Browsing by Subject "Latin American history"

On 23 January 1958, Marcos Pérez Jiménez was ousted in a "democratic revolution" whose emblematic images featured a vast public housing project built by the dictator in the heart of in downtown Caracas, next to the Presidential Palace, Ministry of Defense, and Congress. Officially named "2 December" to memorialize the coup that consolidated his rule, the neighborhood and its residents suffered harshly was renamed the "23 January" (23 de enero) in honor of the 1958 revolution. This study investigates the relationship between this parish and the Venezuelan democratic system that would, over the following decades, be praised for its stability and was believed to have made the urban popular sectors dependent on party and state. This study disrupts such an interpretation by exploring how oppositional politics, forms of street protest, and voting combined to produce evolving understandings of political participation and legitimate contestation.

Three key moments anchor the story told in this dissertation: the transition to electoral democracy during the 1958 revolution and its aftermath; the late 1970s and early 1980s period of structural crisis that lead to dramatic seizures of public vehicles; and the 1989 Caracazo massacre in which Venezuela's newly elected President shocked the nation by ending the country's largest urban protest with a massacre that killed hundreds. The dissertation ends with reflections on the continuity of in political and protest behavior in el 23 under former military rebel Hugo Chávez who was elected to the presidency in 1998. While the urban popular sectors' are depicted by some as having been awoken to national politics under Chavez, this study establishes powerful continuities going back to 1958 in this stronghold of Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution."

A comprehensive and systematic canvas of thirty years' of newspaper and periodical sources on el 23 provides a firm foundation for the narrative. It also draws on primary sources from the Banco Obrero, the US National Archives, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, while making extensive use of polling data and electoral statistics from 1958 to 1989. This archival work allowed for the success of extensive oral histories and ethnographic observation carried out in the 23 de enero over ten months between 2004 and 2005.

This dissertation deals with Cuban art criticism and other written texts related to Abstract Art. From a critical perspective that relates art to society and political and institutional practices, all of the above texts are interpreted as bearers of aesthetic ideologies, which are expressed in the paradigms from which Art Criticism attempted to validate Abstraction. This study further demonstrates that the dominant discourses in the realm of Art Criticism are strongly related to Ideological State Apparatuses. Art Criticism not only mediates between the artwork and the spectator, but also between artistic acts of provocation and the establishment.

Abstraction in Cuba constituted an important axis in the polemic between autonomous art and socially committed art, but the debates themselves were subsumed in ideological and even political battlefields. Art Criticism oriented these debates, by emphasizing certain problems, and diminishing the importance of other ones.

This dissertation is organized in function of the dominant questions that Cuban Art Criticism addressed. The first chapter accordingly deals with definitions of abstract art that were prevalent in art writing and publications from 1948 to 1957, a period in which Art Criticism is mostly concerned with the autonomy of art. The second chapter follows the debates about the social commitment of abstract art, which became predominant during the first years of a Marxist-oriented Revolution. This polemic is implicit in the emergence of an Anti-Academic movement in the visual arts, and it began to lose its strength once the Cuban Avant-Garde started to gain institutional recognition. After being relegated to a peripheral position, the question concerning the social commitment of Abstract Art became crucial after the triumph of the Revolution. The final chapter deals with the relations between Abstract Art and the diverse documents that embodied and defined the Cultural Policy during the Cuban Revolution.

Throughout, this study strives to establish the place of Abstract Art in the Institutional, and discursive practices from 1959 onwards. This place is defined by its instability, as it is constituted through intermittencies and steps backwards on the path towards the institutional consecration of non-figurative tendencies.

