Journal of World History

In this recent collection of essays by Latin American history scholars, editor José C. Moya pulls together a comprehensive look at the state of the field while also offering the nonspecialist an extremely valuable tool for understanding the region’s past as well as its construction as a “historical category” of analysis. Ranging from race and slavery to economics and sexuality, and from colonial ethnography to twentieth-century subaltern studies, each chapter offers a comprehensive view of the most recent literature in their specific area. The compilation boasts contributions from both seasoned experts and new voices in the field, making it an extremely useful tool for both the scholar of Latin America and the global history specialist.

With the introduction, Moya attempts to answer the question of why Latin America, which has “continued to have much stronger historical parallels to the West than the rest of the world,” persists as a region classified as non-Western (p. 14). The question, and the answers he offers, should resonate with anyone who grapples with the dyads of Western/non-Western, developed/developing, or First/Third World. For those who teach global or world history, explaining to students both the geography and scholarly meanings of the “West” can be filled with potential pitfalls. Through the context of Latin America Moya offers a deconstruction of this term that challenges the placement of the bottom half of the Western Hemisphere outside of this category. Using copious empirical data, Moya argues not only that Latin America is tied together cohesively through what he calls its “Iberian cultural imprint,” but also that definitions of the “West” need to similarly [End Page 447] be interrogated and should be seen as “inconsistent, malleable, and fluctuating but ultimately meaningful” (pp. 7, 16).

However, he misses an ideal moment to interrogate the place of the Caribbean in the context of this discussion of terminology and “invention.” As Marshall Eakin argues, most definitions of the region “tend to leave out or avoid those areas of the Americas that make definitions the most problematic and interesting: most of the islands of the Caribbean . . . Belize, the Guianas, and regions of ‘overlap’ . . . It is precisely in these ‘transition zones’ that the definition of Latin America . . . becomes the most challenging.”¹ While Eakin offers what he calls an “entry and exit” approach in which scholars could define when and under what circumstances these transition zones become part of Latin America, Peter Winn argues for a more straightforward “view from the South” as a way to understand how the Americas have “shared a common historical experience.”² In fact, several essays in the collection point to the need of including the Caribbean, particularly those that touch on slavery, African descendent populations, sexuality, family, medicine, and labor. The frequent reliance on the work of Sydney Mintz throughout the collection only reinforces the need for a more expansive construct of the region. Mintz’s foundational work on plantation life and culture as well as his arguments for seeing the circum-Caribbean as a sociocultural area stress the ties that bound and continue to bind the region despite linguistic differences in colonization. Touching upon the scholarly marginalization of the Caribbean in the introduction would have strengthened what is already a stellar collection and conceptualization of the history of the Americas.

Scholars seeking an understanding of the colonial period in the Americas should look closely at the first four chapters, which underscore the patterns of Iberian settlement and, as Moya terms it, the “invention” of Latin America (p. 17). Kevin Terraciano and Lisa Sousa address thoroughly the extensive historiography of New Spain (Mexico and Central America), while Lyman L. Johnson and Susan M. Socolow focus on the past twenty years of scholarship on colonial South America. Both essays attend to the continuities and divergences between Latin American and U.S. scholarship, a thread that continues through the remaining selections. While the research on New Spain is [End Page 448] considerably larger corpus of work, each contribution demonstrates that scholars are producing innovative new work in the areas of religion, rebellion, and gender. Asunción Lavrin expands on the theme of gender in the colonial period by tracing the centrality of mestizaje—and not just as the sex act—throughout the colonial period. She points to several areas in which new research has virtually exploded, demonstrating the importance of gender to our understanding of the period. Treated as a separate case, Brazil demonstrates the importance of blurring the lines between colonial and postindependence periods. Stuart B. Schwartz carefully navigates a large body of scholarship to demonstrate recent innovative work in the areas of indigenous populations, Afro-Brazilian life and culture, governance, and social and cultural realities in the preindependence period. Most significantly, he points to the recent trend of moving away from “modern analytical models and interpretations” to approaches that attend more carefully to the lived realities of historical subjects.

