Handbook of Latin American Studies, Vol. 76: Humanities

Beginning with Number 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year between social sciences and humanities.

The Handbook annotates works on Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the Guianas, Spanish South America, and Brazil, as well as materials covering Latin America as a whole. Most of the subsections are preceded by introductory essays that serve as biannual evaluations of the literature and research underway in specialized areas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Apr 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781477326619

Book preview

ADVISORY BOARD

Roberto González Echevarría, Yale University

Eric Hershberg, American University

Scott Hutson, University of Kentucky

Peter T. Johnson, Princeton University

Franklin Knight, Johns Hopkins University

Susan Ramírez, Texas Christian University

Ben Vinson, III, Case Western Reserve University

ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERS OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Carla Hayden, The Librarian of Congress

Mark Sweeney, Principal Deputy Librarian of Congress

Robin L. Dale, Deputy Librarian, Library Collections and Services Group

Eugene Flanagan, Director, General and International Collections Directorate

Suzanne Schadl, Chief, Latin American, Caribbean, and European Division

REPRESENTATIVE, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

Dawn Durante, Editor in Chief

Kerry Webb, Senior Acquisitions Editor

HANDBOOK EDITORIAL STAFF

Wendy Acosta, Editorial Assistant

Patricia Penon, Library Technician

PRODUCTION SUPPORT

Jeffery Gerhard, Metadata Librarian, Integrated Library System Program Office

HANDBOOK OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES: NO. 76

HUMANITIES

Prepared by a Number of Scholars for the Hispanic Reading Room of the Library of Congress

KATHERINE D. McCANN, Humanities Editor

TRACY NORTH, Social Sciences Editor

2022

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

Austin

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-4773-2279-6

International Standard Serial Number: 0072-9833

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 36-32633

Copyright ©2022 by the University of Texas Press.

All rights reserved.

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions, University of Texas Press,

Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819

First Edition, 2022

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

HUMANITIES

Diana Alvarez-Amell, Seton Hall University, LITERATURE

Félix Ángel, Independent Scholar, Washington DC, ART

José R. Ballesteros, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, LITERATURE

Bradley Benton, North Dakota State University, HISTORY

Célia Bianconi, Boston University, LITERATURE

Amber Brian, The University of Iowa, LITERATURE

John Britton, Francis Marion University, HISTORY

Rogério Budasz, University of California, Riverside, MUSIC

José Cardona-López, Texas A&M International University, LITERATURE

Bridget María Chesterton, Buffalo State, The State University of New York, HISTORY

Matt D. Childs, University of South Carolina, HISTORY

Matthew Crawford, Kent State University, HISTORY

Tiffany D. Creegan Miller, Colby College, LITERATURE

G. Antonio Espinoza, Virginia Commonwealth University, HISTORY

Erin S. Finzer, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, LITERATURE

Raphael E. Folsom, The University of Oklahoma, HISTORY

Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols, Drury University, LITERATURE

Myrna García-Calderón, Syracuse University, LITERATURE

Luis A. González, Indiana University, Bloomington, HISTORY

Isadora Grevan de Carvalho, Rutgers University, LITERATURE

Mark Grover, Brigham Young University, HISTORY

María-Constanza Guzmán, Glendon College, York University, TRANSLATIONS

Michael Huner, Grand Valley State University, HISTORY

Frances Jaeger, Northern Illinois University, LITERATURE

John Koegel, California State University, Fullerton, MUSIC

Erick D. Langer, Georgetown University, HISTORY

Alfred E. Lemmon, Historic New Orleans Collection, MUSIC

Peter S. Linder, New Mexico Highlands University, HISTORY

Daniel Livesay, Claremont McKenna College, HISTORY

Ryan Long, University of Maryland, LITERATURE

M. Angélica Guimarães Lopes, Professor Emerita, University of South Carolina, LITERATURE

Laura R. Loustau, Chapman University, LITERATURE

Mary Ann Mahony, Central Connecticut State University, HISTORY

Elizabeth S. Manley, Xavier University of Louisiana, HISTORY

Claire Emilie Martin, California State University, Long Beach, LITERATURE

Elaine M. Miller, Christopher Newport University, LITERATURE

Sarah M. Misemer, Texas A&M University, LITERATURE

Mollie Lewis Nouwen, Pacific Northwest College of Art, HISTORY

Susana Nuccetelli, St. Cloud State University, PHILOSOPHY

Michael O’Brien, College of Charleston, MUSIC

Élide Valarini Oliver, University of California, Santa Barbara, TRANSLATIONS

Rita M. Palacios, Conestoga College, LITERATURE

Suzanne B. Pasztor, Humboldt State University, HISTORY

Anne Pérotin-Dumon, Historian, Alexandria, VA, HISTORY

Charles A. Perrone, Professor Emeritus, University of Florida, LITERATURE

Jeannine Pitas, Saint Vincent College, LITERATURE

Juan José Ponce Vázquez, The University of Alabama, HISTORY

Joshua Price, Toronto Metropolitan University, TRANSLATIONS

Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, Texas Christian University, HISTORY

Jane M. Rausch, Professor Emerita, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, HISTORY

Jonathan Ritter, University of California, Riverside, MUSIC

Francisco Solares-Larrave, Northern Illinois University, LITERATURE

Peter Szok, Texas Christian University, HISTORY

Barbara Tenenbaum, Historian, Washington, DC, HISTORY

Giovanna Urdangarain, Pacific Lutheran University, LITERATURE

Peter B. Villella, United States Air Force Academy, HISTORY

Stephen Webre, Louisiana Tech University, HISTORY

Thomas Whigham, Professor Emeritus, University of Georgia, HISTORY

Steven F. White, St. Lawrence University, TRANSLATIONS

Chrystian Zegarra, Colgate University, LITERATURE

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Astrid Arrarás, Florida International University, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Melissa H. Birch, University of Kansas, POLITICAL ECONOMY

Silvia Borzutzky, Carnegie Mellon University, POLITICAL ECONOMY

Federico Bossert, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, ANTHROPOLOGY

Christian Brannstrom, Texas A&M University, GEOGRAPHY

Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner, The City University of New York (CUNY), INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Charles D. Brockett, Sewanee: The University of the South, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Kathleen Bruhn, University of California Santa Barbara, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

William L. Canak, Middle Tennessee State University, SOCIOLOGY

Jorge Capetillo-Ponce, University of Massachusetts Boston, SOCIOLOGY

Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, American University, SOCIOLOGY

Miguel Centellas, University of Mississippi, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Amílcar E. Challú, Bowling Green State University, POLITICAL ECONOMY

David M. Cochran, Jr., University of Southern Mississippi, GEOGRAPHY

Jennifer N. Collins, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Roberto Domínguez, Suffolk University (Boston), INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Duncan Earle, Marymount California University, ANTHROPOLOGY

James B. Gerber, San Diego State University, POLITICAL ECONOMY

Mario A. González-Corzo, Lehman College, The City University of New York (CUNY), POLITICAL ECONOMY

Clifford E. Griffin, North Carolina State University, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Daniel Hellinger, Webster University, POLITICAL ECONOMY

John Henderson, Cornell University, ANTHROPOLOGY

Peter H. Herlihy, University of Kansas, GEOGRAPHY

Silvia María Hirsch, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina, ANTHROPOLOGY

