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Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: A Cultural History provides a panoramic and accessible introduction to the era in which Latin America took its first steps into the Modern Age. Including colorful characters like circus clowns, prostitutes, bullfighters, street puppeteers, and bestselling authors, this book maps vivid and often surprising combinations of the new and the old, the high and the low, and the political and the cultural. Christopher Conway shows that beneath the diversity of the New World there was a deeper structure of shared patterns of cultural creation and meaning. Whether it be the ways that people of refinement from different countries used the same rules of etiquette, or how commoners shared their stories through the same types of songs, Conway creates a multidisciplinary framework for understanding the culture of an entire hemisphere. The book opens with key themes that will help students and scholars understand the century, such as the civilization and barbarism binary, urbanism, the divide between conservatives and liberals, and transculturation. In the chapters that follow, Conway weaves transnational trends together with brief case studies and compelling snapshots that help us understand the period. How much did books and photographs cost in the nineteenth century? What was the dominant style in painting? What kinds of ballroom dancing were popular? Richly illustrated with striking photographs and lithographs, this is a book that invites the reader to rediscover a past age that is not quite past, still resonating into the present.

In late nineteenth-century Mexico the Mexican populace was fascinated with the country's booming railroad network. Newspapers and periodicals were filled with art, poetry, literature, and social commentaries exploring the symbolic power of the railroad. As a symbol of economic, political, and industrial modernization, the locomotive served to demarcate a nation's status in the world. However, the dangers of locomotive travel, complicated by the fact that Mexico's railroads were foreign owned and operated, meant that the railroad could also symbolize disorder, death, and foreign domination. InThe Civilizing MachineMichael Matthews explores the ideological and cultural milieu that shaped the Mexican people's understanding of technology. Intrinsically tied to the Porfiriato, the thirty-five-year dictatorship of Gen. Porfirio Díaz, the booming railroad network represented material progress in a country seeking its place in the modern world. Matthews discloses how the railroad's development represented the crowning achievement of the regime and the material incarnation of its mantra, \"order and progress.\" The Porfirian administration evoked the railroad in legitimizing and justifying its own reign, while political opponents employed the same rhetorical themes embodied by the railroads to challenge the manner in which that regime achieved economic development and modernization. As Matthews illustrates, the multiple symbols of the locomotive reflected deepening social divisions and foreshadowed the conflicts that eventually brought about the Mexican Revolution.

Silencing Race provides a historical analysis of the construction of silences surrounding issues of racial inequality, violence, and discrimination in Puerto Rico. Examining the ongoing racialization of Puerto Rican workers, it explores the 'class-making' of race.

In Of Love and Other Passions Guiomar Dueñas-Vargas delves into the world of emotions among the bourgeois elite in Bogotá from the end of the colonial period to 1870. While most studies of the period focus solely on the country's political activity, Dueñas-Vargas shows how Colombia's social, cultural, and political changes transformed the meaning of love, which contributed to the evolution of new models of femininity and masculinity. By examining sources such as personal letters and diaries, Dueñas-Vargas presents the emotional profiles of families and couples, demonstrating how their conduct challenged the established order. As lovers insisted on choosing their own mates rather than marrying spouses selected by their parents, they undermined the patriarchal structure of Colombian society. Such decisions unveil the many functions women assumed in both public and private life and how they participated in the invention of a nation.

Brazilian popular culture, including music, dance, theater, and film, played a key role in transnational performance circuits—inter-American and transatlantic—from the latter nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Brazilian performers both drew inspiration from and provided models for cultural production in France, Portugal, Argentina, the United States, and elsewhere. These transnational exchanges also helped construct new ideas about, and representations of, “racial\" identity in Brazil. Tropical Travels fruitfully examines how perceptions of “race\" were negotiated within popular performance in Rio de Janeiro and how these issues engaged with wider transnational trends during the period. Lisa Shaw analyzes how local cultural forms were shaped by contact with imported performance traditions and transnational vogues in Brazil, as well as by the movement of Brazilian performers overseas. She focuses specifically on samba and the maxixe in Paris between 1910 and 1922, teatro de revista (the Brazilian equivalent of vaudeville) in Rio in the long 1920s, and a popular Brazilian female archetype, the baiana, who moved to and fro across national borders and oceans. Shaw demonstrates that these transnational encounters generated redefinitions of Brazilian identity through the performance of “race\" and ethnicity in popular culture. Shifting the traditional focus of Atlantic studies from the northern to the southern hemisphere, Tropical Travels also contributes to a fuller understanding of inter-hemispheric cultural influences within the Americas.

