Nineteenth Century Latin America

The subject of this volume is the secret actions carried out by various groups of individuals to establish the republic in Mexico, once it obtained its independence from Spain. This book deals with the various conspiracies to destroy the Mexican empire.

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.

Este curso aborda tanto la producción como la función literaria y social de la novela de folletín representativa del siglo XIX en Hispanoamérica y sus contextos socioculturales, en relación con la aparición de la cultura popular a través de los periódicos. Asimismo, estudiará y reevaluará sus manifestaciones genéricas y, dentro de éstas, se dará especial relevancia a las denominadas fantásticas. De este modo, se pondrá en valor obras y autores que no son usualmente considerados dentro del canon literario perteneciente a dicho siglo. Se tendrá en cuenta ejemplos del Perú como de Argentina, Chile y Colombia, por lo que este curso adquiere una dimensión del circuito hispanoamericano en general de la novela de folletín.

From the outbreak of the wars for independence in the Río de la Plata to the 1910 centennial celebration of independence, color-coded headbands known as divisas served as means of identifying political affiliation, necessary accoutrements for battle, symbols bearing war cries, and powerful icons that attested to and participated in the politicization of popular classes. In most cases divisas were handmade and sewn by wives and mothers, making these ribbons the touch of love that soldiers took into hate-filled fights. The ribbons were also emblems of deberes-duties. Divisas provide a unique index of how popular political sentiment reached deep into Rioplatense society, and they offer a glimpse into the world of female duty in the elaboration of a symbolic economy of war. Through writing with the needle and their central role in the confection of symbols, women not only developed parallel forms of literacy; they also participated in political discourse during wartime that the state could not ignore after the end of battle. Manifestations of the political agency women achieved appear in the impact of female affect, and in the formal, public education of women as model mothers in the home and model teachers in the school.

El curso "Corrientes literarias de Hispanoamérica y el Caribe I" propone analizar y reflexionar acerca de textos canónicos o no canónicos producidos durante el período colonial y el siglo XIX en las Américas y el Caribe, en relación con las estructuras de colonialidad de nuestra contemporaneidad. Conjuntamente con el desarrollo de competencias analítico-críticas aplicadas a los estudios coloniales latinoamericanos y caribeños. En este programa de formación los estudiantes desarrollarán habilidades para la edición y creación de contenidos-asociados con autores/textos estudiados en el curso-en plataformas virtuales globales como es el caso de Wikipedia, contribuyendo a disminuir la brecha de representaciones sobre ese periodo histórico.

The paper addresses a particular form of representing the civilization / barbarism conflict in Argentina and Uruguay during the nineteenth century, in relation to literary traditions and the resignification of European republican iconography following the French Revolution.
The ideal of a "civilized" nation threatened by civil wars or conflicts with indigenous peoples appears in different representations as a weeping woman, a captive of Indians or even a crucified female Christ in political caricatures.
In this iconographic tradition, weakness, defenselessness and pain appear as positive values for a new, "civilized" sensibility, as opposed to the local cultural traditions of "bravura" and "courage" associated with gauchos and rural landlords.

En 1865, Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna viajó a Nueva York para buscar apoyo en contra de los avances españoles sobre costas peruanas y chilenas. Invocando la Doctrina Monroe, el chileno esperaba minar al decaído imperio español promoviendo, desde el periódico La voz de la América, la independencia de sus últimas colonias americanas: Cuba y Puerto Rico. En la primera editorial, Vicuña Mackenna afirma: “Cuba, la bella,… es una hermana querida de la América, y tanto más querida cuanto más infeliz, y es preciso restituirla al hogar común”. De manera similar a como medio siglo antes hiciera Simón Bolívar en la “Carta de Jamaica”, la editorial distingue “la raza latina” y el enemigo español, al que el chileno esperaba combatir convocando a “los dos continentes de la América”: “[A] unificar todas las repúblicas de la raza latina; a fortificarlas en presencia del enemigo común… contra toda invasión europea, es a lo que la Voz de la América consagrará sus esfuerzos… sin distinción mezquina de nacionalidades”.
Aunque el periódico apareció hasta el 21 de junio de 1866 porque Estados Unidos exigió la salida del chileno, la iniciativa trans-americana de Vicuña Mackenna consiguió no sólo gatillar la organización de la Guerra de los Diez Años entre Cuba y España, sino también trazar un sendero para la gestación de la Guerra de Independencia de 1895. Y esto último fue posible por la trascendencia cultural de esta tribuna que, a mi parecer, constituye un gesto fundacional del imaginario “latino” en Estados Unidos, tesis que busco probar con ayuda teórica de Cornelius Castoriadis, James Clifford y José David Saldívar.