"Capitalizing Subjects: Free African-Descended Women of Means in Xalapa, Veracruz during the Long Seventeenth Century" explores the socioeconomic worlds of free women of means. I find that they owned slaves, engaged in cross-caste relations, managed their estates, maintained profitable social networks with other regional elites, and attempted to secure the economic futures of their children. Through an examination of notarial, ecclesiastical, and viceregal sources, I highlight the significant role this group played in the local economy and social landscape. My work demonstrates that free women of African descent engaged in specific types of economic endeavors that spoke to their investments in particular kinds of capital (economic, social, and cultural) that allowed them greater visibility and social legitimacy than previously documented. This dissertation, further, challenges a historiography that has over-emphasized the roles of race and gender in determining the lives of all people of African descent in colonial Latin America.

This dissertation employs excess as an analytical framework to explore the ways in which commoner indigenous and mixed-raced peoples accessed the divine to alleviate the ills afflicting their communities. This study also highlights the moral and legal contexts in which colonial officials invoked excess to justify conquest. The documents that I have consulted show that monarchs, viceroys, clergymen and other state functionaries labeled transgressions such as idolatry, superstition, and deviant sex acts as “excesses.” In addition to these primary sources, my understanding of excess as a calculated rhetorical strategy that conflated non-European sociocultural experiences into a single pejorative category has been informed by historians and literary scholars of Latin America.

This dissertation develops three central arguments. First, European and Mesoamerican cultures recognized that excessive behaviors such as dissolution and licentiousness produced harmful repercussions in the terrestrial world. However, the precise definition of these categories and the ways in which they were addressed varied widely, providing the interstice necessary for Spanish colonizers to equate non-European cultural traditions with sin and immorality. A metaphysical impasse emerged as Europeans maintained a unidirectional relationship with the divine while Indigenous peoples emphasized reciprocity. Because Catholics opined that abstention from all sin was the best way to appease the Lord, the total eradication of excess, rather than its management, was the best way to secure good fortune in the terrestrial realm.

Second, additional conflict stemmed from whether geography was deemed to be sacred or profane. Throughout the colonial era, many indigenous and mixed-raced peoples believed that every aspect of the environment corresponded to a supernatural entity. Spanish colonizers, in contrast, approached geography from a secular perspective. Improper land usage failed to improve the terrain, leaving it wild, while acceptable forms of land tenure enhanced the surrounding area, rendering it cultivated. Areas distant from a city’s moral center were viewed as potentially dangerous, thereby transforming formerly sacred landscapes into dens of iniquity.

Third, although the sexual comportment and religious practices of commoners concerned both elite Spaniards and indigenous peoples, the sociopolitical changes that occurred after Iberians solidified their place in the upper echelons of colonial Mexican society meant that pre-Hispanic forms of sexual behavior and religious devotion were derided and pushed underground. Customs that had facilitated diplomacy, e.g. polygynous marriages, were stripped of their political utility and grouped alongside other sinful practices such as masturbation, sodomy, and. And while commoners continued to solicit the services of native and mixed-raced healers, Catholic officials disparaged them as Devil worshipers. Because excess was consistently interpreted to be antithetical to the imperial project, colonial officials attempted to excise practices such as idolatry, magic, and non-reproductive sex from the body politic. Spanish colonizers fretted about non-orthodox rituals, non-reproductive sexual acts, and other perceived excesses because the perpetuation of these practices threatened the construction of an orderly society.

This study is a comparative historical analysis of the link between environmental activism and state-society relations in 20th century Russia and Mexico. It explores the three main currents of environmentalism that originated in these two countries under non-democratic political systems that originated in the social revolutions of 1910 (Mexico) and 1917 (Russia) and the roles that each current has played in the process of democratization that began in the 1980s. It is based on critical evaluation and synthesis of the following theoretical fields: collective action, social movements, political regime change and democratic transition. Scholarly literature and press sources are used to corroborate and evaluate findings from in-depth qualitative interviews with environmental activists, researchers, lawyers, and journalists as well as data from participant observation conducted by the author in Russia and in Mexico. The main findings of the study are two-fold. 1) Environmental activism affects social rather than political democratization. 2) The type of environmental activism that has the most significant impact on social democratization is social environmentalism - the current that emphasizes the synergy between the struggles for social justice and civil rights on the one hand and against environmental degradation on the other.

