Duke University Press Log

Paraguay's History of Immigration Schemes

Paraguay, usually far from the front pages of American and European newspapers, has been featured in a spate of articles in the New York Times recently. Reporter Simon Romero has been in the country covering the presidential election, recently won by tobacco magnate Horacio Cartes. Paraguay's economy is growing, Romero reports, but more than 30% of the citizens still live in poverty. Andrew Nickson, co-editor of the new book The Paraguay Reader, is quoted in the article. “Nearly all of the growth is driven by highly mechanized agriculture, which generates few jobs for the population,” he says. “With a government that finances itself largely through value-added taxes and taxes on imports, you have a situation rather like a low-income African country.”

Romero also investigates the history of Paraguay in a fascinating article about one of the many immigration schemes in Paraguay in the nineteenth century. He reports on Nueva Germania, a consciously racist community founded by German immigrants in 1887. He mentions in passing other colonies of the period: Nueva Australia; Colonia Villa Alborada, founded by Finnish vegetarians; and Victorious Holy Place, set up by Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church. If reading these articles about Paraguay's fascinating history has left you wanting to dig deeper, check out The Paraguay Reader. In it you can read an excerpt from the account of Annie Elizabeth Kennett, one of the "Lincolnshire Farmers" who emigrated to Paraguay from London in 1872. Andrew Nickson and his co-editor Peter Lambert find the tale of the Lincolnshire farmers  to be one of the most bizarre in Paraguayan history. Here is their introduction to Kennett's account:

The first postwar government tried to raise funds for reconstruction by launching a bond issue on the London market. But the Paraguayan consul in London, Máximo Terrero, and the brokers Robinson, Fleming and Co. diverted part of the proceeds from the sale of bonds to finance an emigration scheme to Paraguay in the hope that publicity about the scheme—by suggesting that Paraguay was an excellent place for British colonization—would keep up the price of the bonds. Stories were planted in the London press suggesting that the colonists were farmers from Lincolnshire, at the time one of the most prosperous agricultural regions of England. In fact they were mainly impoverished families from London and northern Germany. The scheme was a shocking indictment of how the urban poor were used as pawns by international financiers during the Victorian period. Three ships left England in October–November 1872 carrying a total of 888 emigrants to Paraguay, of whom 336 were children.

On arrival in Asunción, they were disowned by the Paraguayan government, as well as by Robinson, Fleming and Co. Eventually over 700 colonists were sent to the village of Itapé, and 140 others to the village of Itá. Mr. Seymour, the representative of Robinson, Fleming and Co., described them as “paupers, mostly from large cities, and totally incapable of living in the countryside—tailors, shoemakers, watchmakers, cane-makers and from all kinds of trades except farming.” Housed in tents located in “a low place partially underwater when it rained,” they suffered so much from fever that by the time the Italian consul visited them in June 1873 “the number of graves was equal to the number of those alive.” In the end, the British colony in Buenos Aires collected £1,800 for a “rescue fund” and at the end of 1873, the survivors were brought down from Paraguay by ship. (p. 138)

Anyone wanting to learn more about Paraguay should pick up a copy of The Paraguay Reader. Until May 15, 2013 U.S. and Canadian readers can purchase it for 50% off during our Spring Sale.