In the subsequent selection, Jeremy Adelman examines the literature on independence across the region. However, as Schwartz and others in the collection point out, the strict delineation between the colonial and nation-building eras has a tendency to obfuscate the continuities between the two, creating false dichotomies within the larger themes of gender, family, and identity. Nonetheless, Adelman admirably charts the literature from the narratives of charismatic, if flawed, revolutionary leaders like Jose Martí, through to more recent evaluations that characterize the independence movements as a series of revolutions “that failed, or never [were]” (p. 163).

The next three selections, as well as a significant portion of the remaining chapters, are devoted to understanding the contours of slavery and its impact on postcolonial slave societies. In assessing the major themes in recent scholarship on slavery in Brazil, João José Reis and Herbert S. Klein argue for the significant contributions of new quantitative data to understandings of not just plantation life and culture, but the history of Brazil and other Afro-American societies. Implicit here again are the linkages with the entire Caribbean, as Kim D. Butler and Aline Helg highlight in their look at race in postcolonial Afro-Latin America. The specter of the Haitian Revolution looms large here (as it does in other chapters), yet the framework of the collection limits the authors’ abilities to truly stretch beyond what Moya terms the “Iberian cultural imprint.” Still, Butler and Helg offer a valuable discussion of the scholarship that interrogates the continuously “dynamic construct” of race in postabolition societies. Building on this discussion of “new” national identities, Barbara Weinstein looks at the “rapidly expanding [End Page 449] historiography” on postcolonial Brazil. Moving beyond race to the many issues facing a young nation, Weinstein focuses on recent work that falls within two major trends: the linguistic and cultural turns, and “everyday forms of state formation.” Significantly, Weinstein concludes by arguing for more scholarship that looks to “new social initiatives,” particularly among subaltern groups, that encourages historians to “rethink the past” (p. 245).

Finally, the collection addresses several of the most prominent subfields concerned with the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America: indigenous populations, rural life, labor, gender and sexuality, family, economy, disease and medicine, and religion. Scholars specializing in these subfields in a global or comparative context will be particularly well served by these contributions as they survey the recent literature in a wholly comprehensive manner. Probing concepts of identity and citizenship, Florencia E. Mallon and Donna J. Guy concentrate on the balance between asserting autonomous and “authentic” forms of being and fighting for equal inclusion in state structures. While Mallon’s focus on indigenous populations grapples with a more varied experience across the region, she argues for the “painful contradiction” that Guy also highlights in her discussion of gender. More important, Guy points out that oppression of women—and for that matter any minority group—“has impeded not only [their] advancement,” but “also that of the larger society” (p. 369). In the end, new and innovative scholarship can help us to understand these social and structural processes of exclusion and attend to their eradication.

James P. Brennan addresses these structural processes directly in his historiography of labor, as do Eric Van Young in his treatment of rural histories, and John H. Coatsworth and William R. Summerhill in their discussion of the “new economic” history. Focusing on the ways in which Latin America’s varied settlement and the development of capitalism have affected individuals’ abilities to contribute to the economy, each essay argues for an invigoration of existing conceptual frameworks. For Van Young, the region’s dependence on land touched nearly everyone, necessitating approaches to rural history that regardless of the “fashions of scholarly investigation” continue to focus aggressively on “life on the land.” Conversely, Brennan seeks to interrogate the core meaning of labor “beyond the issues of identity and political culture that now dominate the landscape” (p. 360). While he believes the field should be enlivened by approaches from disciplines like economics and law, it should remain focused on “nothing more and nothing less than the many industrial worlds of modern Latin America” (p. 360). In the [End Page 450] realm of economic history, Coastworth and Summerhill applaud new approaches that employ vigorous models, seek out new data sources and implement sophisticated statistical techniques, yet they also implore scholars to look beyond the most studied regions and topics, singling out education as one of the most necessary arenas for growth.

Rounding out the collection, Diego Armus and Adrián López Denis focus on disease, medicine, and death, and Reinaldo L. Roman and Pamela Voekel address the key concerns in the historiography of popular religion. Both chapters demand that readers question embedded ideas of physical and spiritual bodies and at the same time challenge accepted concepts that both the diseased body and formal religion died out with the modern age.

In sum, this compilation will serve as a valuable addition to scholars already working on Latin America and the Caribbean, and those who seek to know more for either global or thematic interests. The relative exclusion of the circum-Caribbean notwithstanding, future historiographies on this region or others would do well to model this collection’s breadth of scope and innovative reconceptualizing of regional categories and ideas of “modernity.”