This dissertation explores the history of industrial fisheries in the Humboldt Current marine ecosystem where workers, scientists, and entrepreneurs transformed Peru and Chile into two of the top five fishing nations after World War II. As fishmeal industrialists raided the oceans for proteins to nourish chickens, hogs, and farmed fish, the global "race for fish" was marked by the clash of humanitarian goals and business interests over whether the fish should be used to ameliorate malnutrition in the developing world or extracted and their nutrients exported as mass commodities, at greater profit, as a building block for the food chain in the global North. The epicenter of the fishmeal industry in the 1960s was the port city of Chimbote, Peru, where its cultural, social, and ecological impacts were wrenching. After overfishing and a catastrophic El Niño changed the course of Peruvian fisheries in 1972, Chile came to dominate world markets by the early 1980s due to shifting marine ecologies along its coast that shaped the trajectory of the ports of Iquique and Talcahuano. As Peruvian anchoveta stocks recovered in the 1990s, new environmentalist voices--from local residents to international scientists--emerged to contest unsustainable fisheries practices. This study demonstrates how global, transnational, and translocal connections shaped Humboldt Current fisheries as people struggled to understand the complex correlation between fish populations, extractive activity, and oceanic oscillations within a changing geopolitical context.

"For Better or Worse: Divorce and Annulment Lawsuits in Colonial Mexico (1544-1799)" uses petitions for divorce and annulment to explore how husbands and wives defined and contested their marital roles and manipulated legal procedure. Marital conflict provides an intimate window into the daily lives of colonial Mexicans, and the discourses developed in the course of divorce and annulment litigation show us what lawyers, litigants and judges understood to be appropriate behavior for husbands and wives. This dissertation maintains that wives often sued for divorce or annulment not as an end in itself, but rather as a means to quickly escape domestic violence by getting the authorities to place them in enclosure, away from abusive husbands. Many wives used a divorce or annulment lawsuit just to get placed in enclosure, without making a good faith effort to take the litigation to its final conclusion. "For Better or For Worse" also argues concepts of masculinity, rather than notions of honor, played a strong role in the ways that husbands negotiated their presence in divorce and annulment suits. This work thus suggests a new way to interpret the problem of marital conflict in Mexico, showing how wives ably manipulated procedural law to escape abuse and how men attempted to defend their masculine identities and their gendered roles as husbands in the course of divorce and annulment lawsuits.

This dissertation examines Mexico City’s material politics of print—the central actors engaged in making print, their activities and relationships, and the legal, business, and social dimensions of production—across the nineteenth century. Inside urban printshops, a socially diverse group of men ranging from manual laborers to educated editors collaborated to make the printed items that fueled political debates and partisan struggles in the new republic. By investigating how print was produced, regulated, and consumed, this dissertation argues that printers shaped some of the most pressing conflicts that marked Mexico’s first formative century: over freedom of expression, the role of religion in government, and the emergence of liberalism. Printers shaped debates not only because they issued texts that fueled elite politics but precisely because they operated at the nexus where new liberal guarantees like freedom of the press and intellectual property intersected with politics and patronage, the regulatory efforts of the emerging state, and the harsh realities of a post-colonial economy.

Historians of Mexico have typically approached print as a vehicle for texts written by elites, which they argue contributed to the development of a national public sphere or print culture in spite of low literacy levels. By shifting the focus to print’s production, my work instead reveals that a range of urban residents—from prominent printshop owners to government ministers to street vendors—produced, engaged, and deployed printed items in contests unfolding in the urban environment. As print increasingly functioned as a political weapon in the decades after independence, print production itself became an arena in struggles over the emerging contours of politics and state formation, even as printing technologies remained relatively unchanged over time.

