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The Mexico Reader is a vivid introduction to muchos Méxicos—the many Mexicos, or the many varied histories and cultures that comprise contemporary Mexico. Unparalleled in scope and written for the traveler, student, and expert alike, the collection offers a comprehensive guide to the history and culture of Mexico—including its difficult, uneven modernization; the ways the country has been profoundly shaped not only by Mexicans but also by those outside its borders; and the extraordinary economic, political, and ideological power of the Roman Catholic Church. The book looks at what underlies the chronic instability, violence, and economic turmoil that have characterized periods of Mexico...
This book, designed and written on a grand scale, is about the quest over three centuries of Spaniards born in the New World to define their 'American' identity.
This is the first and only comprehensive work to deal with a relatively unknown facet of Mexican social and religious history, the debates over the historicity of the Guadalupe apparitions and the historical existence of Juan Diego.
"A revised and expanded edition of this seminal history of the origins of the Guadalupe apparitions"--Provided by publisher.
On December 12, 1794, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier preached a sermon in Mexico City that led to his arrest by the Inquisition. He was exiled to Spain--only to escape and spend ten years traveling throughout Europe, as none other than a French priest. So began the grand adventure of Fray Servando's life, and of this gripping memoir. Here is an invitation hard for any reader to resist: a glimpse of the European "Age of Enlightenment" through the eyes of a fugitive Mexican friar. In this memoir, one sees a portrait of manners and morals that is a far cry from the "civilized" spirit that the Empire wanted to impose on its Colonies. This book takes a look at history from an upside down perspectiv...
Focusing on a period neglected by scholars, Higgins reconstructs how during the colonial period criollos - individuals identified as being of Spanish descent born in America - elaborated a body of knowledge, an "archive," in order to establish their intellectual autonomy within the Spanish colonial administrative structures." "This book opens up an important area of research that will be of interest to scholars and students of Spanish American colonial literature and history."--BOOK JACKET.
This book discusses responses to the challenges faced by two different Iberian imperial systems in their struggle to sustain territorial integrity and economic interests in the face of international competition. During a so-called period of ‘Enlightened Despotism’, absolutist governments in Spain and Portugal sought to harness Enlightenment ideas to their policies of reform. The Iberian Enlightenment, however, did not rely exclusively on government sponsorship – it had existing foundations in sixteenth-century Spanish humanism and subsequent attempts at reform, and educated individuals in major cities frequently operated independently of government. The Enlightenment contributed greatly to the availability of potential political solutions to the urgent matter of political status, in the attempt to transform absolutist governments into constitutional systems and drawing in the process on the structures of medieval foundations, contemporary revolutions or less radical constitutional monarchies, or a combination of sources more closely aligned with Ibero-American realities.
In Mexico, as elsewhere, the national space, that network of places where the people interact with state institutions, is constantly changing. How it does so, how it develops, is a historical process-a process that Claudio Lomnitz exposes and investigates in this book, which develops a distinct view of the cultural politics of nation building in Mexico. Lomnitz highlights the varied, evolving, and often conflicting efforts that have been made by Mexicans over the past two centuries to imagine, organize, represent, and know their country, its relations with the wider world, and its internal differences and inequalities. Firmly based on particulars and committed to the specificity of such thin...
This volume addresses the political traditions that flourished in regions traditionally neglected by Atlantic history, but which are nevertheless indispensable for a comprehensive interpretation of political modernity. The history of political liberty simply cannot be reconstructed without taking into account the role of the Atlantic as a space for the circulation of ideas. The different chapters trace the origins of the Atlantic notions of liberty in the crisis of the colonial world, in the diverse processes that led to independence from the metropolis, and in the subsequent efforts to build a constitutional order. The book takes an innovative approach by putting together experiences of the English, Portuguese, and Spanish Atlantic and by dealing with political ideas as discursive and socially embedded practices.