Rigoberta Menchú

Rigoberta Menchú Tum, a K’iche’ Maya woman from highland Quiché, Guatemala, is an international advocate for indigenous rights and the winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. Born in 1959, she came of age during the country’s brutal and eventually genocidal armed conflict (1960–1996), and has been involved in organizing and advocacy most of her life. As a young woman, Menchú participated in Catholic activism seeking better conditions for people in Guatemala’s rural highlands, mostly indigenous Mayas. She and other Catholic Action catechists led efforts for rights and dignity in the here and now, challenging a traditional Catholic emphasis on rewards for the poor in heaven. The work led to involvement in the Committee for Peasant Unity (Comité de Unidad Campesina, or CUC), a group uniting campesinos from the region’s many Maya communities and connecting them to Maya and ladino (non-Maya) workers on coastal plantations. CUC was the first organization to achieve such a presence in Guatemala, and it quickly drew the attention of a military state determined to quell social mobilization. In the context of brutal repression in the late 1970s and early 1980s, CUC—like many opposition movements—developed an alliance with the revolutionary Guerrilla Army of the Poor (Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, or EGP). Violence spiraled, for the country and for the Menchú Tum family specifically. In January 1980, students and CUC activists, including Menchú’s father, occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City to call attention to state terror. State forces firebombed the building, and the protestors and others burned to death. The army had murdered Menchú’s brother the year before, and tortured, raped, and killed her mother a few months after the embassy massacre. Rigoberta Menchú fled to Mexico in 1981. Personal trauma did not prevent her from becoming a compelling spokesperson for the opposition, and in that capacity she traveled to Europe to raise awareness of the violence in Guatemala. That is where interviews for the famous I, Rigoberta Menchú were recorded, facilitated by the EGP. That testimonio introduced audiences worldwide to repression in Guatemala while arguing for multiethnic resistance to it. Over the years, critics have levied charges that Menchú’s testimonio—with a narrative style blending many people’s lived experiences—misrepresented her life and served the interests of the revolutionary Left. These critiques in turn generated impassioned defenses of her testimonio as an important expression of political voice. Menchú has continued to work on behalf of Mayas and other marginalized people both internationally and within Guatemala.

Mass Media and Consumer Culture in 20th-Century Mexico

In 20th-century Mexico, as in many other places, consumer culture and mass media have shaped everyday experiences, helped give meaning to ordinary lives, and opened up spaces in which political ideologies could be created and contested. Cultural forms such as dance, song, cuisine, clothing, and sports have been deployed to distinguish regions from one another, while at the same time, print media, radio, television, recorded music, film, and other cultural forms have connected Mexicans across regional and international borders (and across lines of gender, class, ethnicity, language, religion, political affiliation, and more) from the 1880s to the present day. Consumer culture—meaning the distribution, sale, and use of mass-produced goods such as clothing, as well as agricultural commodities like sugar and coffee—linked Mexico to a wider world in the historical era in which Mexico joined in the global process of rapid-fire modernization. The study of mass media and consumer culture in Mexico has been, at its best, highly interdisciplinary: historians and art historians, literary critics and cinema studies specialists, sociologists, and ethnographers have worked with journalists, folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and others in developing a sophisticated scholarly literature. This literature has its roots in two interrelated schools of scholarship: one that interpreted the products of culture industries as well as the creativity of ordinary people in a search for clues to Mexican national identity, and another that interpreted both locally made and imported mass media to understand how they shaped and supported the political, social, and economic status quo, both locally and globally. Since the 1980s, however, scholarly attention has broadened its focus from the images, narratives, movements, sounds, and objects produced by Mexican and foreign culture industries, and recent scholarship has looked to processes of creation, distribution, criticism, and consumption as well. Identities—whether regional, national, local, ideological, sexual, or political—are no longer understood as stable categories, but rather as a highly contested set of ideas, stories, and pictures that have changed radically over time. Much scholarship on mass media and consumer culture now begins with the understanding that culture industries have provided the tools with which discourses of identity could be shaped and reshaped, and that audiences and consumers have sometimes picked up those tools and turned them to their own purposes. And they have moved beyond taking the nation as a central category of analysis to ask how Mexican consumers and culture industries have participated in international and transnational processes of modernization.