This work examines previously unexplored archival documents, including official correspondence, legal cases, business transactions, and printshop labor records, to shed new light on Mexico City printers’ interactions with the emerging national government, and reveal the degree to which heated ideological debates emerged intertwined with the most basic concerns over the tangible practices of print. By delving into the rich social and cultural world of printing—described by intellectuals and workers alike in memoirs, fiction, caricatures and periodicals— it also considers how printers’ particular status straddling elite and working worlds led them to challenge boundaries drawn by elites that separated manual and intellectual labors. Finally, this study engages the full range of printed documents made in Mexico City printshops not just as texts but also as objects with particular visual and material qualities whose uses and meanings were shaped not only by emergent republicanism but also by powerful colonial legacies that generated ambivalent attitudes towards print’s transformative power.

Este trabajo estudia el proceso de invención del espacio en el México colonial durante el siglo XVI y XVII, entendiendo la invención del espacio como la inserción de una conceptualización del entorno ajena a la experiencia de las comunidades indígenas nahuas. Primero se define la idea particular de cosmos, territorio y tierra manejada por los nahuas previo a la llegada española entendida como tlacauhtli, y su conformación mediante los principios de cahuitl (tiempo), ollin (movimiento), nepantla (equilibrio), y tonalli (fuerza) por medio del análisis de documentos prehispánicos y coloniales concernientes a la cosmología nahua. Luego, utilizando la propuesta de Aníbal Quijano sobre la implementación de la matriz colonial de poder en América, se analizan los aspectos de esta matriz en su relación con los procesos de dominación del territorio, motor de la creación del espacio en el México colonial, mediante los procesos de estructuración de los pueblos indígenas coloniales, la economía y el trabajo de la tierra, la deshumanización del espacio mexicano y la cartografía novohispana. Finalmente, se desarrolla la idea de subsistencia de los principios fundamentales del tlacauhtli a pesar de la implementación del concepto de espacio y de la dominación del territorio mexicano por parte de la corona española. En cada ámbito de la matriz, se develan resistencias de la antigua percepción del entorno nahua frente a los cambios impulsados por el proceso colonial.

This dissertation examines the colonial history of medical rights in Latin America through a study of the world’s first vaccine. The Spanish introduced the smallpox vaccine to their empire in 1804, along with royal orders that vaccination be voluntary and medical consent a natural right ceded to parents. Yet, the vaccine first arrived there incubated in the bodies of two enslaved girls. Doctors would continue to rely on enslaved, indigenous, and other dispossessed bodies to conserve the vaccine for those otherwise accorded this ostensibly universal right. Their doing so prompted profound questions about individual liberty, embedding vaccination into struggles over the abolition of slavery, parental rights, and the preservation of colonial rule. By analyzing the politicization of preventative health, the dissertation follows the vaccine through the Spanish Caribbean and Mexico to ask why imperial—and later, national—authorities protected voluntary vaccination, what this choice meant for parents and patients, and what this story can tell us about the meaning and value of consent in an era of both race and rights-making.

To understand how consent operated, I trace the vaccine through the bodies that sustained it, examining the gendered and racialized claims to medical authority that legitimized the vaccine, the state’s patriarchal formulation of consent to it, and the responses and rejections of colonized subjects to both. Medical texts, newspapers, legal codes, orphanage records, plantation guides, and government reports related to the vaccine reveal that recognition of medical rights was inconsistent and often determined by elite assumptions about reason and bodily difference. Racial and sexual politics informed decisions about which bodies were best suited to incubate and test the vaccine, whose knowledge was deemed a threat to public health campaigns, and ultimately, who should be recognized as a parent, worthy of rights and capable of informed consent.

