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"Mexico Social conditions 19th century."
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Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750-1856
History is not just about great personalities, wars, and revolutions; it is also about the subtle aspects of more ordinary matters. On a day-to-day basis the aspects of life that most preoccupied people in late eighteenth- through mid nineteenth-century Mexico were not the political machinations of generals or politicians but whether they themselves could make a living, whether others accorded them the respect they deserved, whether they were safe from an abusive husband, whether their wives and children would obey them-in short, the minutiae of daily life.
Sonya Lipsett-Rivera'sGender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750-1856explores the relationships between Mexicans, their environment, and one another, as well as their negotiation of the cultural values of everyday life. By examining the value systems that governed Mexican thinking of the period, Lipsett-Rivera examines the ephemeral daily experiences and interactions of the people and illuminates how gender and honor systems governed these quotidian negotiations. Bodies and the built environment were inscribed with cultural values, and the relationship of Mexicans to and between space and bodies determined the way ordinary people acted out their culture.
eBook
The dead march : a history of the Mexican-American War
The bloody 1846-1848 war between the United States and Mexico filled out the shape of the continental United States, forcing Mexico to recognize its loss of Texas and give up the rest of what became the Southwestern United States. Generally people argue that the United States won this war because unlike Mexico it was already a unified nation that commanded the loyalty of its citizens. Focusing on the vivid experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians, both Americans and Mexicans, The Dead March reveals something very different. The United States won not because it was more unified but instead because it was much wealthier. Both Americans and Mexicans had complicated relationships with their nations, relationships entangled with their commitments to their religions, their neighbors, and their families. The war's events, both on the grand scale of the conflict between nations and the more intimate scale of campaigns and battles, cannot be understood without probing this social and cultural history. Politicians could not simply conjure up armies, and generals could not manipulate units as if their members were chess pieces without ideas or attitudes. This book also uses the war to compare the two countries as they existed in 1846. The results of this comparison are quite startling. The United States and Mexico were much more alike than they were different, and both nations were still in the tumultuous and often violent process of constituting themselves. What separated them was not some fabled American unity or democracy but the very real economic advantages of the United States.-- Provided by publisher
Book
City on Fire
By the mid-nineteenth century, efforts to modernize and industrialize Mexico City had the unintended consequence of exponentially increasing the risk of fire while also breeding a culture of fear. Through an array of archival sources, Anna Rose Alexander argues that fire became a catalyst for social change, as residents mobilized to confront the problem. Advances in engineering and medicine soon fostered the rise of distinct fields of fire-related expertise while conversely, the rise of fire-profiteering industries allowed entrepreneurs to capitalize on crisis.City on Firedemonstrates that both public and private engagements with fire risk highlight the inequalities that characterized Mexican society at the turn of the twentieth century.
eBook
Borderlands of slavery : the struggle over captivity and peonage in the American Southwest
It's often taken as a simple truth that the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the United States. In the Southwest, however, two similarly coercive labor systems, debt peonage-in which a debtor negotiated a relationship of servitude, often lifelong, to a creditor-and Indian captivity, not only outlived the Civil War but prompted a new struggle to define freedom and bondage in the United States. In Borderlands of Slavery, William S. Kiser presents one of the first comprehensive histories of debt peonage and Indian captivity in the territory of New Mexico after the Civil War. It begins in the early 1700s with the development of Indian slavery through slave raiding and fictive kinship. By the early 1800s, debt peonage had emerged as a secondary form of coerced servitude in the Southwest, augmenting Indian slavery to meet increasing demand for labor. While indigenous captivity has received considerable scholarly attention, the widespread practice of debt peonage has been largely ignored. Kiser makes the case that these two intertwined systems were of not just regional but also national importance and must be understood within the context of antebellum slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Kiser argues that the struggle over Indian captivity and debt peonage in the Southwest helped both to broaden the public understanding of coerced servitude in post-Civil War America and to expand political and judicial philosophy regarding free labor in the reunified republic.