The earliest texts of literary indigenismo in Peru contain all the tropes of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel, including a heavy dose of sympathy or compassion. This presentation defines a "sympathetic transaction" between elite subjects and downtrodden indigenous objects of sympathy in three key, early texts: Narciso Aréstegui's El padre Horán, Ladislao Graña's "Sé bueno y serás feliz," and Clorinda Matto de Turner's Aves sin nido. The sympathetic transaction in these texts can be fruitfully compared with It that of Uncle Tom's Cabin, translated and serialized in El Comercio in 1853. I suggest that sympathy enabled or created certain kinds of subjectivity, citizenship and sociality in 19th century Peru, acting as a force of elite social cohesion, while also reconfiguring and reinforcing colonial social barriers in the republican period. In other words, through its affective element, early indigenista literature furthered diffuse mechanisms of governmentality by which the white and mestizo elite exercised power. As a founding gesture of elite civic engagement, the sympathetic transaction survived in and continued to underwrite indigenista fiction into the twentieth century.

This presentation looks at the corpus of anti- (and pro-) slavery writings from the eighteen thirties, forties and fifties in Peru through the lens of discursive affect theory. It concludes that affective states such as sympathy functioned as a technique of governmentality, and that they functioned to maintain colonial class structures throughout the republican period.

The institutions through which the Mexican and US states tried to imposed the monopoly of violence in the Southwestern borderlands experienced fundamental changes during the last quarter of the Nineteenth century, but it was the capstone of an evolution that had been occurring for centuries in Spanish frontier warfare. The century started out with the Independence struggle pitting the old Spanish colonial military (revamped in the last decades of the Bourbons) and the insurgent armies, many of whose members had been in the colonial militias. The professional Bourbon Army was composed of seasoned Iberian soldiers and was always distinct from the multiethnic colonial militias. In the northern frontier, the old traditions of frontier warfare, some of which went back to the Medieval Iberian Reconquista, were still being utilized against Indians, rebels, and filibusters at the time of the War of Independence and even decades afterwards.
The repressive apparatus of state in newly-Independent Mexico was so chaotic it made the security of the denizens of the borderlands more precarious than it had been even in the colonial era. The Texas Secession 1836 and subsequent Mexican-American War only made the Mexicans painfully aware of the growing military disparity between both nation-states. Mexican military corps and their technological capabilities were no match for the Anglo Americans. Despite this disparity, on both sides of the border a mosaic of various national and regional corps were created, reformed, merged or disbanded throughout the half century or so after the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in an attempt to bring these violent borderlands into some semblance of tranquility and normality, as least as each country´s capital understood this. It was not until the last quarter of the century when the U.S. economy was surging to world dominance and Mexico, under the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, managed to impose a new level of political stability in the country, that the corps under the control of central forces in each nation-state were finally able to be fully deployed in order to achieve some semblance of control over the violence that had characterized the region since the colonial era.

By 1700, Guatemala's capital was a mixed-race "city of women." As in many other cities across colonial Spanish America, labor and migration patterns in Guatemala produced an urban female majority and high numbers of single women, widows, and female household heads. In this history of religious and spiritual life in the Guatemalan capital, Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara focuses on the sizable population of ordinary, non-elite women living outside of both marriage and convent. Although officials often expressed outright hostility towards poor unmarried women, many of these women managed to position themselves at the forefront of religious life in the city.

Through an analysis of over 500 wills, hagiographies, religious chronicles, and ecclesiastical records, Alone at the Altar examines how laboring women forged complex alliances with Catholic priests and missionaries and how those alliances significantly shaped local religion, the spiritual economy, and late colonial reform efforts. It considers the local circumstances and global Catholic missionary movements that fueled official collaboration with poor single women and support for diverse models of feminine piety. Extending its analysis past Guatemalan Independence to 1870, this book also illuminates how women's alliances with the Catholic Church became politicized in the Independence era and influenced the rise of popular conservatism in Guatemala.

Political Patronage was at the very basis of society's functioning in nineteenth-century Latin America, yet we know very little about its inner dynamics. This study examines the dilemma faced by elites of this period of how to reconcile their own political control, the legitimacy of the political system, and the unknowns of elections. It does so by focusing on the campaign for a seat in the 1860 Congress in the province of Quispanchis in Cuzco and  loking at the way patronage was used.

In Press, Power, and Culture in Imperial Brazil
Edited by Hendrik Kraay, Celso Thomas Castilho, and Teresa Cribelli, 90-110 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2021).
[https://www.google.com/books/edition/Press_Power_and_Culture_in_Imperial_Braz/fyQnEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1]

Este ensayo reconstruye el debate republicano sobre las costumbres en la primera mitad del siglo XIX hispanoamericano, y lo relaciona con las dimensiones estéticas y políticas del costumbrismo en la región. Al leer el pensamiento republicano desde la ótpica de las costumbres, y al costumbrismo desde la experiencia republicana, el texto explora la especificidad de la relación entre la política y la estética de las costumbres en Hispanoamerica, más allá de las trilladas aproximaciones hispanistas que privilegian una matriz ibérica en el desarollo del costumbrismo. Entre los pensadores republicanos estudiados, destacan Simón Bolívar, Simón Rodríguez y Francisco Bilbao. Asimismo, se comentan las teorizaciones sobre las costumbres de los escritores Juan Bautista Alberdi, Felipe Pardo y Aliaga y Ramón Rojas y Cañas.