Amidst political and social unrest, I argue that these articulations worked to uphold colonial structures of power, as healthcare became woven into the fractional freedoms accorded to and claimed by subjects and citizens. Medical consent, as it was envisioned and employed in vaccination policies, helped to reinforce these hierarchies even after independence. Mexico retained voluntary vaccination, but the medical rights of women and men, particularly those of indigenous and African descent, remained restricted by assumptions about culture and competence. By tracing the vaccine through the postcolonial era, my project addresses the enduring effects of colonialism across political discourses of liberalism and access to resources and care. Such historicization suggests the limits of consent and prompts a more ethical conceptualization of "informed refusal" that embraces and respects indigenous and other cultural articulations of bodily autonomy.

The poor and overwhelmingly non-white Baixada Fluminense, on Rio’s urban periphery, saw Black Catholic priests and lay people engage in religiously-informed activism and grassroots educational initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s. Thus began the nationwide campaign that, by 2012, led to the adoption of racial and ethnic quotas in higher education admissions, the civil service, the diplomatic corps, and the military. As part of raising Black consciousness, they drew on a global theology of inculturation and joined others in pioneering a reform of the Catholic liturgy through “Afro Masses” that taught Catholics to respect Africa, its cultures, and its descendants. In doing so, these Catholic activists made common cause with ‘secular’ organizations ranging from trade unions, black movements, NGOs, and political parties that were often formed and led by Catholics. This dissertation suggests that post-Second Vatican Council Catholicism, especially threads that combined Latin American liberation and decolonial African and Asian theologies, is essential if we are to understand how Brazil came to adopt a bold quota system despite the vast under-representation of Blacks and the poor in the political system. Rather spouting class-only Marxism, liberation theology in its Brazilian heartland was a journey in pursuit of personal, spiritual, and collective liberation that contributed decisively to the country’s secular but nonetheless Catholic-informed legal and political culture in the 21st century.

This dissertation considers the role of Afro-Brazilians in the urban formation of Vila Rica—a Brazilian mining town in Minas Gerais—from its creation in 1711 to the solidification of its urban form around 1750. During this period, Afro-Brazilians comprised more than two-thirds of the population, gained unprecedented independence, and bought their freedom in large numbers. Yet they rarely appear in either colonial records or the scholarly literature on urban development. How can two-thirds of Vila Rica’s population leave no trace of their presence in the urban fabric? This is the question this dissertation seeks to answer by exploring the role of Rosary confraternities—Afro-Brazilian Catholic brotherhoods—in the creation of urban space. Some of the earliest and most widespread organizations to intervene in the urban fabric, Rosary confraternities changed the course of urban development in Vila Rica by stimulating the production of what I call invisible spaces—borrowed, hidden, temporary and mobile spaces (all largely undocumented) that formed an independent spatial network populated almost exclusively by Afro-Brazilians. In constant intersection with spaces registered and mapped by colonial authorities, invisible spaces filled the voids on the colonial map and, simultaneously, reshaped the mapped spaces. Eventually, the invisible spaces would come to the attention of Vila Rica’s colonial government, which claimed that their Afro-Brazilian inhabitants propagated disorder. As colonial officials began to suppress the invisible spaces, one Rosary confraternity responded by building new, visible and ordered spaces for its members. Moving from passive to active influence on the urban fabric, this confraternity developed new regions of the city and changed the trajectory of Vila Rica’s urban development. By reconsidering historical events in relation to the Afro-Brazilian urban footprint, this paper seeks to insert Afro-Brazilian voices back into the urban history of Vila Rica.

Tolerance is considered foundational for a multicultural society to defuse tensions over race, religion, and sexuality. However, critics of tolerance point out that its reliance on the consent of the majority to extend equal rights to a minority, along with its liberal method of individualizing prejudice, does not result in equality. This project historicizes tolerance by examining the trajectory of its adoption by leftist political parties in Mexico to address concerns over sexual identity and difference. It demonstrates that the embrace of tolerance was not only a political strategy for electoral gain, but also a method to maintain a masculinist party. By endorsing a policy of tolerance through the expansion of the principle of private life, leftist parties claimed solidarity with the feminist and sexual liberation movement rather than engage with their criticisms of the heterosexism of leftist militancy.