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala

The Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and his Nueva corónica y buen gobierno stand at the intersection of the study of the Andean world of the past and that of Latin America in the present. Written in the early 17th century, the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno is both colonial and postcolonial: created in the Spanish colonial past of the Peruvian viceroyalty it reflects on the society of its day; read from the postcolonial perspective of the present, its concerns have never been more current. As a long-ago antecedent of the testimonial literature of today, Guaman Poma combines the resonances of Andean oral traditions and European written sources. As a testimony to the lifeways of the Andean past and Guaman Poma’s Spanish colonial present, there are few sources like it. Its 399 full-page drawings speak louder than its 800 pages of Quechua-inflected prose, and its images of Inca-era history and practices are followed by a unique pictorial account of life in the Peruvian viceroyalty that depicts the activities of all the castes and classes of colonial society. The life of Guaman Poma has been a topic of considerable interest. His presence in the archival documentary record as well as his work as an artist for the first version of the Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa’s history of the Incas are key points of access to his experience. The Nueva corónica y buen gobierno offers new and ongoing challenges to research and teaching in such fields as history, art history, environmental studies, linguistics, and literary and cultural studies in Andeanist, Latin Americanist, and postcolonialist perspectives. Guaman Poma’s account reveals how social roles and identities could evolve under colonial rule over the course of a single individual’s lifetime. As a speaker of indigenous languages who learned Spanish, and thus called an “indio ladino” by the colonizers, Guaman Poma’s Quechua-inflected Spanish prose may present reading challenges but his 399 drawings welcome casual as well as scholarly and student readers into the rooms and onto the roadways of the multiethnic—Andean, African, Spanish, and Spanish creole—society that he inhabited.

Abortion and Infanticide

The history of infanticide and abortion in Latin America has garnered increasing attention in the past two decades. Particularities of topic and temporal focus characterize this work and shape this bibliography’s geographic organization. Mexico possesses the most developed scholarship in both the colonial and modern periods. There, tracing of the persistence of pre-Conquest Indigenous medical knowledge and the endurance of paraprofessional obstetrical practitioners through the colonial era and into the 19th century features prominently and echoes some of the scholarship examining European midwives’ administration of plant-based abortifacients in the medieval and Early Modern eras. This topic plays a role, but a much less prominent one in scholarship on Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. Scholars of Brazil, the Caribbean, and circum-Caribbean have focused in particular on the issue of enslaved mothers’ commission of infanticide and abortion on their own children in the 18th and 19th centuries, a particularly fraught issue in the context of the abolition of the slave trade. A central assumption in much scholarship on the 19th-century professionalization (and masculinization) of obstetrical medicine is that the marginalization of midwives entailed a reduction in women’s access to abortion, although this position has been challenged in some recent scholarship on 19th-century Mexico in particular. The examination of the ways that the new republics perceived the crimes of infanticide and abortion in their legal codes, judicial processes, and in community attitudes is a central focus of 19th- and 20th-century scholarship. Scholars have remarked upon the considerable uniformity across all regions of a paucity of denunciations or convictions in the first half of the 19th century and the rise of criminal trials for both crimes in its last three decades. This change coincided (although no one has argued been provoked by) many countries’ issuance of national penal codes in the 1870s and 1880s. This intensification of persecution also coincided with the Catholic church’s articulation of an explicit condemnation of abortion (Pius IX’s 1869 bull Apostolicae Sedis), although demonstrating the concrete implications of this decree to the Latin American setting remains a task yet to be undertaken. Historians of both abortion and infanticide have also concentrated on defendant motives and defenses in criminal investigations. While some highlight defendants’ economic desperation, most scholars argue that the public defense of female sexual honor was a crucial motivator, which courts understood as a legitimate concern in 19th- and even mid-20th-century trials. Scholarship on 20th-century infanticide and abortion history continues to concentrate on fluctuations in attitudes toward honor, gender, and the family as influences on criminal codes and especially judicial sentencing for both acts, and toward the late 20th century on feminist efforts to decriminalize abortion that have met with varied success across countries.