Indigenous Rights and the Environment in Mexico's Colorado Delta

Today's New York Times science section covers the efforts of Mexico to relieve the parched Colorado River delta, deprived of water by dams upstream in the U.S. Sixty years ago, the river flowed freely into the Gulf of California, creating a rich estuary where shrimp, fish, and dolphins were abundant. But during the second half of the twentieth century, the U.S. damned the river and diverted it to supply water for agriculture and a growing population and the delta is now mostly a dry, cracked wasteland. An amendment to a treaty between the two countries should lead to more water sharing over the next five year. Perhaps hardest hit by the lack of water in the region has been the local Cucapá indigenous people, who had long survived by fishing in the Delta. In her new book Where the River Ends: Contested Indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta, Shaylih Muehlmann talks about how the Mexican government has also diverted water away from the lands of the Cucapá, preventing them from earning a livelihood. When the Cucapá fish anyway, they are pressured by federal inspectors to stop, and are blamed for the ecological damage in the region. Muehlmann writes, "The Cucapá people have experienced the brunt of the environmental damage done to the delta, while simultaneously being targeted as objects of intervention because of their alleged blame in the crisis. As is always the case in narratives that blame the victim, this focus exonerates the more powerful political actors and institutions that have prevented the Colorado River from reaching the Sea of Cortez. This ethnographic case, therefore, illustrates how environmental conflicts are never just about 'the environment.'" (172) Where the River Ends is a moving look at how the Cucapá people have experienced and responded to the diversion of the Colorado River and the Mexican state's attempts to regulate the environmental crisis that followed. It's available for 50% off during our Spring Sale.

Duke Press Authors on the Venezuelan Elections

The Venezuelan elections were held yesterday, April 14, and it now appears that Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez’s handpicked political heir, has won. Duke Univerisity Press authors blanketed the media this weekend talking about the elections and the future of Venezuela.

George Ciccariello-Maher's We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution is just out and he is burning up Twitter and the airwaves. He appeared on Al-Jazeera, Russia Today, and on BBC Radio 5. In an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, he debunks five common myths about Venezuela. In Counterpunch, he compared reactions to the deaths of Chávez and Margaret Thatcher. He was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the Miami Herald, and Brazil's InterJournal. 

Sujatha Fernandes, author of Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela is quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, discussing the importance of women in Venezuelan politics. “Chávez made popular women central protagonists in his politics,” she says. "It was really important in giving women a sense of what they could achieve in life." She also appeared on NY1.

Miguel Tinker Salas, author of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela, appeared on a panel with filmmaker Oliver Stone at a special screening of his film on Hugo Chávez. Salas commented on the importance of this election and the future of Venezuela: “What’s at stake is really two different visions of Venezuela, two different visions of Latin America, and two different visions of how the north and the south should relate to each other. Fundamentally what’s at stake here is control over the largest oil reserve in the world,” he said. Tinker Salas also appared on the PBS News Hour, Russia Today, Al-Jazeera, Telemundo, Pacifica, Telesur, and CCTV.

David Smilde, co-editor of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy: Participation, Politics, and Culture under Chávez, liveblogged the elections yesterday, calling the results "a devastating victory" for Maduro. "It leaves him weakened within his own coalition and facing an emboldened opposition," he writes. Smilde appeared on BBC Radio 5, Latin Pulse at Link TV, and on Al-Jazeera discussing the elections.

And don't forget, these books and all in-stock books are on sale for 50% off until May 15, 2013!

 

 

Mexico's Religious Question: Ben Fallaw on Catholicism and the State

As millions of Catholics in Latin American prepare to celebrate Easter under a new Pope, we're pleased to present a guest post by Ben Fallaw, Colby College professor of Latin American Studies and author of the new book Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico and Cárdenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán. 

Eleven years ago, I went to Mexico City to research Mexico’s “religious question” of the 1930s:  the political role of the Church after an anticlerical revolution in a Catholic country. Not long after I arrived, the city virtually shut down as millions flocked to greet Pope John Paul II.  He came to canonize Juan Diego, the Nahua
shepherd who witnessed the Virgin of Guadalupe’s apparition in 1531. A few weeks later, my archival work uncovered why the campaign to make Juan Diego a saint was championed by Bishop José de Jesús Manríquez beginning in 1939. Manríquez and his priests had just beaten back attempts by federal teachers to turn his diocese of Huejutla (Hidalgo state) into a revolutionary laboratory for land reform and indigenous empowerment. For them, Juan Diego symbolized the pure “Indian Church” menaced by “the Beast” of the state. This was but one of many historical connections between Mexico’s postrevolutionary religious question and Church-state tensions today. 

Two months after the publication of Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico, Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the first Latin American pope. North Americans (non-Catholics among them) celebrated the choice, lauding the Argentine’s simplicity, devotion to the poor, and New World origins. The latter was hard to miss: the backdrop for an early public appearance as Francis I featured a large image of la Guadalupuana. Reaction to Francis I in Latin America was much more divided. 

