Rediscovering The Past at Mexico's Periphery

Rediscovering The Past at Mexico's Periphery
Author: Gilbert M. Joseph
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2003-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0817350675

Surveys major trends in Yucatán’s currents in Mexican historiography, and suggest new departures for regional and local-level research Increasingly, the modern era of Mexican history (c. 1750 to the present) is attracting the attention of Mexican and international scholars. Significant studies have appeared for most of the major regions and Yucatán, in particular, has generated an unusual appeal and an abundant scholarship. This book surveys major trends in Yucatán’s currents in Mexican historiography, and suggest new departures for regional and local-level research. Rather than compiling lists of sources around given subject headings in the manner of many historiographies, the author seeks common ground for analysis in the new literature’s preoccupation with changing relations of land, labor, and capital and their impact on regional society and culture. Joseph proposes a new periodization of Yucatán’s modern history which he develops in a series of synthetic essays rooted in regional political economy.

Outside the Hacienda Walls

Outside the Hacienda Walls
Author: Allan Meyers
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2012-03-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816529957

The Mexican Revolution was a tumultuous struggle for social and political reform that ousted an autocrat and paved the way for a new national constitution. The conflict, however, came late to Yucatán, where a network of elite families with largely European roots held the reins of government. This privileged group reaped spectacular wealth from haciendas, cash-crop plantations tended by debt-ridden servants of Maya descent. When a revolutionary army from central Mexico finally gained a foothold in Yucatán in 1915, the local custom of agrarian servitude met its demise. Drawing on a dozen years of archaeological and historical investigation, Allan Meyers breaks new ground in the study of Yucatán haciendas. He explores a plantation village called San Juan Bautista Tabi, which once stood at the heart of a vast sugar estate. Occupied for only a few generations, the village was abandoned during the revolutionary upheaval. Its ruins now lie within a state-owned ecological reserve. Through oral histories, archival records, and physical remains, Meyers examines various facets of the plantation landscape. He presents original data and fresh interpretations on settlement organization, social stratification, and spatial relationships. His systematic approach to "things underfoot," small everyday objects that are now buried in the tropical forest, offers views of the hacienda experience that are often missing in official written sources. In this way, he raises the voices of rural, mostly illiterate Maya speakers who toiled as laborers. What emerges is a portrait of hacienda social life that transcends depictions gleaned from historical methods alone. Students, researchers, and travelers to Mexico will all find something of interest in Meyers's lively presentation. Readers will see the old haciendas—once forsaken but now experiencing a rebirth as tourist destinations—in a new light. These heritage sites not only testify to social conditions that prevailed before the Mexican Revolution, but also remind us that the human geography of modern Yucatán is as much a product of plantation times as it is of more ancient periods.

Fragments of a Golden Age

Fragments of a Golden Age
Author: Gilbert M. Joseph
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 534
Release: 2001-06-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822327189

DIVThe first cultural history of post-1940s Mexico to relate issues of representation and meaning to questions of power; it includes essays on popular music, unions, TV, tourism, cinema, wrestling, and illustrated magazines./div

Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648-1812

Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648-1812
Author: Robert Patch
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 1994-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804765642

A study of the development of human society in Yucatan during the colonial period, this book poses a challenge to a variety of accepted views, including the notion that Yucatan was largely isolated from the main part of Spain's New World empire and thus from international markets and the world economy - an isolation often cited as the principal reason for the extended survival of indigenous culture in the region. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Yucatan society was composed of both Maya and Spanish commonwealths, each with its own economic, social, and political organization. This book represents several new departures, both for what is known about colonial Yucatan and for colonial Latin American history in general. It forces the reader to rethink much of the received knowledge about acculturation, the hacienda, and inter-regional relations.

Mexico in the 1940s

Mexico in the 1940s
Author: Stephen R. Niblo
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 440
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780842027953

This title examines Mexican politics in the wake of Cardenismo, and the dawn of Miguel Aleman's presidency. This new book focuses on the decade of the 1940s, and analyzes Alcmanismo into the early years of the 1950s. Based upon a decade of intensive investigation, it is the first broad and substantial study of the political life of the Mexican nation during this period, thus opening a new era to historical investigation. Analytical yet lively, mixing political and cultural history, Mexico in the 1940s captures the humor, passion, and significance of Mexico during the World War II and post-war years when Mexicans entered the era called "the miracle" because of the nation's economic growth and political stability. Niblo develops the case that the Mexico of today -- politically and executively centralized, stressing business and industry, corrupt, ignoring the needs of the majority of the population -- has its roots in the decade and a half after 1940. Finally, Mexico in the 1940s offers a unique interpretation of Mexican domestic politics in this period, including an explanation of how political leaders were able to reverse the course of the Mexican Revolution in the 1940s; an original interpretation of corruption in Mexican political life, a phenomenon that did not end in the 1940s; and an analysis of the relationship between the U.S. media interests, the Mexican state and the Mexican media companies that still dominate mass communication today.