Jonathan Hiskey, Vanderbilt University, POLITICAL ECONOMY

Keith Jamtgaard, University of Missouri, SOCIOLOGY

Arthur A. Joyce, University of Colorado Boulder, ANTHROPOLOGY

Joseph L. Klesner, Kenyon College, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Gregory W. Knapp, The University of Texas at Austin, GEOGRAPHY

Matthew C. LaFevor, University of Alabama, GEOGRAPHY

José A. Laguarta Ramírez, City University of New York, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Thomas P. Leppard, Florida State University, ANTHROPOLOGY

Félix E. Martín, Florida International University, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Daniel Masís-Iverson, Inter-American Defense College, POLITICAL ECONOMY

Kent Mathewson, Louisiana State University, GEOGRAPHY

Shannan L. Mattiace, Allegheny College, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Cecilia Menjívar, University of California, Los Angeles, SOCIOLOGY

Mary K. Meyer McAleese, Eckerd College, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Erika Moreno, Creighton University, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Suzanne Oakdale, University of New Mexico, ANTHROPOLOGY

Julio Ortiz-Luquis, Borough of Manhattan Community College and Brooklyn College, CUNY, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

María Sol Prieto, Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina, SOCIOLOGY

Enrique S. Pumar, Santa Clara University, SOCIOLOGY

David J. Robinson, Syracuse University, GEOGRAPHY

René Salgado, Independent Consultant, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Isabel Scarborough, Parkland College, ANTHROPOLOGY

Joseph Leonard Scarpaci, Center for the Study of Cuban Culture & Economy, GEOGRAPHY

Jörn Seemann, Ball State University, GEOGRAPHY

Peter M. Siavelis, Wake Forest University, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Amy Erica Smith, Iowa State University, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Russell E. Smith, Washburn University, POLITICAL ECONOMY

Scott Tollefson, National Defense University, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Jason L. Toohey, University of Wyoming, ANTHROPOLOGY

Brian Turner, Randolph-Macon College, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Erica Lorraine Williams, Spelman College, SOCIOLOGY

Foreign Corresponding Editors

Franz Obermeier, Universitätsbibliothek Kiel, GERMAN PUBLICATIONS

Mao Xianglin, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, CHINESE PUBLICATIONS

Special Contributing Editors

Lucia A. Wolf, Library of Congress, ITALIAN LANGUAGE

CONTENTS

EDITOR’S NOTE

ART

SPANISH AMERICA

Colonial

19th-21st Centuries

Félix Ángel

General

Mexico

Central America

The Caribbean

South America

Argentina

Chile

Colombia

Peru

Uruguay

Venezuela

HISTORY

ETHNOHISTORY

Mesoamerica

Bradley Benton and Peter B. Villella

South America

Susan Elizabeth Ramírez

GENERAL HISTORY

John Britton

General

Colonial

Independence and 19th Century

20th Century

MEXICO

General

Suzanne B. Pasztor

General

Colonial Period

Raphael E. Folsom

Colonial

Independence, Revolution, and Post-Revolution

Suzanne B. Pasztor and Barbara Tenenbaum

Independence To Revolution

Revolution and Post-Revolution

CENTRAL AMERICA

Peter Szok and Stephen Webre

General

Colonial

National

THE CARIBBEAN AND FRENCH GUIANA

Matt D. Childs, Luis A. González, Daniel Livesay, Elizabeth S. Manley, Anne Pérotin-Dumon, and Juan José Ponce Vázquez

General

Early Colonial

Late Colonial and French Revolutionary Period

19th Century

20th Century

SPANISH SOUTH AMERICA

Colonial Period

Matthew Crawford and Michael Huner

Nueva Granada

Peru

Bolivia/Charcas

Rio de la Plata

19th and 20th Centuries

Venezuela

Peter S. Linder

Colombia and Ecuador

Jane M. Rausch

Colombia

Ecuador

Peru

G. Antonio Espinoza

Bolivia

Erick D. Langer

Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay

Bridget María Chesterton, Mollie Lewis Nouwen, and Thomas Whigham

Argentina

Paraguay

Uruguay

BRAZIL

Mark Grover and Mary Ann Mahony

General

Colonial

Empire to Republic

LITERATURE

SPANISH AMERICA

Colonial Period

Amber Brian

Individual Studies

Texts, Editions, Anthologies

21st Century Prose Fiction

Mexico

Ryan Long

Prose Fiction

Central America

Tiffany D. Creegan Miller, Erin S. Finzer, Frances Jaeger, and Francisco Solares-Larrave

Prose Fiction

Literary Criticism and History

Hispanic Caribbean

Diana Alvarez-Amell and Myrna García-Calderón

Prose Fiction

Literary Criticism and History

Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela

José Cardona-López

Literary Criticism and History

Colombia

Venezuela

Prose Fiction

Colombia

Peru

Venezuela

River Plate Countries

Claire Emilie Martin, Laura R. Loustau, and Giovanna Urdangarain

Prose Fiction

Argentina

Paraguay

Uruguay

Literary Criticism

Argentina

Uruguay

Poetry

José R. Ballesteros, Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols, Rita M. Palacios, Jeannine Pitas, and Chrystian Zegarra

Anthologies

Books of Verse

Special Studies

Drama

Elaine M. Miller and Sarah M. Misemer

Plays

Theater Criticism and History

BRAZIL

Short Stories

M. Angélica Guimarães Lopes

Crônicas

Célia Bianconi

Poetry

Charles A. Perrone

Drama

Isadora Grevan de Carvalho

Original Plays

Theater Criticism and History

TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH FROM THE SPANISH AND THE PORTUGUESE

María-Constanza Guzmán, Élide Valarini Oliver, Joshua Price, and Steven F. White

Anthologies

Translations from the Spanish

Poetry

Brief Fiction

Novels

Essays, Interviews, and Reportage

Translations from the Portuguese

Novels

MUSIC

GENERAL

MEXICO

John Koegel

CENTRAL AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

Alfred E. Lemmon

The Caribbean (except Cuba)

Central America

Cuba

ANDEAN COUNTRIES

Jonathan Ritter

Bolivia

Colombia

Ecuador

Peru

Venezuela

SOUTHERN CONE

Argentina

Chile

BRAZIL

Rogério Budasz

PHILOSOPHY: LATIN AMERICAN THOUGHT

Susana Nuccetelli

General

Mexico

Central America

The Caribbean

Venezuela

Colombia

Ecuador

Peru

Bolivia

Chile

Uruguay

Argentina

INDEX

ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

TITLE LIST OF JOURNALS INDEXED

ABBREVIATION LIST OF JOURNALS INDEXED

SUBJECT INDEX

AUTHOR INDEX

EDITOR’S NOTE

I. GENERAL AND REGIONAL TRENDS

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. So began a narrative familiar to most of us, if the setting, characters, and intimate plotlines differ. The Library of Congress closed its doors and sent its staff home. So too did the cultural institutions, schools and universities, publishing enterprises, and many transportation systems that play a vital role in the Library’s operations. For those able to work remotely, video conferencing and daily log-on protocols became as familiar as masks, hand sanitizer, and cleaning wipes. Fortunately, many Library of Congress staff, including reference staff, were accustomed to working online, and some had been teleworking for years. So, with laptops open in home workspaces, staff resumed answering questions, searching for materials, and developing the records, metadata, and access points that enable worldwide users to find the Library’s collection materials. Working remotely all day, every day strengthened staff telework capabilities. The Library had made a timely prepandemic decision to begin transitioning older online bibliographies to new platforms, creating research guides and ArcGIS StoryMaps, and also had begun experimenting with crowdsourced projects. Staff across the Library quickly went to work building on these endeavors: digitizing resources, cataloging materials, answering online queries, and developing more guides to help scholars, students, and teachers find accessible resources while the Library buildings were closed to patrons and visitors. Hispanic Reading Room staff developed a guide to using the Handbook of Latin American Studies and individual Country Guides to the Library’s collections—from Argentina to Venezuela (all available at https://guides.loc.gov/hispanic). The Library’s By the People campaigns (https://crowd.loc.gov) invited staff and volunteers worldwide to join online efforts to transcribe an array of letters and documents, providing searchable access to hundreds of pages of manuscript material. The Herencia campaign, for example, invites participants to transcribe documents written in Spanish, Latin, and Catalan between 1300 and 1800, and open the legal history of Spain and Spanish colonies to greater discovery.