While some North Americans see Bergoglio as a fierce critic of what John Paul II famously called savage capitalism, many Latin Americans see in him a bitter foe of the new left. Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is a nemesis of the IMF, but she also championed birth control and marriage equality. Bergoglio denounced the latter as “a destructive attack on God’s plan.” They and their supporters often view each other through the lens of history: Fernández remembered the silence of the Argentine Church’s hierarchy during the Cold War dictatorship, Conservative Catholics charged Fernández was prejudiced by leftist anti-Catholicism dating back to the nineteenth century. The conflict has underscored the Latin American Church’s paradoxical position as an institution both non-partisan and politicized, both very influential yet feeling persecuted by the postcolonial state.   In Mexico, I chronicle how the postrevolutionary state’s consolidation created many lingering historical grievances among Catholics. For instance, Bishop Manríquez’s counterrevolutionary jeremiads were provoked in part by federal teachers’ destruction of hundreds of sacred images in Huejutla on 3 June 1935.

Of course, Mexico in the 1930s and Argentina today are profoundly different. Among other things, Argentine Catholics never rebelled against a revolutionary state as did Mexico’s cristeros in the late 1920s. Nevertheless, the election of Francis I has reopened wounds in Mexico, too. Some are quite recent. As I was writing the conclusion to Religion and State Formation in August 2010, the mayor of Mexico City sued the Archbishop of Guadalajara for libel after the prelate denounced legalization of same-sex marriage in the capital, and the press was reporting on the jailing of six young women charged with seeking abortions in the conservative Catholic state of Guanajuato. Just last year, the PRI, the party that claims to have institutionalized the revolution, returned to the presidency a dozen years after its presumed demise in part by courting important bishops. At the moment, new president Enrique Peña Nieto is negotiating with the Vatican, reportedly offering the return of Church influence over public schools in return for a visit by Francis I.

The PRI’s willingness to abandon its heritage of revolutionary secularization in return for political advantage reflects one of Religion and State Formation’s main concerns: the ability of Catholics and Catholicism to impede the revolutionary transformation of society in the 1930s. The Church refused to allow a political party or insurgency to act in its name. However its organizational matrix, its ideology, and its lay (and in a few cases clerical) leadership galvanized grassroots-level resistance to postrevolutionary state-making. The Vatican endorsed this “radial strategy” which successfully turned much of Mexican civil society against the revolutionary state, but it was in many ways a strategy that emerged from the base. In Campeche, caciques led syncretic gremios (confraternities) to oppose peasant cooperatives and elect sympathetic candidates. In Guerrero, Catholic women mobilized male voters, and catechists and priests convinced peasants to reject federal teachers and land reform. Some even supported the sporadic attacks against schools and ejidos (land grants) termed the Second Cristero War (c.1932-38). In Guanajuato, congressman and army reserve officer Salvador Azaña collaborated with cristero insurgents, catechists and allied politics to block agrarian reform.  Again and again, the Church’s radial strategy stymied revolutionary change.

  Historians long assumed that President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) put to rest Mexico’s vexing
religious question though negotiation and compromise with Catholics, ending anticlerical regulations in return for Catholic support. I found that the clergy and much of the laity saw Cárdenas’s détente as the opportunity for a strategic shift rather than acquiescence to the postrevolutionary regime’s hegemony.   After 1940, Catholic leaders formed the right-of-center opposition party known as the PAN that eventually ousted the PRI from the presidency in 2000. The Church also “rechristianized” Mexican society in part by encouraging Catholics to marry sacramentally, zealously defending its social teachings from a state still seen as anti-Catholic. Indeed, Catholics opposed federal schooling because it was coeducational and allegedly mandated sexual education.

Seen in this light, contemporary Church-state tensions in Argentina and in Mexico result not just from national traumas like the Dirty War and the Mexican Revolution but also from deeper conflicts over the definition of marriage and human  sexuality. The direction and outcome of these conflicts has profoundly shaped and will continue to profoundly shape everyday life and politics in the region. In many ways the Church in Latin America prevailed for close to two centuries.  Under Francis I it confronts an uncertain future, one clouded by the same problems that beset the Church in Europe and North America as well as the region’s unresolved religious questions.