Despite the inherent brutality of slavery, some slaves could find small but important opportunities to act decisively.The Hierarchies of Slavery in Santos, Brazil, 1822-1888 explores such moments of opportunity and resistance in Santos, a Southeastern township in Imperial Brazil. It argues that slavery in Brazil was hierarchical: slaves' fleeting chances to form families, work jobs that would not kill or maim, avoid debilitating diseases, or find a (legal or illegal) pathway out of slavery were highly influenced by their demographic background and their owners' social position. By tracing the lives of slaves and owners through multiple records, the author is able to show that the cruelties that slaves faced were not equally shared. One important implication is that internal stratification likely helped perpetuate slavery because there was the belief, however illusionary, that escaping captivity was not necessary for social mobility.

The politics of slavery and slave trade in nineteenth-century Cuba and Brazil is the subject of this acclaimed study, first published in Brazil in 2010 and now available for the first time in English. Cubans and Brazilians were geographically separate from each other, but they faced common global challenges that unified the way they re-created their slave systems between 1790 and 1850 on a basis completely departed from centuries-old colonial slavery. Here the authors examine the early arguments and strategies in favor of slavery and the slave trade and show how they were affected by the expansion of the global market for tropical goods, the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the collapse of Iberian monarchies, British abolitionism, and the international pressure opposing the transatlantic slave trade. This comprehensive survey contributes to the comparative history of slavery, placing the subject in a global context rather than simply comparing the two societies as isolated units.

In Private Topographies, Grzegorczyk identifies and analyzes the types of postcolonial subjectivity prevalent among the Creole (Euro-American) ruling classes in post-independence, nineteenth-century century Latin America as articulated through their relation to their surroundings. Exactly how did creole elites change their self-conception in the wake of independence? In what ways and why did they feel compelled to restructure their personal space? What contradictions did they respond to? Where and how were the boundaries between public and private constructed? How were the categories of race and gender relevant to this process? For the first time, this book links together political transitions (the end of the colonial period in Latin America) with \"implacements\" - attempts that people make to reorganize the space around them. By looking at cartographies of states and regions, the structure of towns, and appearance and lay-out of homes in literature from Mexico, Argentina and Brazil from this nineteenth century period of transition, Grzegorczyk sheds new light on the ways a culture remakes itself and the mechanisms through which subjectivities shift during periods of political change.

The Heart in the Glass Jarbegins with one man's literal heart (that of a prominent statesman in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico) but is truly about the hearts, bodies, legal entanglements, and letters-as both symbols and material objects-of northern Mexicans from the 1860s through the 1930s. William E. French's innovative study of courtship practice and family formation examines love letters of everyday folk within the framework of literacy studies and explores how love letters functioned culturally and legally. French begins by situating love letters in the context of the legal system, which protected the moral order of families and communities and also perpetuated the gender order-the foundation of power structures in Mexican society. He then examines reading and writing practices in the communities that the letters came from: mining camps, villages, small towns, and the \"passionate public sphere\" that served as the wider social context for the love letters and crimes of passion. Finally, French considers \"sentimental anatomy,\" the eyes, hearts, souls, and wills ofnovios(men and women in courting relationships), that the letters gave voice to and helped bring into being. In the tradition of Carlo Ginzburg'sThe Cheese and the Wormsand Natalie Zemon Davis'sThe Return of Martin Guerre, French connects intimate lives to the broader cultural moment, providing a rich and complex cultural history from the intersection of love and law.

Lens, Laboratory, Landscape focuses on competing views about the power of vision in Spain between the 1830s and the 1950s. The photographic lens, laboratory microscope, \"retinal vision\" of philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, and the topographical studies of Manuel de Terán are woven together in and around a European cultural milieu that gave observation primacy. For once, Spain-now bereft of its empire-was not on the outside of such debates. Whether in the laboratory, family home, darkroom, art gallery, or on the road, in Cuba or Zaragoza, Madrid or Massachusetts, Spanish artists and scientists were engaged with the social and economic power of observation at a time when the speed of modern life made observing a challenge. Claudia Schaefer brings the technologies of the eye-photograph, microscope, lens, tools for land surveying-to light as markers on the nation's touted path to modernity.