Issues of sexuality, particularly homosexual and reproductive rights, were in an uneasy, if not antagonistic, relationship with the revolutionary politics of left-wing organizations such as the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) since their foundation. However, between 1976 and 1981, leftist parties shifted their stances. Adopting a policy of tolerance, party leaders hoped to reconcile the growing lesbian, gay and feminist movements with their rank and file because these social movements provided the potential votes that could launch the Left out of electoral obscurity. Revolution in the Sheets traces the limits and outcomes of this strategy. Tolerance did little to stem homophobia or sexism among leftists in Mexico. Furthermore, militants rejected the tolerance policy because sexual politics were the primary outlet for rank and file leftists to dispute intra-party tensions, vocalize intimate grievances, and distinguish themselves from one another for political gain. In the end, the shift to tolerance – a defining feature of the conflicts over the cultural turns that marked the last decades of the twentieth century – was a contingent product of intimate feuds, electoral strategy, and interpersonal relationships.

This dissertation examines how the crisis of World War I impacted imperial policy and popular claims-making in the British Caribbean. Between 1915 and 1918, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean volunteered to fight in World War I and nearly 16,000 men, hailing from every British colony in the region, served in the newly formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR). Rousing appeals to imperial patriotism and manly duty during the wartime recruitment campaigns and postwar commemoration movement linked the British Empire, civilization, and Christianity while simultaneously promoting new roles for women vis-à-vis the colonial state. In Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, the two colonies that contributed over seventy-five percent of the British Caribbean troops, discussions about the meaning of the war for black, coloured, white, East Indian, and Chinese residents sparked heated debates about the relationship among race, gender, and imperial loyalty.

To explore these debates, this dissertation foregrounds the social, cultural, and political practices of BWIR soldiers, tracing their engagements with colonial authorities, military officials, and West Indian civilians throughout the war years. It begins by reassessing the origins of the BWIR, and then analyzes the regional campaign to recruit West Indian men for military service. Travelling with newly enlisted volunteers across the Atlantic, this study then chronicles soldiers' multi-sited campaign for equal status, pay, and standing in the British imperial armed forces. It closes by offering new perspectives on the dramatic postwar protests by BWIR soldiers in Italy in 1918 and British Honduras and Trinidad in 1919, and reflects on the trajectory of veterans' activism in the postwar era.

This study argues that the racism and discrimination soldiers experienced overseas fueled heightened claims-making in the postwar era. In the aftermath of the war, veterans mobilized collectively to garner financial support and social recognition from colonial officials. Rather than withdrawing their allegiance from the empire, ex-servicemen and civilians invoked notions of mutual obligation to argue that British officials owed a debt to West Indians for their wartime sacrifices. This study reveals the continued salience of imperial patriotism, even as veterans and their civilian allies invoked nested local, regional, and diasporic loyalties as well. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on the origins of patriotism in the colonial Caribbean, while providing a historical case study for contemporary debates about "hegemonic dissolution" and popular mobilization in the region.

This dissertation draws upon a wide range of written and visual sources, including archival materials, war recruitment posters, newspapers, oral histories, photographs, and memoirs. In addition to Colonial Office records and military files, it incorporates previously untapped letters and petitions from the Jamaica Archives, National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados Department of Archives, and US National Archives.