The Handbook continued its editorial work, albeit initially at a slightly slower pace as our staff dwindled from five to three and we developed new telework procedures, and as our publishing partner, the University of Texas Press, likewise transitioned to remote work. Unsurprisingly, the HLAS contributors proved to be unwavering despite flipping to remote teaching—sometimes within a week’s time—and coping with shuttered offices and libraries and students flung back to homes or hastily arranged living places across the country and across the world. This volume, HLAS 76, and the previous Social Sciences volume, HLAS 75, were largely produced under pandemic restrictions: materials mailed, reviews written, bibliographic records created, subject headings added, copyediting and proofreading performed, and page proofs and XML files compiled, along with the myriad other editorial tasks. As with HLAS 75, many of the contributors to this volume note the impact of the pandemic on conferences, book festivals, and archival access—the wellsprings of scholarly collaboration and production. How and whether this temporary remote turn will shape publications in the coming years remains to be seen.

We’ve gradually learned more about how to live with COVID, and how to try and protect ourselves against recurring waves, but the costs have been crushing: an estimated 540 million cases worldwide and 6.3 million dead to date; 1 million of those in the US. The staggering numbers do not begin to tell either the individual or community tales of the immense physical, emotional, psychological, and financial toll wrought by the still-ongoing pandemic, of the loneliness, separation from family, anxiety, layoffs, fatigue, overwork, illness, family responsibilities, and deaths of loved ones. Even as masks come off and pandemic mandates and restrictions are lifted, there continue to be a sobering 120,000 COVID cases and 400 COVID deaths per day in the US alone. Nonetheless, with the reassurance of the availability of vaccines and boosters, and with declining case counts across most of the country in Spring 2022, government offices, businesses, schools, and cultural institutions saw an opportune moment to reopen fully. On 11 April 2022, just over two years into a protracted period of closure and then partial reopening, the Library welcomed back all staff, patrons, and visitors for regular operating hours.

Within HLAS 76 one striking trend is the ubiquitous interest, across disciplines, in biography. This trend is not, thankfully, an atavistic embrace of the Great Man theory of old. It does, however, in other ways conform to standards of biographies from earlier periods. Alongside studies on Fidel Castro (item 761), revolutionary Che Guevara (item 766), and statesman and intellectual Bartolomé Mitre (item 1015), we get portrayals of lesser-known or unknown (even to their siblings) individuals, as in My German Brother (item 1948), the fictionalized rendering of Chico Buarque’s discovery of his half-brother, the secret child of his father, in real life the eminent historian Sergio Buarque de Holanda. Many of these biographies are a testimony to the reality that even overexamined lives can be electrified in the hands of the right biographer. The gorgeous and marvelous pictorial study on Juan Manuel de Rosas (item 1042) observes that images . . . carry within them . . . the complexity and contradiction of the human experience. Readers will be drawn back to Rosas, whose blue-gray eyes stare at us from the past, challenge us, threaten us with murder, and refuse to let us go. A study of the surrealist artist Remedios Varo (item 1947), who herself created fantastic and fantastical images, seeks to apprehend the Mexican painter through her translated writings. Her letters, dream accounts, projects, poems, and notes on her drawings reveal mysticism and magic . . . the everyday and the marvelous, a love of mischief, and an ongoing meditation on the need for . . . escape.

Other studies give long-overdue recognition to groundbreaking figures, among them a welcome biography of Martiniquais politician Janvier Littée (item 561), the first Black deputy to the French revolutionary assemblies, born of a slave mother, which charts his ascent among the island’s elite. An inspiring article (item 2137) traces the journey of master drummer Eric Odarkwei Morton, a Tabom, a descendant of Afro-Brazilians who resettled in Ghana in the late 19th century, to the Northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia, confirm[ing] the centrality of music in the African and Brazilian diasporic experiences. In a study reflecting our times, we meet the late 19th–early 20th century feminist, activist, and socialist Gabriela de Laperrière de Coni (item 1039), whose life’s work centered on women’s issues and public health and the larger context of women’s organizing. For those seeking advice on this form, we have Andrew Paxman’s Business Biography in Mexico: The State of the Genre, its Usefulness, and How to Research One to be read in conjunction with his book-length detailed biographical sketch of the oft-reviled American entrepreneur, William Oscar Jenkins, who gained a reputation for business acumen, graft, and even violence (items 454 and 455). Noteworthy also are the historian Eric Van Young’s reflections on the genre in an essay entitled Adventures with Don Luquitas: Exploring Our Obligations as Biographers (item 404), delivered as a talk when he received the Distinguished Service Award of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH).

Biographical works find a connection to Library of Congress collections in two studies on Elisabeth Alexandrine Louise Ferrand, the mixed-race Haitian actor-singer known as Minette (b. 1767 in Port-au-Prince, d. 1807 in New Orleans, La.) (items 2047 and 2053). As Laurent Dubois explains, she was the first woman of color to achieve fame on the French stage. Toward the end of her life, in ill health and struggling financially, she organized a benefit performance of the opera Euphrosine et le tyran corrigé, ou Le pouvoir de l’amour: comédie en trois actes & en vers. The opera’s libretto, part of the Library’s collection, is available digitally (https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/musschatz.16432). Musical history is likewise explored in a study of the tensions and politics behind an exchange of traditional music recordings between Brazil and the US—just one of the Library’s many World War II efforts in cultural diplomacy initiated by then Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish with the goal of strengthening Allied ties to Latin America. Those responding to the author’s call for further studies on these recordings and their ‘music, voices, authors, instruments, contexts, subjects, intentions, noises, and silences’ (item 2118) might find an excellent starting point in the online finding aid to the Library’s Discoteca Pública Municipal de São Paulo collection, 1937–1943 (https://lccn.loc.gov/2004695166). The Cold War tensions between the US and the Dominican Republic after the assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo form the basis for Translating Diplomacy (item 725), which draws on the detailed accounts of diplomat and writer John Bartlow Martin, whose papers are held in the Library’s Manuscript Division (https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms003018). Based on the translation and publication of a short story by Juan Bosch, The Indelible Spot, in the Saturday Evening Post and the relationship between Martin and the former Dominican president, the study reveals the diametrically opposed world views that dominated political circles in each country.

