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The Woman on the Windowsill
A true story of violence and punishment that illuminates a transformative moment in Guatemalan history On the morning of July 1, 1800, a surveyor and mapmaker named Cayetano Díaz opened the window of his study in Guatemala City to find a horrific sight: a pair of severed breasts. Offering a meticulously researched and evocative account of the quest to find the perpetrator and understand the motives behind such a brutal act, this volume pinpoints the sensational crime as a watershed moment in Guatemalan history that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order. Sylvia Sellers-García reveals how this bizarre and macabre event spurred an increased attention to crime that resulted in more forceful policing and reflected important policy decisions not only in Guatemala but across Latin America. This fascinating book is both an engaging criminal case study and a broader consideration of the forces shaping Guatemala City at the brink of the modern era.
Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire's Periphery
The Spanish Empire is famous for being, at its height, the realm upon which "the sun never set." It stretched from the Philippines to Europe by way of the Americas. And yet we know relatively little about how Spain managed to move that crucial currency of governance—paper—over such enormous distances. Moreover, we know even less about how those distances were perceived and understood by people living in the empire. This book takes up these unknowns and proposes that by examining how documents operated in the Spanish empire, we can better understand how the empire was built and, most importantly, how knowledge was created. The author argues that even in such a vast realm, knowledge was bu...
The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds
The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds is the first major historical study of the creation and development of the prison system in Peru. Carlos Aguirre examines the evolution of prisons for male criminals in Lima from the conception—in the early 1850s—of the initial plans to build penitentiaries through the early-twentieth-century prison reforms undertaken as part of President Augusto Leguia’s attempts to modernize and expand the Peruvian state. Aguirre reconstructs the social, cultural, and doctrinal influences that determined how lawbreakers were treated, how programs of prison reform fared, and how inmates experienced incarceration. He argues that the Peruvian prisons were primarily...
Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context
Central America has a long history as a site of cultural and political exchange, from Mayan and Nahua trade networks to the effects of Spanish imperialism, capitalism, and globalization. In Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context, instructors will find practical, interdisciplinary, and innovative pedagogical approaches to the cultures of Central America that are adaptable to various fields of study. The essays map out classroom lessons that encourage students to relate writings and films to their own experience of global interconnectedness and to read critically the history that binds Central America to the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean. In the context of debates ...
El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace
El Salvador's civil war, which left at least 75,000 people dead and displaced more than a million, ended in 1992. The accord between the government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) has been lauded as a model post-Cold War peace agreement. But after the conflict stopped, crime rates shot up. The number of murder victims surpassed wartime death tolls. Those who once feared the police and the state became frustrated by their lack of action. Peace was not what Salvadorans had hoped it would be. Citizens began saying to each other, "It's worse than the war." El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy challenges the pronounce...
Independence in Central America and Chiapas, 1770–1823
Central America was the only part of the far-reaching Spanish Empire in continental America not to experience destructive independence wars in the period between 1810 and 1824. The essays in this volume draw on new historical research to explain why, and to delve into what did happen during the independence period in Central America and Chiapas. The contributors, distinguished scholars from Central America, North America, and Europe, consider themes of power, rebellion, sovereignty, and resistance throughout the Kingdom of Guatemala beginning in the late eighteenth century and ending with independence from Spain and the debate surrounding the decision to join the Mexican Empire. Their work r...
The Oxford Handbook of Central American History
Interpreting the History of a Region in Crisis / Robert H. Holden -- Land and Climate: Natural Constraints and Socio-Environmental Transformations / Anthony Goebel McDermott -- Regaining Ground: Indigenous Populations and Territories / Peter H. Herlihy, Matthew L. Fahrenbruch, Taylor A. Tappan -- The Ancient Civilizations / William R. Fowler -- Marginalization, Assimilation, and Resurgence: The Indigenous Peoples since Independence / Wolfgang Gabbert -- The Spanish Conquest? / Laura E. Matthew -- Spanish Colonial Rule / Stephen Webre -- The Kingdom of Guatemala as a Cultural Crossroads / Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara -- From Kingdom to Republics, 1808-1840 / Aaron Pollack -- The Political Econo...
Mere Equals
In Mere Equals, Lucia McMahon narrates a story about how a generation of young women who enjoyed access to new educational opportunities made sense of their individual and social identities in an American nation marked by stark political inequality between the sexes. McMahon’s archival research into the private documents of middling and well-to-do Americans in northern states illuminates educated women’s experiences with particular life stages and relationship arcs: friendship, family, courtship, marriage, and motherhood. In their personal and social relationships, educated women attempted to live as the "mere equals" of men. Their often frustrated efforts reveal how early national Ameri...
Intonations
Intonations tells the story of how Angola's urban residents in the late colonial period (roughly 1945-74) used music to talk back to their colonial oppressors and, more importantly, to define what it meant to be Angolan and what they hoped to gain from independence. A compilation of Angolan music is included in CD format. Marissa J. Moorman presents a social and cultural history of the relationship between Angolan culture and politics. She argues that it was in and through popular urban music, produced mainly in the musseques (urban shantytowns) of the capital city, Luanda, that Angolans forged the nation and developed expectations about nationalism. Through careful archival work and extensi...
Labor and Love in Guatemala
Labor and Love in Guatemala re-envisions the histories of labor and ethnic formation in Spanish America. Taking cues from gender studies and the "new" cultural history, the book transforms perspectives on the major social trends that emerged across Spain's American colonies: populations from three continents mingled; native people and Africans became increasingly hispanized; slavery and other forms of labor coercion receded. Komisaruk's analysis shows how these developments were rooted in gendered structures of work, migration, family, and reproduction. The engrossing narrative reconstructs Afro-Guatemalan family histories through slavery and freedom, and tells stories of native working women and men based on their own words. The book takes us into the heart of sweeping historical processes as it depicts the migrations that linked countryside to city, the sweat and filth of domestic labor, the rise of female-headed households, and love as it was actually practiced—amidst remarkable permissiveness by both individuals and the state.