This dissertation is a cultural history of the port city of Recife, the capital of the Northeast Brazilian state of Pernambuco, from the 1940s to the late seventies. Its focus is on the Mercado Público de São José, a bustling commercial node where affect, sex, and culture were exchanged as often as physical commodities. It examines the denizens and cultural practices of this storied space using an extraordinary 10,000 pages of handwritten diary entries produced by a municipal functionary who sympathetically documented the stories shared with him by poets, sex workers, entertainers, policemen, and vagrants. This material is supplemented by a rich array of sources from multiple subject positions, including music, published erotica, chapbook poetry (literatura de cordel), photographs, films, material objects, and expressive culture. This dissertation foregrounds two neglected forms of Black culture that take the form of black dolls. It first looks at mamulengo, an improvised form of puppet play historically practiced by and for poor and nonwhite men. Two chapters show how this practice, predicated upon interpersonal violence meted out by Black heroes, is simultaneously a form of Black protest and a perpetuation of anti-Black racism. The project then analyzes calungas, regally dressed tar black dolls that are highly visible components of Recife’s maracatus, as royal corteges of queens, ladies-in-waiting, and percussionists are known. It holds that calungas and maracatus are expressions of an alternative blackness to mamulengo, a female-centered practice whose prestige draws from a grammar of Africanicity. By illustrating the tight braiding of the “people’s” and “learned” culture, this dissertation confronts head on the enduring influence of racial hierarchy and domination on descendants of the slave quarters (senzala) and the big house (casa-grande).

“Surrendering to the Streets” thus offers a fully contextualized urban cultural history of slavery’s afterlives in the capital of the northeastern state that received one-fifth of the enslaved Africans that landed in the Western Hemisphere. In presenting the broad resonances of slavery as “living,” the dissertation does not assume that these sociocultural inheritances are immutable, nor does it contend that poor and overwhelmingly nonwhite Brazilians are perpetually condemned to domination. Rather, it examines Brazil’s “public secret” of racism while exploring how Recife’s nonwhite majority contested these hierarchies through humor, religiosity, and forms of popular entertainment that proved capable of influencing the literate upper-class, with a chapter each focusing on the multitalented artist and documentarian Liêdo Maranhão (1925-2014) and Recife’s famed playwright and novelist Hermilo Borba Filho (1917-1976).

This dissertation argues that the civilian "political class" played an understudied yet decisive role in toppling Brazil's 1964-1985 military dictatorship. In contrast with existing explanations for the regime's fall, which emphasize either the isolated initiative of the generals or the independent resistance of civil society, this dissertation highlights the inadvertent opposition of civilian politicians, connected by familial and social ties to both the military and social movements. Between 1968 and 1985, the relationship between all three shifted significantly, as politicians first resisted the military's challenge to their presumed right to rule on behalf of the masses and later came to defend a role for those masses in ruling the nation. It offers a deeper understanding of the dispositions, worldview, and behavioral codes that united politicians regardless of ideology or party and turned them against the regime that many of them had helped bring to power.

In contrast to the Southern Cone, where the military sought to abolish political activity, Brazilian officers cast themselves as democracy's saviors. Yet even as they maintained elections, they also imposed authoritarian reforms on politicians. The first four chapters offer the most detailed study to date of this project and politicians' indignant reaction. In 1968, as the regime repressed leftist student activists, politicians, tied to students by blood and social class, took to the streets to defend their children in a nearly forgotten act of defiance. Then, when the military demanded the prosecution of a congressman for insulting them, Congress refused to lift his immunity. In response, the military placed Congress in recess, arrested several politicians, removed many others from office, and decided to turn their reforms into tutelage. Amidst the repression, a few politicians opted for courageous denunciation, but most chose to wait out the storm until the generals believed them sufficiently cowed. Still others adopted the strategy proved most successful - working within the rules to build their careers despite constraints.

The final three chapters show how the military's project collapsed amidst bolder challenges from politicians, especially in the vitally important state of São Paulo. In 1974, after five years of breathtaking economic growth, the powerless opposition party decisively won legislative elections. This study offers fresh insights into the opposition's success by examinging its novel appeal to working class voters. By 1978, restiveness in São Paulo spread to the military's own allied party, as in São Paulo they nominated a dissident gubernatorial candidate against the generals' wishes. As the regime turned toward political opening, in 1979-1980, opposition politicians took to the streets to protect striking workers from repression, demonstrating a greater acceptance of popular mobilization. Politicians changed under military rule, but rather than collaborating with a demobilizing regime, many allied with an emerging civil society to oppose it.

