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Victoria Bricker shows that "history" sometimes rests on mythological foundations and that "myth" can contain valid historical information. Her book, which is a highly original critique of postconquest historiography about the Maya, challenges major assumptions about the relationship between myth and history implicit in structuralist interpretations. The focus of the book is ethnic conflict, a theme that pervades Maya folklore and is also well documented historically. The book begins with the Spanish conquest of the Maya. In chapters on the postconquest history of the Maya, five ethnic conflicts are treated in depth: the Cancuc revolt of 1712, the Quisteil uprising of 1761, the Totonicapan r...
Violent class struggles and ethnic conflict mark much of the history of Latin America, continuing in some regions even today. Perhaps the worst and most prolonged of these conflicts was the guerra de las castas or ?Caste War,? an Indian rebellion that tore apart the Yucatan Peninsula for much of the nineteenth century (1847?1903). The struggle was not only ethnic, pitting indigenous peoples against a Hispanic or Hispanicized ruling class, but also economic, involving attacks by rural campesinos on plantation owners, merchants, overseers, and townspeople. The rebels met with sporadic and limited success but still managed at times to remove whole portions of the Yucatan Peninsula from state control. ø Don E. Dumond?s work is the anticipated complete history of the Caste War. Drawing on primary sources, he presents the first comprehensive description of this turbulent century of conflict in Yucatan and sets forth a carefully argued analysis of the reasons and broader social, political, and economic processes underlying the struggle.
A full-color exploration of the encoded ceiling at the Temple of Dendera • Draws on more than 5,000 high-resolution photographs taken by the author to reconstruct the complete ceiling of the portico of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera • Reveals in detail how each panel represents celestial cycles of time from the Precession of the Equinoxes to the annual cycles of life found along the Nile • Explains each panel’s astronomical significance from the ancient Egyptian perspective as well as examining the myths, gods, and goddesses depicted Egypt is famous for its pyramids, the Sphinx, the temples at Luxor, and the Valley of the Kings, but 40 miles north of Luxor lies the best-preserved te...
This is the classic account of one of the most dramatic episodes in Mexican history--the revolt of the Maya Indians of Yucatán against their white and mestizo oppressors that began in 1847. Within a year, the Maya rebels had almost succeeded in driving their oppressors from the peninsula; by 1855, when the major battles ended, the war had killed or put to flight almost half of the population of Yucatán. A new religion built around a Speaking Cross supported their independence for over fifty years, and that religion survived the eventual Maya defeat and continues today. This revised edition is based on further research in the archives and in the field, and draws on the research by a new gen...
Recounts six infamous crimes committed in nineteenth-century Mexico City and the underworld they were used to create. Examining judicial records, newspapers, government documents, and travel accounts, the author uncovers the truth behind some of nineteenth-century Mexico's most notorious criminals, including the serial killer "El Chalequero."
Synthesizing a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán offers a fresh study of the complex and violent history of Mexico's easternmost Gulf Coast region that expands and revises perceptions of liberal as well as Second Empire politics from 1855 to 1876.
This book explores the role played by artists and intellectuals who constructed and disseminated various competing images of national identity which polarized Spanish society prior to the Civil War. The convergence of modern and essentialist discourses and practices, especially in literature and poetry, in what is conventionally called in Spanish letters "The Generation of '27", created fissures between competing views of aesthetics and ideology that cut across political affiliation. Silvina Schammah exposes the paradoxes facing Madrid's cultural vanguards, as they were torn by their ambition for universality, cosmopolitanism and transcendence on the one hand and by the centripetal forces of nationalistic ideologies on the other. Taking upon themselves roles to become the disseminators and populizers of radical positions and world-views first elaborated and conducted by the young urban intelligentsia, their proposed aim of incorporating diverse identities embedded in different cultural constructions and discourse was to have very real and tragic consequences as political and intellectual lines polarized in the years prior to the Spanish Civil War.
2004 – Harvey L. Johnson Award – Southwest Council of Latin American Studies In the tumultuous decades following Mexico's independence from Spain, religion provided a unifying force among the Mexican people, who otherwise varied greatly in ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Accordingly, religion and the popular cultures surrounding it form the lens through which Terry Rugeley focuses this cultural history of southeast Mexico from independence (1821) to the rise of the dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1876. Drawing on a wealth of previously unused archival material, Rugeley vividly reconstructs the folklore, beliefs, attitudes, and cultural practices of the Maya and Hispanic peoples of the Yuc...
The essays in this collection illuminate both the processes of change and the negative reactions that they frequently elicited Yucatan has been called “a world apart”—cut off from the rest of Mexico by geography and culture. Yet, despite its peripheral location, the region experienced substantial change in the decades after independence. As elsewhere in Mexico, apostles of modernization introduced policies intended to remold Yucatan in the image of the advanced nations of the day. Indeed, modernizing change began in the late colonial era and continued throughout the 19th century as traditional patterns of land tenure were altered and efforts were made to divest the Catholic Church of i...