This volume of HLAS shares with previous humanities volumes a preoccupation with the military juntas and dictatorships of the 1960s–80s era. However, in the space previously occupied by oral histories from survivors of torture and historical studies of key moments, we now find novelists, playwrights, and critics hard at work on the same period. Among the works exploring these themes are Teatro de las tres Américas: escena, política y ficción (item 1690), which touches on issues of memory, politics, and postdictatorship history. Two prize-winning plays dramatically recreate the repression and torture of Joaquín Balaguer’s political opponents in the Dominican Republic (item 1689). Teatro e política: Arena, Oficina e Opinião offers a look at the three most important left-leaning [Brazilian] theater groups during the dictatorship and beyond (item 1870). The use of Chilean poet Nicanor Parra’s 1952 collages in a short-lived 1975 Universidad de Chile publication reveals how political contexts impact the interpretation of art (item 45). In 77, novelist Guillermo Saccomanno recreates the environment of fear, desire, denial, and furtiveness of Argentine gay life during the title year (item 1938). Also in Argentina, the cynical political calculations leading to the Malvinas/Falklands War still haunt the nation. Six plays with accompanying scholarly apparatus provide a much richer context for understanding the war and its depictions than a singularly located vision (item 1707) and two novels (items 1461 and 1485) lay bare el horror y la imbecilidad of the war and its reverberating impact.

A set of studies on libraries, teaching, reading, and the press seems especially relevant in light of the current raging debates on educational theories, book banning, school curriculums, and the role of the media in shaping opinions about these and other issues. A study of 19th-century New Granada posits that the need for school textbooks laid the groundwork for the emergence of writers, books, and presses in provinces throughout the nation (item 837), while a survey of more recent texts used in Colombia finds that the role of Indigenous and Afro-Colombians in the evolution of the country’s history has been downplayed or overlooked (item 857). In a fascinating episode of library history, from 1934–47, the Liberal government in Colombia donated reading materials to isolated communities, setting up school and public libraries that still function today (item 872). Another study (item 838) of the era based on meticulous archival research focuses on how two Liberal newspapers shaped political and cultural developments. And a work on late 18th-century Venezuela (item 833) finds that it is difficult for governing bodies to control the flow of ideas: despite the Spanish Crown’s refusal to grant Caracas a printing press, revolutionary ideas spread through imported books and pamphlets—and by word of mouth.

Today ideas travel in bytes and datastreams and for many of us the greatest difficulty is separating the authoritative from the myths and baseless conjectures. Studies of the forced journeys of enslaved peoples and the stories of their descendants undoubtedly will be advanced by the rigorously produced digital presentations and databases freely available on the SlaveVoyages website (item 621). Based on decades of work by researchers in Europe, Africa, North and South America, the website for the collaborative project documents the forced relocations of millions of Africans through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, the Intra-American Slave Trade Database, and the People of the African Slave Trade Database. The site recently has been enhanced with maps, 3D renditions of slave vessels, a timelapse presentation of slave ship voyagers, and a timeline. Scholars will also want to consult the 22 essays on the slave trade in Atlântico de dor (item 1169), part of the Coleção UNIAFRO produced under the auspices of the Núcleo de Estudos Afro-Brasileiros do Recôncavo da Bahia within the Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia. Among the essays is a new estimation of the numbers of peoples transported to Brazil that itself tells a stark and tragic story—Africans embarked: 5,848,266; Africans arrived: 5,099,816.

The Editor’s Note in HLAS 74 discussed the publication of studies that deepen our understanding of the complexities of slavery and post-slavery life. Similarly, within the present volume, Fractional Freedoms (item 804), based on a detailed study of court cases in colonial Lima, found a system in which most enslaved peoples experienced varying degrees of quasi emancipation or contingent liberty on a wide spectrum from bondage to autonomy. A work on colonial Brazil (item 1133) finds that the many freed Blacks in the country represented a separate social class between enslaved peoples and Europeans. Another study confirms the suspicion that racial identification affected the quality of care among abandoned children in the rudimentary foster care of colonial Brazil (item 1107). A set of essays (item 1141) also on Brazil demolishes the notion that all the enslaved were illiterate with numerous examples of education and writing in the slave population. Livesay (item 560) looks at the family ties and the opportunities seized by or denied to the colonial mixed-race Jamaicans who migrated to Great Britain to escape colonial persecution. And a unique study (item 860) on Pacific Coast Colombia introduces the concept of the racialization of the landscape, combining forest history and postemancipation studies to describe how enslaved and later freed peoples gained autonomy by controlling the extraction of natural resources from the rainforest.

The efforts of women in the performing arts to gain autonomy and recognition are acknowledged in a number of studies. In her pioneering essay Blowing the Tradition (item 1977), Castillo Silva explores the role of women in the frequently gender-exclusionary world of Mexican wind bands, specifically the military Banda Sinfónica de Marina-Armada. With their options narrowed by tradition, women in Mexico and elsewhere formed their own ensembles or persisted, until, as with the Banda Sinfónica, they have become respected members of the ensemble. As bambas do samba (item 2117) reveals the agency of women in the development of samba as Brazilian sambistas and sambadoras push[ed] hard against strongly patriarchal cultural structures. A monograph on la gran dama de la guitarra, María Luisa Anido (item 2059), celebrates the Argentine musician for her groundbreaking appointment as the first female professor of classical guitar in a Costa Rican institution. In the theater world, an anthology celebrates works by actress and dramatist Nélida Ballo, one of the most recognized female playwrights from the ‘provincias’ in Argentina (item 1660), while another, Las mujeres sí hablan así: antología LGBTTQI en honor a Nemir Matos (item 1682), as the title says, is an homage to the trailblazing Puerto Rican writer whose 1981 book of poetry was the first publication from the island to openly address lesbianism. A one-act play in the anthology draws inspiration from Matos’ poetry and life. Alzate Cuervo’s El teatro feminino (item 1694) focuses on Colombian theater, but situates her discussion . . . within the larger context of Latin American political, historical, and artistic movements, as well as feminist and LGBTQ+ studies to reveal how live performance by women problematizes the historical erasure of and limitations imposed upon the female body. . . ..

As we emerge from the limitations and restrictions imposed by COVID-19, holding our collective breath in case a larger wave hides just over the horizon, it’s easy to empathize with those of different times caught in similar circumstances. A truly novel study of early colonial smellscapes in Lima (item 801) shows how beliefs about the effect of bad odors on health led colonial authorities to lump hospitals, butcher shops, slaughter houses, tanneries, municipal dumps—in the multiethnic neighborhood of San Lázaro in a form of environmental colonialization that separated neighborhoods into healthy and unhealthy spaces. At the turn of the 19th century, Lima’s Chinatown was disparaged for being unsanitary and stereotyped as a threat to public health and modernization, contributing to anti-Chinese sentiment, even while some non-Chinese sought affordable herbal treatments there (item 918). During a 19th-century cholera epidemic in Tucumán, Argentina, health officials believed miasmic vapors from acres of fruit trees were the cause and ordered the trees destroyed. This rather odd idea was endorsed by government decrees, notices in newspapers, and a public opinion more influenced by fear and panic than by reasoned thinking (item 979). And when bubonic plague broke out in 1912 Puerto Rico, the poorest suffered the most . . . as class, race, and colonial policy intersected, shaping the actions of health and civil authorities (item 796). Plus ça change. . . . But with all that has happened over the past two years, a fascinating edited collection of 19 essays (item 1227) on 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century transgressive language may be uniquely beneficial reading for us all. For what book could provide us with a more useful and cathartic response than one devoted to invective, swearing, blasphemy, and slander?