This study draws on transcripts and audio recordings of legislative speeches, electoral court records, public opinion surveys, police records, classified Brazilian intelligence reports, newspapers, and correspondence from the foreign embassies. It cites the personal archives of key politicians, as well as oral histories, biographies, and memoirs. The sources enable a dynamic and culturally informed analysis of the "political class" to explain how, through resistance to tutelage and the acceptance of popular participation, civilian politicians helped topple the military regime and lay the groundwork for an unprecedented expansion of citizenship in the following decades.

This dissertation analyzes how Colombian criollos – people of real or imagined European origins – dealt with the problem of representing value as part of their efforts to build a “civilized” nation during the nineteenth century (1822-1903). It researches capitalist development from the perspective of the symbolic structure that makes the accumulation of capital possible. It emphasizes the role of finance in the historical process through which Colombia’s territory and people were imagined and organized around a core principle: the pursuit of profit. As the affective and discursive center of profit-making, money is the most important pivot of liberal governmentality. This study thus takes as its main object what Mary Poovey has called “monetary genres” (e.g., bonds, stocks, paper money) as well as a variety of texts (e.g., political economy, literature, statistical accounts, press advertisements, conduct manuals, investment prospectuses) that criollos consumed and produced to understand and manage the relation of money to value. The anxiety produced by the difficulties of locating value in an “economy” based on speculation shaped not only political economy, but virtually all spheres of life. The project argues that capitalist development in Colombia involved new modes of representation that secured the trust required by financial instruments – essentially promises to pay – while simultaneously making the economy vulnerable to cyclical crises of credibility. These authorial modes of representation have been largely produced in the country by an exclusive, white, male elite. The research thus underlines the continuing reliance of capitalism on colonial structures of power and reveals how the symbolic architecture of the financial system has historically played an important role in the reproduction of gender, race, and class hierarchies.

This dissertation examines amelioration – the effort to create a more “humane” or reformed version of slavery – as it intertwined with enslaved people’s everyday conflicts and the legal system of the Jamaican colonial state. In the context of a rising anti-slavery movement in metropolitan Britain, some pro-slavery advocates adopted colonial legal reform as a strategy to present slavery as redeemable and colonial governments as capable of restraining slaveholders’ worst impulses. While these reformers were often cynical in their aims, enslaved people took these proclaimed legal rights seriously and strategically mobilized their rhetoric to secure a semblance of justice and redress within – and without – the legal system. Whether through fighting in court for the return of their stolen possessions, or seeking justice for a friend brutally murdered by an overseer, enslaved people were savvy and calculated legal actors who stretched the modest reforms conceded by the state. Each dissertation chapter develops a thematic approach to a key area of the law of slavery– enslaved people’s flight, property ownership, maltreatment by enslavers, and criminal procedure – and examines enslaved peoples’ attempts to strategically mobilize reformist legal principles to secure rights and justice within the legal system. In the process, the centrality of the legal system to the maintenance of the broader edifice of white supremacy and plantocracy is also considered.

This dissertation delves into the history of contraception in twentieth-century Mexico by analyzing the technoscientific activities of local professionals who sought to promote fertility control at a time in which the state maintained a pronatalist policy. By examining the roles of doctors, eugenicists, economists, chemists, and demographers between the 1930s and 1970s, this dissertation argues that these experts contributed to the government’s shift in population policy in the 1970s. Drawing on various archival sources, including clinical reports, institutional records, correspondence, and published materials authored by doctors and social scientists, this study demonstrates how local professionals forged alliances with international donors and fostered interdisciplinary collaborations. All these initiatives allowed these experts to smuggle contraceptives, establish family planning clinics, and even conduct human trials with the birth control pill in Mexico. “The Science of Family Planning,” thus, underscores the complex interplay between state policies, expert interventions, and individual agency, contributing to broader discussions on reproductive rights, public health, and governance in Latin America.