Gender and History in the Andes

In Andean academia, a highly conservative environment, gender as a category of analysis has been an elusive and poorly understood concept. Despite the fact that in many countries of the Northern Hemisphere (where Euro-American knowledge is constructed), as well as South American countries, historians and anthropologists working from feminist perspectives have used gender theory since the 1980s, it is only in the 2010s that Andeanist scholars have begun to fully acknowledge that almost all historical narratives (from the Pre-Hispanic, Colonial, Republican and Contemporary Periods) excluded women as actors in all-important historical processes. As many Andean countries reevaluate their national republican discourses while celebrating the bicentennial of their independence, this flaw has become more evident. Hegemonic and historical accounts of South American independence movements, which highlight critical events and important historical figures, have focused on male figures and republican ideals mostly based on masculine values. Disseminating history from a masculine viewpoint, these narratives ignore women and other marginalized social groups, including indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, and fail to recognize their role as agents of political change. Consequently, using these narratives in the construction of national identities and citizenship has created social inequalities. The exclusion of women and nonbinary gender identities from the narrative has been noticed and acknowledged not only by academics, but also by society in general. Therefore, academic institutions and nonprofit organizations have promoted the publication and investigation of gender topics in history. However, archaeology, an isolated discipline immersed in its own discussions and dynamics, has developed in its own way. In general, opportunistic discoveries of “great and powerful women” have positioned archaeologists (mostly men) and their interpretations of the Andean past and power in an uncomfortable position. How to interpret these contexts using societal models that envision female bodies and feminine collectivities in a perpetually subordinated role? How to understand them without the tools of feminism and decolonial and anthropological theory? How to construct complex roles for Andean women in the past from a place in the present where that seems impossible and unimaginable (or even subversive)? From an Andean political awakening that takes a deep historical perspective, gender theory is under (de)construction. The topic of gender and history in the Andes is not about placing some female figures and mixing them up in an already hegemonic history; it is about creating innovative visions of the past, where multiple historical voices from the past and present appear.

Hospitals

Contemporary readers likely have a narrow view of hospitals. But prior to the 19th century, hospitals were used for many purposes: to provide charity for the needy, shelter wounded soldiers, house homeless community members, inoculate against disease, learn and teach anatomy, and heal the sick and wounded. Hospitals were nearly indistinguishable from hospices, where citizens who could prove their need could receive shelter and food. These hospitals were charged with dealing with epidemics, demographic collapse, war wounds, birth (and sometimes baptism), death, and all of the other bodily expressions of colonization, occupation, and expansion. Of course, buildings or other spaces for healing preceded European colonizers. While a few of the books discussed below provide a glimpse of pre-Columbian hospitals, this is an ample area for exploration. Early colonial hospitals were built alongside churches, buildings of state, trade houses, and houses for the wealthy. The boundary between medical and religious knowledge was blurred. Practitioners were diverse: the very indigenous and African healers who were censured by the Inquisition were also relied upon. Universities, like Guatemala’s Universidad de San Carlos (founded in 1676), offered medicine as a course of study. The Enlightenment “arrived” unevenly in Latin America. Generally, the number of hospitals grew, as did the number of the regulations concerning them. Owing to imperial anxieties, as well as epidemics and medical innovation, medicine (and hospitals) became more a part of colonial life. Enlightenment hospitals were teaching and research institutions, too. With independence, medical science became a tool of liberal state building, as it had previously been of colonial administration. Liberal governments wrested responsibility for care of the sick and the needy from religious orders. Positivism and eugenics became the drivers of much hospital work. Clinics for the degenerate and other threats to the nation promised rehabilitation. Diagnoses and specializations proliferated. Then, a number of welfare states emerged throughout the region, sometimes in response to popular demand. Some hospitals sat in uneasy balance between positivism and the welfare state. Hospitals were also laden sites in the Cold War. Mid-20th-century revolutions were fought with health care among guerrillas’ demands. Some revolutionary states managed to fulfill their promises of accessible community health care. Around the 1980s, state welfare gave way to privatization. While this has continued, proponents of community and preventive health care have won crucial victories in many places. Hospital historiography sits at the intersection of many fields. Historians of science, technology, medicine, public health, charity, nationalism, social movements, and political repression all have a stake in hospital history. Many of these fields have produced extensive bodies of knowledge, even conferences and journals dedicated to their study. But this is not the case for hospitals. Of course, the boom in scholarship on history of medicine and Science and Technology Studies (STS) has provided still more texts featuring hospitals in nuanced ways. In fact, many different types of historians consult hospital records in the course of their research. So, on the one hand, hospital history is everywhere; on the other, it is obscure.

