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"Rugeley, Terry, 1956-"
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The River People in Flood Time
The River People in Flood Time tells the astonishing story of how the people of nineteenth-century Tabasco, Mexico, overcame impossible odds to expel foreign interventions. Tabascans resisted control by Mexico City, overcame the grip of a Cuban adventurer who seized the region for two years, turned back the United States Navy, and defeated the French Intervention of the early 1860s, thus remaining free territory while the rest of the nation struggled for four painful years under the imposed monarchy of Maximilian.
With colorful anecdotes and biographical sketches, this deeply researched and masterfully written history reconstructs the lives and culture of the Tabascans, as well as their pre-Columbian and colonial past. Rugeley reveals how over the centuries, one colorful character after another sets foot on the Tabascan stage, only to be undone by climate, disease, and more than anything else, tenacious Tabascan resistance. Virtually the only English-language study of this little-known province,River People in Flood Time explores the ways in which geography, climate, and social relationships contributed to an extraordinarily successful defense against unwelcome meddling from the outside world.
River People in Flood Time demonstrates the complex relationship between imperial forces in relation to remote parts of Latin America, and the way that resistance to external pressure helped mold the thoughts, attitudes, and actions of those remote peoples. Nineteenth-century Mexico was more a land of localities than a unified nation, and Rugeley's narrative paints an indelible portrait of one of its least known and most unique provinces.
eBook
Forced Marches
Forced Marchesis a collection of innovative essays that analyze how the military experience molded Mexican citizens in the years between the initial war for independence in 1810 and the consolidation of the revolutionary order in the 1940s. The contributors-well-regarded scholars from the United States and the United Kingdom-offer fresh interpretations of the Mexican military, caciquismo, and the enduring pervasiveness of violence in Mexican society. Employing the approaches of the new military history, which emphasizes the relationships between the state, society, and the \"official\" militaries and \"unofficial\" militias, these provocative essays engage (and occasionally do battle with) recent scholarship on the early national period, the Reform, the Porfiriato, and the Revolution.When Mexico first became a nation, its military and militias were two of the country's few major institutions besides the Catholic Church. The army and local provincial militias functioned both as political pillars, providing institutional stability of a crude sort, and as springboards for the ambitions of individual officers. Military service provided upward social mobility, and it taught a variety of useful skills, such as mathematics and bookkeeping.In the postcolonial era, however, militia units devoured state budgets, spending most of the national revenue and encouraging locales to incur debts to support them. Men with rifles provided the principal means for maintaining law and order, but they also constituted a breeding-ground for rowdiness and discontent. As these chapters make clear, understanding the history of state-making in Mexico requires coming to terms with its military past.
eBook
Of wonders and wise men : religion and popular cultures in southeast Mexico, 1800-1876
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 Yucatán. In engagingly written chapters, he explores folklore and folk wisdom, urban piety, iconography, and anticlericalism. Interspersed among the chapters are detailed portraits of individual people, places, and institutions, that, with the archival evidence, offer a full and fascinating history of the outlooks, entertainments, and daily lives of the inhabitants of southeast Mexico in the nineteenth century. Rugeley also links this rich local history with larger events to show how macro changes in Mexico affected ordinary people.
eBook
Alone in Mexico
The first-ever English translation of the memoirs of
botanist and naturalist Karl Heller This volume is the
first-ever English translation of the memoirs of Karl Heller, a
twenty-year-old aspiring Austrian botanist who traveled to Mexico
in 1845 to collect specimens. He passed through the Caribbean,
lived for a time in the mountains of Veracruz, and journeyed to
Mexico City through the cities of Puebla and Cholula. After a
brief residence in the capital, Heller moved westward to examine
the volcanoes and silver mines near Toluca. When the United
States invaded Mexico in 1846–47 conditions became chaotic,
and the enterprising botanist was forced to flee to Yucatán.
Heller lived in the port city of Campeche, but visited
Mèrida, the ruins of Uxmal, and the remote southern area of
the Champotòn River. From there Heller, traveling by canoe,
journeyed through southern Tabasco and northern Chiapas and
finally returned to Vienna through Cuba and the United States
bringing back thousands of samples of Mexican plants and animals.
Heller's account is one of the few documents we have from
travelers who visited Mexico in this period, and it is
particularly useful in describing conditions outside the capital
of Mexico City. In 1853 Heller published his German-language
account as
Reisen in Mexiko , but the work has remained virtually
unknown to English or Spanish readers. This edition now provides
a complete, annotated, and highly readable translation.
eBook
Rebellion Now and Forever
This book explores the origins, process, and consequences of forty years of nearly continual political violence in southeastern Mexico. Rather than recounting the well-worn narrative of the Caste War, it focuses instead on how four decades of violence helped shape social and political institutions of the Mexican southeast.Rebellion Now and Forever looks at Yucatán's famous Caste War from the perspective of the vast majority of Hispanics and Maya peasants who did not join in the great ethnic rebellion of 1847. It shows how the history of nonrebel territory was as dramatic and as violent as the front lines of the Caste War, and of greater significance for the larger evolution of Mexican society. The work explores political violence not merely as a method and process, but also as a molder of subsequent institutions and practices.
eBook