Regardless of our responses to the pandemic, few of us have emerged unscathed from the past two years. Against the backdrop of national discord—most starkly revealed by the deadly assault on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021—there have been professional challenges and personal losses directly due to or exacerbated by COVID-19. The HLAS corps was not spared. We lost HLAS Contributors Don Coerver (see p. xxi), Carol Maier (see p. 486), Jose Nelstein (see p. xxii), and former Hispanic Division chief Cole Blasier (see https://blogs.loc.gov/international-collections/2021/08/remembering-cole-blasier-former-chief-of-the-hispanic-division/).

One loss was especially personal. My father, Frank D. McCann (15 Dec. 1939–2 April 2021), was one of the original Brasilianistas. He, like many of his small cohort, fell under the country’s spell in the Alliance for Progress era, with the inauguration of the new capitol city Brasilía and during the heyday of música popular brasileira (MPB). In 1965, granted a Fulbright to complete his dissertation on US-Brazil relations, he set off to Rio—the cidade maravilhoso—with his wife, a toddler, and an infant in tow. He dove into archival research, studied Portuguese with my mother, and took courses at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RJ). It would be the first of dozens of research and teaching visits—long and short—to the country as he, a former ROTC student, and later—during the Vietnam War—a professor at West Point, turned his focus to the Brazilian military. His work in this field would be recognized by the Comendador in the Order of Rio Branco (1987) and in 1995, the Medalha do Pacificador (Peacemaker Medal). Though a prodigious reader and tireless researcher, his most natural gift was teaching. His greatest joy was instilling in a student some of the passion he felt for history in general and for his own areas of interest: the history of Brazil, the history of Indigenous peoples, military and social history, and geography. His native milieu was the camaraderie of teachers and students. He was a teacher of the old school: his instruction was as much about his field as about life. Having grown up in Lackawanna, a steel mill town in New York state, he saw family and friends lose jobs, and sometimes their homes, with the vagaries of corporate decisions and economic cycles, and strove to imbue in his students his belief that education is the one thing that can’t be taken away from you.

If our lives, generation by generation, are on a continuum, then, in my case, it is one mediated largely by libraries and print. In the days before my birth my father was 500 miles away from my mother, leafing through documents in Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory—then a storage facility for the National Archives—and reading in the stacks, as scholars then could, in the Library’s Jefferson Building, steps away, I imagine, from where I now work. The small southern NH town where I grew up had no public library during my childhood, instead, townspeople had access to the local state university library. My father taught me to use the card catalog and to navigate the LC classification numbers. For a school report on the family and social lives of enslaved peoples, he introduced me to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Slave Narrative Collection, a Depression-era oral history project. It was the first time I was made aware of the value of government documents and of preserving individual memories and stories for future generations. He also showed me the work of historian Lawrence Stone, whose then recently published history of family life helped propel the burgeoning field of social history and the application of social science research methods within the humanities, and demonstrated that the intimacies of quotidian life are a compelling component of the historical record.

The early project also stands out to me because my father paid one of his students to type it. Noting my shy approval when he handed me the pages neatly enclosed in a plastic folder, he nodded understandingly, the words look different in type, don’t they? I called him one day several years ago for suggestions to fill the role of HLAS Contributor for Brazilian history. Rather to my surprise, he suggested he’d like to do it himself. He reviewed works on the Brazilian Empire (HLAS 64–70) and the National Period (HLAS 70–74). Always at work on several projects at once, he had intended to contribute to this volume.

There is another continuum of which my father’s turma was a part: the evolving field of Latin American studies, which, within the career-span of a single generation of scholars, has seen dramatic changes. His generation’s work on the cultures, societies, and politics of the region contributed to a seismic shift in the field of Latin American studies in the US and, perhaps more importantly, within Latin America. The Latin American Studies Association (LASA), founded in the Library’s Hispanic Division by Howard Cline, Cole Blasier, Richard Morse, Kalman Silvert, and other scholars in the late 1960s, is now an organization of 13,000 members, many based in Latin America. As noted by contributors to this and previous volumes, the number of works based on dissertations from centers of study and PhD programs in Latin America that did not exist a generation ago are too abundant to list. This is as it should be. It is the fruition of the hope of my father’s generation.

II. WORKS BY CURRENT HLAS CONTRIBUTORS REVIEWED IN HLAS 76

Ethnohistorians Benton and Villella with literary specialist Brian (and their colleague Pablo García Loaeza) translated Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s 17th-century chronicle of ancient Mexico in a must read and important addition to the literature (item 309), while Ramírez shows that Andean Natives largely held to their ‘ancestralities’ or lineage identities (item 159). Langer, meanwhile, challenges the conventional narrative of Andean Indigenous peoples as perpetually poor and impervious to economic modernity. He shows that members of Indigenous communities had integral roles in 19th-century trading and mining (item 914). Livesay likewise adds nuance to established notions with his study of mixed-race Jamaicans emigrating to Great Britain, demonstrating that family belonging was critical to conceptions of race, even when set against the incredibly abusive locale of Jamaican slavery (item 560). Ethnomusicologist Budasz (item 2123) analyzes the ways that theater and music was used for ideological purposes, often concealing the horrors of a slave culture, but also as a tool for revolutionary ideas. Huner captures the exuberant modernity among young Paraguayan men before and during the Triple Alliance War that many would not survive. Whigham’s two-volume work, offered in print and as open-access pdfs by the University of Calgary Press, is the magnum opus on the same Paraguayan War (items 1057 and 1058) (see also https://press.ucalgary.ca/books/9781552389966/ and https://press.ucalgary.ca/books/9781552388099/). Pérotin-Dumon offers two expanded studies of the historiography of the French Caribbean (items 573 and 574). With his study of another part of the Caribbean, Ponce-Vázquez brings alive many fascinating examples of lives on the periphery of empire and commerce (item 612). Manley examines the Dominican feminist movement that arose in the late 1970s as a case for local and global activism (item 754). Rausch explores the contributions of Colombian intellectual Enrique Pérez Lleras through his contributions to the journal Hispania in the early 20th century (item 883). And in a study that combines philosophy with biographical sketches Nuccetelli provides a testimonial to the importance of ideas in history (item 2228).

III. CLOSING DATE

With some exceptions, the closing date for works annotated in this volume was 2019. Publications received and cataloged at the Library of Congress after that date will be annotated in the next humanities volume, HLAS 78.

IV. ONLINE ACCESS TO HLAS AND RELATED RESOURCES

HLAS records are searchable through two open access web sites hosted at the Library of Congress. HLAS Web is a mobile-friendly, ADA-compliant web site (https://hlasopac.loc.gov). The site offers robust search features; permalinks to individual records; links to many open access journal articles, and easy options for printing, saving, and exporting lists of records. The site is also compatible with Zotero. HLAS records that did not appear in a print volume may not be annotated, and newer records are in a preliminary editorial stage. Currently Volumes 36–76, along with preliminary records for the forthcoming Volumes 77–78, are available. In other words, reviews of publications from the 1960s to the present are searchable via HLAS Web. An ongoing conversion project will eventually make the remaining volumes (1–35) available through HLAS Web. (See HLAS 70, Editor’s Note, p. xxiii for more information about the conversion project.) In the meantime, reviews of publications from the mid-1930s onward are accessible via HLAS Online.