Nuns and Convents in Colonial Latin America

Soon after European settlements were established in Latin America, the Catholic Church became the most important colonial institution, extending its power to all aspects of life. Prevalent views on gender among the new settlers and religious authorities, and an environment of religious fervor, fostered the rapid creation of female convents in the urban centers of Mexico and Peru in the mid-16th century, spreading to other areas of the continent later during the colony. Female cloisters were already common in the Iberian Peninsula since the Middle Ages, yet they became more popular after the religious revival of the Counter-Reformation (1545–1648). The Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila (b. 1515–d. 1582) became the model for many women to follow in the Hispanic world. Her reform of the Carmelite order brought even more popularity to the already widespread practice of life in the convent for women of all social classes. Nuns followed a religious rule that emulated the life of the saints and Jesus; they kept a strict schedule that included prayer, spiritual exercises, and physical penitence. The reformed orders would also harvest their food, make their clothes, and take care of housekeeping, while the unreformed cloisters allowed servants and slaves to perform those chores. The nuns who entered the latter convents had to provide a dowry, while nuns in reformed convents lived out of charity. Choosing conventual life was common during this time period. However, their choice was not always informed by religious devotion; many times it responded to social circumstances. The convent became a solution for the increasing number of women of European descent who could not find suitable husbands in the postconquest years in Latin America. Religious and gendered views of the time encouraged the protection of women from the dangers of the world. Women were considered weak and more prone to sin, therefore their enclosure and close supervision by male religious authorities was not only deemed ideal but also necessary; at the same time women were seen as simpleminded and therefore more likely to receive spiritual favors from God. Nuns’ prayers were considered beneficial for those whom they interceded for. Ultimately it became a matter of social and spiritual status for a city to be able to establish a convent. However, convents were not monolithic institutions, and significant differences existed between them depending on the place where they were established, the rule they followed, and the political and economic circumstances of the times.

World War I in Latin America

The First World War was a global event that intensively involved Latin America. From the beginning, Latin Americans sensed that this war had worldwide scope. For many observers, the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 represented a profound turning point in the unfolding of history. Because of the breakdown of the European civilizational and development model, and in the unreserved belief in human progress in the years from 1914 to 1918, a world where Latin America had occupied a fixed position was effectively gone. Many contemporary witnesses agreed that an era had ended in the days of August 1914, and a new, still uncertain age had begun. The war stimulated the massive utilization of new forms of media like photography and cinema. Press photography proved to be an important instrument of propaganda, which contributed to the worldwide circulation of war pictures that seemed to depict objective reality. The understanding of reality expanded, for what was real no longer simply pertained to one’s own life, but also to events mediated through imagery. It was precisely in places like Latin America, where there was a geographical separation from the front lines that people experienced the war, both privately and publicly, through media-produced images. What is more, the World War I took place there especially as a propaganda war, which also caused a largely unprecedented form of radical hatemongering among rivals to spread in the subcontinent. Consequently, the traditional bias toward European models proved to be obsolete and the future had to be conceived anew. Due to this attitude, the call for a reorientation of identities on a national and regional level, which had already gained momentum before the war, became even louder. Scholarship on Latin American history has for decades largely ignored the First World War as a major event in which the continent played a part. This was mainly due to historiography’s focus on the nation and as well as initially on military and diplomatic, and later social and economic, topics. Only recently, with the rise of the new cultural history and global history, have the tides started to turn. Several important studies have now been published.