Monumental Ambivalence

Monumental Ambivalence
Author: Lisa C. Breglia
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2009-12-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292783280

From ancient Maya cities in Mexico and Central America to the Taj Mahal in India, cultural heritage sites around the world are being drawn into the wave of privatization that has already swept through such economic sectors as telecommunications, transportation, and utilities. As nation-states decide they can no longer afford to maintain cultural properties—or find it economically advantageous not to do so in the globalizing economy—private actors are stepping in to excavate, conserve, interpret, and represent archaeological and historical sites. But what are the ramifications when a multinational corporation, or even an indigenous village, owns a piece of national patrimony which holds cultural and perhaps sacred meaning for all the country's people, as well as for visitors from the rest of the world? In this ambitious book, Lisa Breglia investigates "heritage" as an arena in which a variety of private and public actors compete for the right to benefit, economically and otherwise, from controlling cultural patrimony. She presents ethnographic case studies of two archaeological sites in the Yucatán Peninsula—Chichén Itzá and Chunchucmil and their surrounding modern communities—to demonstrate how indigenous landholders, foreign archaeologists, and the Mexican state use heritage properties to position themselves as legitimate "heirs" and beneficiaries of Mexican national patrimony. Breglia's research masterfully describes the "monumental ambivalence" that results when local residents, excavation laborers, site managers, and state agencies all enact their claims to cultural patrimony. Her findings make it clear that informal and partial privatizations—which go on quietly and continually—are as real a threat to a nation's heritage as the prospect of fast-food restaurants and shopping centers in the ruins of a sacred site.

Murder in Mérida, 1792

Murder in Mérida, 1792
Author: Mark W. Lentz
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826359620

During the summer of 1792, a man wearing the rough garb of a vaquero stepped out of the night shadows of Mérida, Yucatan, and murdered the province’s top royal official, don Lucas de Gálvez. This book recounts the mystery of the Gálvez murder and its resolution, an event that captured contemporaries’ imaginations throughout the Hispanic world and caused consternation on the part of authorities in both Mexico and Madrid. In this work Lentz further provides a readable introduction to the Bourbon Reforms as well as new insights on late colonial Yucatecan society through the vast depictions of the cross-section of Yucatecan people questioned during the decade it took to uncover the assassin’s identity. These suspects and witnesses, from all walks of life, reveal the interconnected layers found in colonial Yucatecan society and the social networks of Mérida’s urban underclass as well as their unexpected ties to the creole elites and rural Mayas that have previously been unexplored.

Unbecoming Modern

Unbecoming Modern
Author: Saurabh Dube
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2019-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429648693

In this volume well-known scholars from India and Latin America – Enrique Dussel, Madhu Dubey, Walter D. Mignolo, and Sudipta Sen, to name a few – discuss the concepts of modernity and colonialism and describe how the two relate to each other. This second edition to the volume comes with a new introduction which extends and critically supplements the discussion in the earlier introduction to the volume. It explores the vital impact of the colonial pasts of India, Mexico, China, and even the Unites States, on the processes through which these countries have become modern. The collection is unique, as it brings together a range of disciplines and perspectives. The topics discussed include the Zapatista movement in Southern Mexico, the image of the South in recent African-American literature, the theories of Andre Gunder Frank about the early modernization of Asian countries, and the contradictions of the colonial state in India.

Moral Ecology of a Forest

Moral Ecology of a Forest
Author: José E. Martínez-Reyes
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2016-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816531374

Conclusion. Conservation Rebels: Blocking Land Grabs, Post-Conservation, and Decolonizing Coloniality -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Mayan People Within and Beyond Boundaries

Mayan People Within and Beyond Boundaries
Author: Peter Hervik
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2013-12-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 113539296X

Mayan People Within and Beyond Boundaries explores the Maya of Yucatan, the Maya of academic institutions and the Maya of the tourist industry. It examines the interplay between the local and the external, academic categories of the Maya, and seeks to transcend the paradoxical and incongruent relationship between the social spaces that breathe life into the categories. The notion of "shared social experience" is introduced to embody a focus on reflexivity that goes beyond the subjective position of the author and helps demystify the coexisting subjectivities characteristic of ethnographic fieldwork. It provides a basis for overcoming the exclusive focus on "author," " text," and "discourse" in contemporary postmodernist ethnography, while still conveying important ethnographic information.