HLAS Online (https://lcweb2.loc.gov/hlas/), a searchable web-based database, offers electronic access to all volumes of the Handbook. The website also includes tables of contents and linked introductory essays for Volumes 50–65 (https://lcweb2.loc.gov/hlas/contents.html). The introductory essays for Volumes 1–49 are searchable within the database by using the phrase general statement. HLAS Online offers a trilingual interface (English, Spanish, and Portuguese) and the data is updated weekly. HLAS Online is also an OpenURL source, allowing seamless linking from HLAS entries to related electronic resources.

An online Library of Congress Research Guide provides a brief history of HLAS and offers search tips and examples. The Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS): A Resource Guide, can be found at https://guides.loc.gov/handbook-of-latin-american-studies/. Those interested in a visual history of HLAS and an overview of the work of its Contributing Editors may turn to the Handbook of Latin American Studies Story Map, which is accessible from the Library of Congress Story Maps page: https://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/storymaps.html/.

V. CHANGES FROM THE PREVIOUS HUMANITIES VOLUME

History

Juan José Ponce Vázquez examined works on the early history of the Dominican Republic. Anne Pérotin-Dumon returned to HLAS to survey the literature on the French Caribbean and French Guiana. Michael Huner provided reviews of works on colonial Rio de la Plata.

Literature

Célia Bianconi covered Brazilian crônica, while Sarah M. Misemer described works on South American theater and original plays. Joshua M. Price joined María Constanza Guzmán to review literary works translated from Spanish.

Katherine D. McCann, Humanities Editor

OBITUARIES

Don M. Coerver (1943–2020)

With this volume of the Handbook we remember Don M. Coerver, a longtime contributor to this project, who passed away on June 25, 2020, in Fort Worth, Texas. Don was a co-contributor to the section on Mexican history from 1976 to 2015. His commitment to the Handbook was impressive, representing 40 years of work, 17 volumes, and countless annotations. Don’s deep and consistent engagement with the Handbook made him one of the most knowledgeable specialists in the field of Mexican history.

Born in Dallas in 1943, Don distinguished himself academically from an early age, graduating as valedictorian from Jesuit Preparatory School of Dallas. He earned BA and MA degrees in history from Southern Methodist University, and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Alpha Theta. He served in the US Air Force before attending Tulane University, where he earned his PhD in Latin American history in 1973, under the tutelage of Richard Greenleaf. His dissertation took him to Mexico City, and resulted in the first significant study of Mexican president Manuel González Flores (later published as Porfirian Interregnum: The Presidency of Manuel González of Mexico, 1880–1884 (see HLAS 42:2180)). Immediately after receiving his PhD, Don became a faculty member at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, beginning a long career teaching Latin American, US, and business history to both undergraduate and graduate students.

Don pursued an ambitious research agenda throughout his career, with a focus on Mexican history, and a particular interest in the Mexico-US border region and inter-American relations. With co-author Linda B. Hall, Don published Texas and the Mexican Revolution: A Study in State and National Border Policy, 1910–1920 (see HLAS 48:2130) and Revolution on the Border: The US and Mexico, 1910–1920 (see HLAS 52:1283). Both volumes made significant contributions to our knowledge of the Mexican Revolution, Borderlands history, and US-Mexican relations. Also with Hall, Don produced a popular text on US-Latin American relations, Tangled Destinies: Latin America and the United States (see HLAS 59:4158). This work continues to appear in revised and updated editions, indicative of its importance as an accessible, authoritative study of inter-American relations. Don also initiated a project with ABC-CLIO Press that resulted in the publication of Mexico: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Culture and History, co-authored with Suzanne B. Pasztor and Robert M. Buffington.

Don Coerver began his affiliation with the Handbook of Latin American Studies in 1976, joining with his Tulane mentor Richard Greenleaf, as a co-author of the section Mexico: Revolution and Post-Revolution. Coerver and Greenleaf completed six volumes of the Handbook together. In 1990, Linda B. Hall of the University of New Mexico took over as Don’s co-author, continuing a longstanding collaboration between these two historians. In 1994, Don recruited Suzanne B. Pasztor of University of the Pacific and Humboldt State University (his former MA student from Texas Christian University) to continue work on the Handbook. Their collaboration lasted until 2015 and spanned eight volumes.

As he continued his teaching career at Texas Christian University, Don also became involved in administration, serving for many years as chair of the History Department and director of the Master of Liberal Arts Program. From 2002 to his retirement in 2017, Don served as associate dean of the AddRan College of Liberal Arts. His contributions to TCU were many, and the university recognized his dedication in 2017 with the inauguration of the Don Coerver Lecture in the Liberal Arts.

Those who were fortunate enough to have Don as a teacher will remember his wealth of knowledge, quick wit, and above all, his kindness. His co-authors, as well as Handbook editors and staff, will remember the graciousness and quiet competence that made him such a delight to work with. The former chief of the Hispanic Division Georgette Dorn recalled that Don was a cherished member of the HLAS family whose visits to the Hispanic Reading Room were a delight. She remembers him as a dear friend who will remain in our memories. To his wife Marie and his daughter Katherine, we extend sincere condolences. Don will be sorely missed by many. [Suzanne B. Pasztor]

José Neistein (1934–2020)

José Neistein’s passing leaves those of us who knew him with tremendous saudades, even as we are consoled by his immeasurable legacy as a critic, curator, cultural attaché, teacher, lecturer, and art collector. His life’s work was deeply connected to the development of and international advocacy for Brazilian art during the second half of the 20th century. Born in 1934, the son of Jewish immigrants, he spent his childhood and youth in the neighborhood of Bom Retiro (in the city of São Paulo). The neighborhood remained a locus of his roots all of his life and, in his final years, he returned to live there, in an apartment immersed in his books and a diverse collection of artwork.

As a young man, José attended the first São Paulo Art Biennial (1951), broadening his horizons in the arts. While a student of philosophy at the Universidade de São Paulo, encouraged by Décio de Almeida Prado and Maria José de Carvalho, he showed exceptional promise as a critic of São Paulo theater; he studied German poetry and philosophy with Anatol Rosenfeld; and he became fascinated by the richness of Yiddish literature under the tutelage of Jacó Guinsburg.

After graduating in 1956, he was awarded a scholarship from the Austrian government to complete a PhD in esthetics at the University of Vienna. While living in Europe, he grew to understand both the cultural roots of Western society and the postwar European vanguard, allowing him to pursue art criticism with increased dedication.

His distance from Brazil gave him an opportunity to reconsider the country’s artistic production and ethnography from a more global perspective. While completing his doctoral studies in Vienna, he began a career with the Brazilian Ministério das Relações Exteriores, promoting Brazilian culture to an international audience and organizing conferences throughout Europe and the Americas.

