrast, portrays a colony, which grew, prospered and matured within the confines of Empire. It depicts the late 1700s as the golden age of caraqueno colonial society and suggests that it was no accident that this late renaissance created an environment which bred the self-confident men who led much of Spanish America to independence. The causes of the independence struggle, and the violence, which accompanied it, are considered in the context of the imperial crisis provoked by Napoleon's invasion of Spain. The findings of this study are based on an exceptionally varied array of new data on the economy and society of late eighteenth-century Caracas, of which a collection of 800 wills is the most impressive.

Since its first appearance in Brazil in 1949, Victor Nunes Leal's Coronelismo, Enxada e Voto, here entitled Coronelismo: the Municipality and Representative Government in Brazil, has come to be recognized as a classic analysis of the system that emerges from 'the superimposition of structural forms evolved through the representative process on an inadequate social and economic structure'. The text is here published without any substantial change or addition, according to the author's wish. His insights and approach remain as suggestive as when they first appeared; as Barbosa Lima Sobrinho pointed out in the preface to the second Brazilian edition, the work is not only the analysis of a structure, but the record of that structure and of the arguments about it at a certain time, a record important in itself. Its place in the development of political analysis in Brazil is set out in Alberto Venancio Filho's introduction: 'a divide in the history of political science in Brazil... the first landmark of the study of politics in our Universities'. The work is recognized everywhere as an essential text for the student of that country.

This study is concerned with the forty-year period before 1930, when Argentina experienced rapid economic and social growth broken only by the First World War. The Radical Civic Union appeared in the 1912 elections and in 1916 its leader, Hipolito Yrigoyen, became President. Dr Rock discusses the origins and course of this experiment in representative government, and the distribution of power and political benefits under the new system in the light of the society created by the growth of the primary export economy: how it came about that the established political elite ceded control to the Radicals; whom they represented and towards which groups they directed their attentions. The work also deals with the methods of organization and mobilization used by them in a complex urban environment to develop and uphold their political support. It examines in some detail the class conflicts of the wartime period, the strikes whereby the workers sought to guard against the erosion of their wages by inflation, and the counter-mobilization of elite and middle-class groups, most notably in the bloody 'Tragic Week' of 1919.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Buenos Aires was one of the major commercial entrepots of the Spanish American empire. Chief among the beneficiaries of the new prosperity of the area were the wholesale merchants, a group of men who came to control the commerce of the entire Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata. This study, a contribution to the fields of social history and group biography, looks at the formation of the merchant group, and at the social patterns which assured the merchants' primacy in the economic and social life of the colony. Origin, education, recruitment, group perpetuation and social mobility are treated in depth. The role of women and marriage in recruiting individual merchants into mercantile families and clans is a central issue. Professor Socolow also looks at the merchants' roles in commerce and society, lay religious institutions and local government. A biography of one merchant, Gaspar de Santa Coloma, provides a case study of the multiple roles of a porteno merchant.

In the seventeenth century, Veracruz was the busiest port in the wealthiest colony in the Americas. People and goods from five continents converged in the city, inserting it firmly into the early modern world's largest global networks. Nevertheless, Veracruz never attained the fame or status of other Atlantic ports. Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century is the first English-language, book-length study of early modern Veracruz. Weaving elements of environmental, social, and cultural history, it examines both Veracruz's internal dynamics and its external relationships. Chief among Veracruz's relationships were its close ties within the Caribbean. Emphasizing relationships of small-scale trade and migration between Veracruz and Caribbean cities like Havana, Santo Domingo, and Cartagena, Veracruz and the Caribbean shows how the city's residents - especially its large African and Afro-descended communities - were able to form communities and define identities separate from those available in the Mexican mainland.

"We, the King reveals how ordinary subjects aided and abetted law-making in the Spanish Empire, demonstrating how its policies, racial categories, and society were created from the "bottom up". An important study for scholars of Colonial Latin America, this work reassesses our understandings of kingship, empire, race, and colonialism"--

"Tracing the variety of printed commodities that were circulating in the urban sphere, Agnes Gehbald provides a comprehensive study of print culture in Peru in the decades before Independence. An important volume for those interested in the history of books beyond the European market"--