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Outside the Hacienda Walls
The Mexican Revolution was a tumultuous struggle for social and political reform that ousted an autocrat and paved the way for a new national constitution. The conflict, however, came late to Yucatán, where a network of elite families with largely European roots held the reins of government. This privileged group reaped spectacular wealth from haciendas, cash-crop plantations tended by debt-ridden servants of Maya descent. When a revolutionary army from central Mexico finally gained a foothold in Yucatán in 1915, the local custom of agrarian servitude met its demise.Drawing on a dozen years of archaeological and historical investigation, Allan Meyers breaks new ground in the study of Yucatán haciendas. He explores a plantation village called San Juan Bautista Tabi, which once stood at the heart of a vast sugar estate. Occupied for only a few generations, the village was abandoned during the revolutionary upheaval. Its ruins now lie within a state-owned ecological reserve.Through oral histories, archival records, and physical remains, Meyers examines various facets of the plantation landscape. He presents original data and fresh interpretations on settlement organization, social stratification, and spatial relationships. His systematic approach to \"things underfoot,\" small everyday objects that are now buried in the tropical forest, offers views of the hacienda experience that are often missing in official written sources. In this way, he raises the voices of rural, mostly illiterate Maya speakers who toiled as laborers. What emerges is a portrait of hacienda social life that transcends depictions gleaned from historical methods alone.Students, researchers, and travelers to Mexico will all find something of interest in Meyers's lively presentation. Readers will see the old haciendas--once forsaken but now experiencing a rebirth as tourist destinations--in a new light. These heritage sites not only testify to social conditions that prevailed before the Mexican Revolution, but also remind us that the human geography of modern Yucatán is as much a product of plantation times as it is of more ancient periods.
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City on fire : technology, social change, and the hazards of progress in Mexico City, 1860-1910
\"City on Fire is a chronicle of progress and danger, that integrates urban environmental history with histories of technology, science, and medicine to reveal how Mexico City changed in response to the growing threat of fire in the urban center\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Private Women, Public Lives
Through the lives and works of three women in colonial California, Bárbara O. Reyes examines frontier mission social spaces and their relationship to the creation of gendered colonial relations in the Californias. She explores the function of missions and missionaries in establishing hierarchies of power and in defining gendered spaces and roles, and looks at the ways that women challenged, and attempted to modify, the construction of those hierarchies, roles, and spaces. Reyes studies the criminal inquiry and depositions of Barbara Gandiaga, an Indian woman charged with conspiracy to murder two priests at her mission; the divorce petition of Eulalia Callis, the first lady of colonial California who petitioned for divorce from her adulterous governor-husband; and the testimonio of Eulalia Pérez, the head housekeeper at Mission San Gabriel who acquired a position of significant authority and responsibility but whose work has not been properly recognized. These three women’s voices seem to reach across time and place, calling for additional, more complex analysis and questions: Could women have agency in the colonial Californias? Did the social structures or colonial processes in place in the frontier setting of New Spain confine or limit them in particular gendered ways? And, were gender dynamics in colonial California explicitly rigid as a result of the imperatives of the goals of colonization?
eBook
The mark of rebels : indios fronterizos and Mexican independence
\"This work explores social and cultural transformations among the indigenous communities of western Mexico, especially the indios fronterizos (Frontier Indians), preceding and during the struggle for independence\"--Provided by publisher.
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Coyote nation
With the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s came the emergence of a modern and profoundly multicultural New Mexico. Native Americans, working-class Mexicans, elite Hispanos, and black and white newcomers all commingled and interacted in the territory in ways that had not been previously possible. But what did it mean to be white in this multiethnic milieu? And how did ideas of sexuality and racial supremacy shape ideas of citizenry and determine who would govern the region? Coyote Nation considers these questions as it explores how New Mexicans evaluated and categorized racial identities through bodily practices. Where ethnic groups were numerous and—in the wake of miscegenation—often difficult to discern, the ways one dressed, bathed, spoke, gestured, or even stood were largely instrumental in conveying one's race. Even such practices as cutting one's hair, shopping, drinking alcohol, or embalming a deceased loved one could inextricably link a person to a very specific racial identity. A fascinating history of an extraordinarily plural and polyglot region, Coyote Nation will be of value to historians of race and ethnicity in American culture.
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