In 1967, he became cultural attaché in Asunción, Paraguay, and in 1970, he was transferred to the US where he set up permanent residence. From 1970 to 2007, he was the director of the Brazilian American Cultural Institute (BACI) in Washington, DC, presenting several stimulating events every year, including art shows, Portuguese classes, concerts, and seminars related to Brazilian culture and literature. During the July holidays, when he returned to Brazil, José reconnected with the country’s local cultural scene, visiting art shows and studios in order to put together the BACI’s annual programming. Among the numerous artists Neistein hosted at BACI were Yolanda Mohalyi, Tomie Ohtake, Manabu Mabe, Axl Leskoschek, Martins de Porangaba, Mira Schendel, Nelson and Giselda Leirner, Ismael Nery, Emanoel Araujo, Marcelo Grassmann, Evandro Carlos Jardim, Maria Bonomi, Lívio Abramo, and Renina Katz. The curatorial texts for these events were compiled in Feitura das Artes (1981) published by Editora Perspectiva.

Along with his work at BACI, José Neistein contributed to the Handbook from 1970 to 2020—an incredible 50 years—writing bibliographic annotations that describe scholarship in the fields of art and architecture in Brazil. Drawing on this exceptional work, Kosmos published a compilation of 1,700 of his annotations describing Brazil’s artistic output from 1970 to 1997 entitled A arte no Brasil dos primórdios ao século vinte, with a preface by art critic and curator Aracy Amaral. In the following 20 years, José composed an additional 500 HLAS commentaries, leaving a record of Brazilian art historiography that continues to be relevant for students and scholars. A second compilation of his HLAS annotations will be published posthumously in Portuguese translation in Brazil.

All who knew him were struck by José’s unique ability to draw from a personal trove of artistic, musical, theatrical, and literary references and to relate them to his own experiences. When speaking and writing, he demonstrated both an attention to detail and an appreciation of the world around him, which amounted to a personal esthetic that also expressed itself in daily conversations.

An inspiration to many, de abençoada memória, José Neistein passed away on Saturday, 4 July 2020, leaving his family and friends with a sense of loss as large as the legacy he leaves to Brazilian arts and culture. [Gabriel Neistein Lowczyk. Translated from Portuguese by Henry Widener and Katherine D. McCann]

ART

SPANISH AMERICA

Colonial

1   Muerte barroca: retratos de monjas coronadas. Curaduría de Alma Montero Alarcón. Con textos de Alma Montero Alarcón et al. Bogotá: Banco de la República, 2016. 154 p.: bibl., color ills., portraits.

This color-illustrated catalog accompanied an exhibition of 46 portraits of dead nuns, the majority painted by anonymous artists in Nueva Granada (Colombia) during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Some of the artists may have been the nuns themselves. The paintings belong to the collection of Banco de la República de Colombia, the largest of its kind in Hispanic America and Spain. Montero Alarcón, the Mexican curator and expert on the subject, presents the collection within the context of similar collections held elsewhere. Additional essays analyze iconographic aspects (Borja Gómez), death from the perspective of Christianity as understood in colonial times (Montero Vallejo), art restoration (Álvarez White), and the relationship between photographic portraits of dead children and portraits of the dead nuns (Castañeda Galeano), a custom popularized in Spain as well as in Mexico, Peru, and Colombia (seats of Spain’s colonial viceroyalties). The collection is unique since portraiture in Hispanic America, for the most part, was reserved for the political aristocracy and members of the religious hierarchy, following conventional codes of representation. As Ángela Pérez Mejía, vice secretary of culture at Colombia’s Central Bank, rightly assures the reader, the dead nun portraits are an incomparable historic and artistic testimony because they are the first attempts (in the Hispanic American world) to endow the subjects portrayed with individual character. [F. Ángel]

19th–21st Centuries

FÉLIX ÁNGEL, Former Curator, Cultural Center, Inter-American Development Bank

FINDING SENSIBLE SOLUTIONS to conflict has become progressively more difficult as those in power—legitimately or illegitimately—take increasingly extreme, ideological, or idiosyncratic positions. Meanwhile, societies grow impatient. Radicalism is on the rise and spreading at a disquieting speed. Some communities have been waiting for reform and now demand immediate changes, which, in the short term, may be difficult and unrealistic to put in place.

The news is not particularly encouraging. Some studies indicate that nearly 50 countries around the world are experiencing civil unrest and another 25 may join that trend in 2020, including a few Latin American countries that had been relatively stable. Human rights abuses in Latin America are on the rise. Those are not welcome developments in a region with historically uneven approaches to fighting inequality, respecting freedom of expression, and protecting against discrimination. In Latin America, and around the world, many seem to be dissatisfied with the broken or unfulfilled promises of democracy. Inequality appears to outpace any good-intentioned reforms to improve the lives of the many. At best, the political status quo is upheld; at worst, repression is exercised through ingeniously cruel and sophisticated means, aggravating the situation and solving nothing.

Through their work, artists around the world and across generations have found ways to break the silence that enables the abuse, injustice, and corruption of authoritarian governments. Their voices have been important, especially as leaders demonstrate little regard for ethics. One should not assume, however, that all artists want to use their art as a megaphone for social justice. When a wave of protest washed over her country, a Colombian pop singer declared via social media that Art is not resistance. Art is art, period. (El arte no es resistencia. El arte es arte y punto. https://twitter.com/Marbelle30, 23 December 2019). Art was not, of course, the central issue of the protests, but it was used as means of voicing demands. The demonstrations in Bogotá, Medellín, and Calí, like the protests in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, have continued well into 2020, and are indicative of the level of social discontent and unrest throughout the region.

During the 20th century, a significant number of Latin American artists, art theoreticians, and scholars decried the deterioration of social welfare and social values, while attempting to support those who have tried to alleviate inequality. HLAS 76 delivers an array of illustrative cases. Artists may not provide specific answers for solving challenges, but rather aim, through intellectual and creative ouput, to clarify the discussions and issues surrounding societal problems, offering new perspectives and possible points of departure towards resolution.

Examples of artistic responses to military and political conflict can be found across Latin America. In Imprints of Revolution: Visual Representations of Resistance (item 6), editors Calvente and García gather a collection of case studies mostly about revolutions in Mexico, Cuba, Peru, Venezuela, and Argentina (also China, Vietnam, and Ethiopia). The editors point out that the repertoire of the visual offers an alternative archive for studying the processes of revolutionary moments and potentially avoiding the mistakes of the past. The Art of Solidarity: Visual and Performative Politics in Cold War Latin America, edited by Stites Mor and Pozas (item 3), examines and explores the practices of solidarity-based cultural production. The Cold War and its impact on Latin America take center stage through examples from across the Americas, including Mexico, Honduras, and Brazil. The book explains how transnational solidarity movements connected people and used artistic expression to fuel ideological commitment to struggles at home and abroad. México 68/18: 100 carteles (item 18) edited by Tovalín Ahumada examines a devastating incident of internal political violence in Mexico. The work documents a project developed at the Instituto de Artes de la Universidad Veracruzana in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Noche de Tlatelolco, 2 October 1968, when Mexican soldiers opened fire on protestors in a plaza in Mexico City, killing an estimated 300 people, mostly students. This exhibit, employing graphic art as a form of visual activism to commemorate the tragic evening, falls within a long tradition of popular printing and printmaking in Mexico.

