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This unique reader offers an engaging collection of essays that highlight the diversity of Latin America's cultural expressions from independence to the present. Exploring such themes and events as funerals, dance and music, letters and literature, spectacles and monuments, and world's fairs and food, a group of leading historians examines the ways that a wide range of individuals with a variety of motives attempted to forge identity, turn the world upside down, mock their betters, forget their troubles through dance, express love in letters, and altogether enjoy life. Drawing on a rich array of case studies, this text introduces the complexity of motives behind and the diversity of expression of popular culture in Latin America.
List of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Piety and Public Space: The Cemetery Campaign in Veracruz, 1789-1810
Pamela Voekel
Chapter 2: Church, Humboldt, and Darwin: The Tension and Harmony of Art and Science
Stephen Jay Gould
Chapter 3: Black Kings, Blackface Carnival, and Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Tango
John Charles Chasteen
Chapter 4: "Cartas y cartas, compadre . . . .": Love and other letters from Río Frío
William E. French
Chapter 5: Peddling the Pampas: Argentina at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889
Ingrid E. Fey
Chapter 6: Death and Disorder in Mexico City: The State Funeral of Manuel Romero Rubio
Matthew D. Esposito
Chapter 7: Images of Indians in the Construction of Ecuadorian Identity at the End of the Nineteenth Century
Blanca Muratorio
Chapter 8: Many Chefs in the National Kitchen: Cookbooks and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
Jeffrey M. Pilcher
Chapter 9: The New Order: Diversions and Modernization in Turn-of-the-Century Lima
Fanni Muñoz Cabrejo
Chapter 10: From the Ruins of the Ancien Régime: Mexico's Monument to the Revolution
Thomas L. Benjamin
Chapter 11: Racial Parity and National Humor: Carmen Miranda's Samba Performances, 1930-1939
Darién J. Davis
Chapter 12: Oil, Race, and Calypso in Trinidad and Tobago, 1909-1990
Graham E. L. Holton
Chapter 13: The Dictator's Seduction: Gender and State Spectacle during the Trujillo Regime
Lauren H. Derby
Chapter 14: En el corazón del pueblo: Pedro Infante's Funeral, the Pueblo Motif, and the Contest over his Legacy
Sal Acosta
Chapter 15: Nostalgia for the Future: The New Song Movement in Nicaragua
Janet L. Sturman
About the author
William H. Beezley received the Ohtli medal from the Mexican government in 2017 in recognition of his contributions to the nation’s history and culture. He teaches at the University of Arizona and is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford Research Encyclopedia for Latin America. He is the author of Judas at the Jockey Club, Mexican National Identity: Memories, Innuendos, and Popular Culture, and such fundamental anthologies as A Handbook of Mexican History and Culture and The Oxford History of Mexico He has authored or edited over twenty-five additional books, including Mexico--the Essentials, Oxford History of Mexico, Mexicans in Revolution, Latin American Popular Culture: An Introduction, and the volumes of The Human Tradition in Latin America. His books have been translated into Spanish and Mandarin.