 

Duke Authors on the Death of Hugo Chávez

Several Duke authors have been active in the media since the death of Hugo Chávez on March 5. 

George Ciccariello-Maher, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drexel University, is the author of We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution, which will be out next month. He appeared on Al Jazzeera yesterday, and on RT's Crosstalk today. He is quoted in the French paper Libération. In a new review in The New Republic, Dorothy Kronick calls Ciccariello-Maher's book "essential to understanding the Chávez era." Read his piece "Preparing for a post-Chávez Venezuela" on Counterpunch. Follow him on Twitter @ciccmaher.

Miguel Tinker Salas is the author of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela. Born in a Venezuelan oil camp, Tinker Salas is now Professor of History at Pomona College. This week he has appeared on PRI's The World and Democracy Now!. He is quoted in the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and Business Insider.  

 

Sujatha Fernandes, Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela. She is also quoted in the Los Angeles Times and was interviewed on KPFK's "Hiphop and Politics." Catch her this weekend on MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes. 

 

 

Greg Grandin, Professor of History at NYU, is author of The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation and co-editor of The Guatemala Reader and A Century of Revolution. His article in The Nation "On the Legacy of Hugo Chávez," has been much-circulated and discussed. And, he very kindly calls out the work of the above authors!

Books on Chávez and Venezuela

What lies ahead for Venezuela after the death of president Hugo Chávez? To understand Venezuela's history, culture, and politics at this crucial crossroads, check out these books.

We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution by George Ciccariello-Maher will be out this May. It provides a broad, nuanced account of Chávez’s rise to power and the years of activism that preceded it. Based on interviews with grassroots organizers, former guerrillas, members of neighborhood militias, and government officials, Ciccariello-Maherpresents a new history of Venezuelan political activism, one told from below.

In Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela, Sujatha Fernandes also looks at Chávez’s poor supporters in the barrios of Caracas. Her widely-praised book portrays everyday life and politics in the shantytowns of Caracas through accounts of community-based radio, barrio
assemblies, and popular fiestas, and the many interviews she conducted with activists and government officials. Listen here to a recent interview with Fernandes and Miguel Tinker Salas on KALW's "Your Call."

In The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela, historian Miguel Tinker Salas examines the role of oil in Venezuela's economy. He traces the historyof the oil industry’s rise in Venezuela from the beginning of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to the experiences and perceptions of industry employees, both foreign and Venezuelan. His interest in how oil suffused the consciousness of Venezuela is personal: Tinker Salas was born and raised in one of its oil camps.

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy, edited by David Smilde, Daniel Hellinger, brings together a variety of perspectives on participation and democracy in Venezuela. An interdisciplinary group of contributors focuses on the everyday lives of Venezuelans, examining the forms of participation that have emerged in communal councils, cultural activities, blogs, community media, and several other forums.

Looking much further back at Venezuela's history is a special issue of the journal Ethnohistory, Colonial Transformations in Venezuela: Anthropology, Archaeology, and History, edited by Berta E. Pérez. Contributors employ the tools of history, anthropology and ethnology to address the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in Venezuela. It examines various aspects of the Venezuelan oral-based cultures—including religion, gender, and trade—and argue that the
indigenous and black populations were never "cultural islands"—neither before nor after European penetration.

Duke Authors at the 2013 AHA Convention

We're back from the American Historical Association annual meeting in New Orleans, where we had a great time selling books and meeting authors. Some of our biggest selling titles were Bourdieu and Historical Analysis by Philip S. Gorski, A Primer for Teaching World History by Antoinette Burton, and C.L.R. James's play Toussaint Louverture. You can continue to order these and other history titles at the conference discount by using the code DEXH131B when you place an order on our website.

Check out some of our authors with their books.