Other works acknowledge the fundamental divide between pre- and post-1968 Mexico and reflect on feminist art in a new era. Aceves Sepúlveda (item 10) explores how the visual and embodied manifestations of feminist activists . . . challenged established structures of power and knowledge. In another work that moves back and forthe between 1971 and 2011, Aceves Sepúlveda analyzes the fundamental role played by artists and feminist activists in transforming the mediascape and shaping the debate over the body, gender differences, and sexual violence. In Fragmentos de lo queer: arte en América Latina e Iberoamérica (item 5), editor Martinelli likewise argues that for years queer theory has enriched art production systems and renovated the traditional organization of art criticism and art history. However, having been accepted by the academy, the disruptive nature of queerness has been lost. Martinelli believes a new strategy and discourse must be formulated because queer must remain subversive.

Various works examine the reaction of artists to political and social instability and change. Rocca (item 43) examines the visual thought of a group of younger artists in Córdoba, Argentina during the infamous decade (1933–43). Rocca argues that the artists’ interactions promoted a democratic, antifascist culture, creating a space for debate and inspiration within a hostile environment. Cucurella (item 45) discusses the impact and meaning of the 1975 publication Manuscritos at the Universidad de Chile, which included a selection of Quebrantahuesos, a 1952 collage publication created by writer Nicanor Parra and a group of friends. The work highlights the Chilean regime’s use of the press as an ideological tool to validate repression. Performance art en Chile (item 47), by González Castro, López, and Smith, examines the development of performance art in Chile during the last three decades of the 20th century. Arte y disidencia políitica (item 49) brings together a series of thematic interviews with members of Colombia’s Taller 4 Rojo, a collective created in 1972 and dissolved in 1974. The collective aimed to connect artistic production to the country’s development. In her work, Acosta López (item 48) considers artists concerned with forgetfulness, loss, and mourning, laying the foundation for her argument that memory constitutes an archive in which the past is stored for study in the present. In her article, Panella (item 60) examines Uruguayan arts of the 1990s and how they were affected by the country’s political and social transformations during the democratic transition. In El techo de la ballena: Retro-Modernity in Venezuela (item 65), Gaztambide reconstructs a collective formed in 1961 (ironically, two years after the restoration of democracy) by a group of artists and intellectuals with the subversive mission of disrupting, transgressing, and unmasking the false pretention of modernism which had been the ideal of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship. At the end of the 1970s, Peru experienced a massive migration from the countryside to the capital city of Lima, spurred in part by reforms implemented by the military government. Mitrovic Pease (item 52) discusses the visible transformation of the arts in Peru as the internal demographic shift brought together different cultures, traditions, perspectives, and ways of life.

A number of books reviewed for HLAS 76 demonstrate fervor, commitment, and intellectual rigor as they advance appreciation for art history and related disciplines such as curatorial and critical studies. A study on modernism by Montgomery (item 8) notes the fluid mobility that characterized many of the seminal Latin American artists (Emilio Pettoruti, Xul Solar, and Carlos Mérida, among them) as they looked for ways to innovate the visual arts in the 1920s. The artists shared an anticolonialist attitude and an emotional, antihistorical esthetic. Estudios de arte latinoamericano y caribeño (item 4), coordinated by Rodríguez Bolufé, attempts to redefine Latin American and Caribbean art since their respective histories are based on premises that warrant a second look. Amor (item 2) reflects on the uneven spaces and rhythms of modernity in the region. She looks in particular at Neo-Concrete artists and writers—Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, the Argentine Asociación Arte Concreto Invención, and the Brazilian poet Ferreira Gullar—who were influenced by Russian and European movements of geometric abstraction (Suprematism, De Stijl, Neoplasticism, Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus, Parisian and Swiss Concrete art, etc.). Díaz Güémez (item 12) focuses on the Mexican state of Yucatán and its capital city, Mérida, where artists of various disciplines, including architects, participated in the cultural activism of the first half of the 20th century. Monumental art became a way of representing the ideals of postrevolutionary Mexican socialism and expressing those ideals to the people of Yucatán. Also noteworthy is Juan Acha: despertar revolucionario = Revolutionary Awakening (item 51), a work accompanying the exhibition curated by Joaquín Barriendos on the writings and intellectual projects of Peruvian-born critic and theoretician Juan Acha. He attempted to establish the differences between European and American conceptual art. In her work, Paquette (item 24) weighs in with new data and observations related to the highly publicized controversies surrounding Diego Rivera and his 1931 MoMA exhibition, the destruction of the Rockefeller Center mural Man at the Crossroads, and the (re)creation of a similar mural at the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City).

Among the works reviewed here are a few monumental studies based on meticulous research or drawing together large bodies of work. The remarkable three-volume Arte salvadoreño: cronología de las artes visuales de El Salvador, 1821–2015 (item 33), by Palomo, provides a chronological panorama of the visual arts in El Salvador across almost two centuries. Palomo’s study is the most detailed one published to date on the art and artists of the country. Based on a variety of sources, including first-hand documents from descendants that correct hitherto accepted facts, the work provides information on hundreds of artists. Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (item 36), edited by Flores and Stephens, is a fully illustrated catalog of the exhibition presented at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach, California, featuring the work of 80 artists, one of the largest ever shows dedicated to the region and its sociocultural and geographical issues. Bisagras y simulacros: ensayos escogidos 1997–2015 (item 56) by Óscar Larroca is an anthology of 30 of the Uruguayan artist’s articles about art, design, and visual perception, selected from his substantial body of work. Larroca himself lamented the decline of art criticism, blaming, in one article, the confusion about the role of the curator and that of the critic, the reduced space that today’s mass media provides for serious art criticism, and the—at times deceptive—intellectual and political opportunism of conceptual art.

Shifting to another specialty and serving as closing for this essay is a study of modern architecture, its connection to creative, social, and economic development, and its power to interpret the present, and sometimes, provide an alternative vision of the future for an entire community. In her study, O’Rourke (item 22) analyzes Juan O’Gorman’s emblematic UNAM central library in Mexico City. The design and construction of the new university campus created one of the most complex systems of 20th-century visual culture. Two works on Uruguayan architecture also merit mention: One is a study of the award-winning architect Julio Agustin Vilamajó Echaniz (1894–1948), who many believe was the most important modern architect of 20th-century Uruguay (item 64), and the other is a study of three Catholic churches built in Uruguay after 1950 which reflect the individual interpretations of the Catholic faith of their architects within a traditionally secular country (item 58).

In Latin America, where the have-nots overwhelmingly outnumber the have’s, it is not easy to demonstrate the value, much less the necessity, of studying art and art history. As a good friend asked me, how many times do people feel the same urgent need for an art historian that they feel when in need of a plumber?

On the face of it, the question does not merit arguing. However, history, including art history, helps us decipher the past and helps us understand how we arrived at this particular moment of civilization. If a significant number of people, including those who claim to understand the evolution of civilization, are missing an esthetic component—let’s call it art—in their lives, then perhaps, in the rush and clatter of daily events, they are missing an opportunity to see and feel and absorb and revel in and rage at and find comfort in the human experience. And that seems a need as urgent as a plumber.

Researchers and scholars throughout the region face constant difficulty in carrying out their studies. Nonetheless, the arts continue to be a lively field, adding to the rich and varied experience of life—an experience that deserves to be interpreted from a variety of creative viewpoints. Thanks to these dedicated individuals, the difficult world I mentioned at the beginning of this essay is less disappointing, enriching our daily experience with an unconventional and ultimately positive outlook.

GENERAL

2   Amor, Monica. Theories of the