Jesuits in Colonial Latin America

The Jesuits have impacted the history of colonial Latin America as have few other religious orders. Founded in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola and a group of companions, the Society of Jesus defined its profile from the beginning as an order devoted to apostolic activity, especially through missions, and education, which led it to promote new forms of preaching and teaching. Its expansion in the world coincides with the Catholic Counter-Reformation fostered by the Council of Trent (1545–1563), in which the Jesuits had a decisive participation. The growth and expansion of the order in Latin America was rapid and continuous. The first Jesuits arrived in Brazil in 1549, in Peru in 1568, and in Mexico in 1572, and they soon became involved in the main religious, social, economic, and political activities of each region. They founded numerous colleges and residences in the most important cities and dozens of missions, or reducciones, villages among the indigenous populations living on the so-called borderlands of the colonial domains of Spain and Portugal. The several Jesuit establishments in Latin America were territorially organized into provinces, which maintained constant and fluid communication with the headquarters of the order in Rome, where its highest authority, the superior general, resided. Demands by local governments, an increase in the number of operarios, and an expansion of the political and ecclesiastical jurisdictions led to the establishment of new Jesuit provinces in the 17th century, most especially that of Paraguay, which became one of the most famous in Latin America. Each province was staffed by both priests and coadjutor brothers (lay Jesuits who had not completed their training) from different European countries, mainly Spain, as well as Creoles and mestizos born in America. Both internally and externally, the writing of documents of different types served as a central instrument of communication and government of the various Jesuit establishments. This abundance of documents produced is why the corpus of research of the Jesuit order in Latin America is profuse.

Contemporary Indigenous Social and Political Thought

The contemporary continental emergence of a significant number of indigenous intellectuals who have been trained in the academic fields of social sciences (history, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, law, education, etc.) and have continued to be engaged with the social struggles of their ethnic communities of origin is a major sociocultural phenomenon not so well known in Latin America. Beginning in the 1960s, but with a stronger sociopolitical visibility in the 1980s and 1990s, indigenous intellectuals’ production of knowledge has become the backbone of many indigenous movements and proposals in the continent. Just like the booming appearance of modern indigenous literary writers (see Oxford Bibliographies article in Latin American Studies “Indigenous Voices in Literature”), the contemporary rise of indigenous intellectuals has reconceptualized indigenous communitarian worldviews and contributed to the study of their own social realities from their specific needs, cultural perspectives, and native languages. Indigenous intellectuals and scholars have flourished in the early 21st century, transforming knowledge and academic discourses into tools of indigenous cultural self-recognition; criticism of neocolonial forms of subordination and exploitation; and new conceptual ways of understanding history, democracy, communal life, political participation, cultural representation, and our human relationship with nature (Mother Earth). The purpose of this bibliographical essay is to offer an interdisciplinary and continental comprehensive view about these critical reflections, research studies, reports, interviews, essays, testimonies, manifests, discourses, and other conceptual contributions of Latin American indigenous intellectuals and communitarian leaders from the 1960s to the present. I have limited this vast and complex intellectual production to three fundamental indigenous debates: first, the criticism against neocolonialism, racism, and discrimination; second, self-defense of indigenous human rights and pluricultural laws; and, third, the development of judicial systems to protect the rights of Mother Earth—all of which lead to constructing new societies based on universal principles of ethnic diversity, respect for social equality and reciprocity, and living together in harmony. There are many other areas of indigenous sociopolitical production that are not considered here. That is why this study is a modest and preliminary tribute to a long and much more complex indigenous intellectual production that emerges based on exclusion, discrimination, and other forms of social inequality still suffered by many indigenous peoples in Latin America. This essay, thematically organized, provides an inclusive selection of a very heterogeneous spectrum of contemporary Latin American indigenous intellectuals, academics, activists and communitarian leaders, in conjuction with others who have been inspired or influenced by them. The purpose here then is to visibilize these contemporary indigenous authors, thinkers, and activists, even if their ideas, studies, and social reflections can be related to precolonial or colonial times. The strong presence of social leaders such as Berta Cáceres in Honduras, Isildo Beldenegro in Mexico, or José Tendetza in Ecuador, and many many others—some of whom have been killed, tortured, and criminalized— cannot be separated from the concepts and critical studies produced by indigenous intellectuals. I want to thank Agustín Grijalva and Maria Warren for their invaluable help.