J. T. Way, author of The Mayan in the Mall.

 

A. Ricardo López and Barbara Weinstein with their new collection The Making of the Middle Class.

 

 

Leon Fink, editor of the journal Labor.  

 

 

 

Andor Skotnes, author of A New Deal for All? 

 

 

John Mckiernan-González, author of Fevered Measures.

 

William Marotti, author of Money, Trains, and Guillotines.

 

Peter H. Sigal, author of The Flower and the Scorpion.

 

 

 

Many thanks to Michael McCullough for taking these photos. Check out a few more on our Facebook page. 

 

 

Tijuana's Expanding Art Scene

Has this weekend's New York Times article about traveling to Tijuana got you dreaming of a visit? Sam Lubell writes that while parts of Tijuana do live up to the city's seedy reputation, it has a thriving culture industry. "In this chaotic, messy, visceral place," he writes, "the resurgence has been from the ground up, and art has landed in unexpected places." In their book Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border, Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo collect essays about Tijuana's art, architecture, music, film, novels and poetry. Taken together, the selections present a kaleidoscopic portrait of a major border city in the age of globalization. It would be a great read before a trip to the city, or it can transport you there from your armchair if you can't actually visit. Kun and Montezemolo will be holding a book event at the Festival Tijuana Internzona on October 20.  You can read an excerpt from the book here, and see some photographs from the book by Ingrid Hernández here. As Kun and Montezemolo say in their introduction, "Welcome to (a new) Tijuana."

Books Inspire Art

We're very pleased that two of our books have recently inspired exciting artistic projects. 

If you're in New York City next Friday, June 8, you can catch a staged reading of The Hopefulness of Esperanza, a play by Raquel Almazán which was inspired by Denise Brennan's 2004 book What's Love Got to Do with It?: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic. The play is about two Dominican sisters, sex workers, who stow away on a cargo ship from the Dominican Republic to France. It transpires entirely inside a storage container in which they are slowly suffocating to death. After the reading there will be a Q&A with Almazán and Brennan. Click here to make reservations for free tickets to the show at the Studio Theater on 42nd Street.

 

Enda Duffy's book The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (2009) recently inspired an art installation by Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec entitled "City Velocities-Body Speeds." The project involved measuring velocities of several trams in Amsterdam, streaming the data to the exhibition space in real time, and recreating them by several powerful fans. Visitors stood among the fans and experienced the feeling of the trams' actual speed. The exhbition was part of the Dutch arts festival Sonic Arts, and Duffy was pleased to give a talk during the festival. He noted that the tram operators, initially skeptical about the project, were invited to the exhibition and found it quite interesting.

 

Congratulations to Our Award-Winning Authors

At this weekend's Latin American Studies Association conference, several of our books were honored with awards. Michelle Bigenho's Intimate Distance: Andean Music in Japan has won the Book Award from the LASA Section for Asia and the Americas. Paul Eiss has been awarded the LASA Mexico Section Book Award for his book In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community, and the Politics of History in Yucatan. Jerry Dávila's Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950-1980 has won the LASA Brazil Section Book Award. The Brazil section also awared Amy Chazkel Honorable Mention for her book Laws of Chance: Brazil's Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life. And Kathryn Burns received Honorable Mention for the LASA Bryce Wood Award for her book Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru. 

Our authors were also honored at the Association of Asian Studies conference in March. Eleana Kim won the James Palais book prize from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies for her book Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging. Yomi Braester's Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract was awarded the AAS China and Inner Asia Council (CIAC) Levenson Prize for Books in Chinese Studies. And Karen Strassler's Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java has won the AAS Southeast Asia Council Harry J. Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies. 

We also congratulate Carolyn Dean for winning the Association for Latin American Art Book Award for her book A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock. And Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism has won the 2012 René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association. The 2012 Joel Gregory Prize from the Canadian Association of African Studies was awarded to Vinh-Kim Nguyen for his book The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa's Time of AIDS. And Sukanya Banerjee's Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late Victorian Empire has won the Northeast Victorian Studies Association Sonya Rudikoff Award for the best Victorian book by a first-time author.

Congratulations to all our award-winning authors!