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Squaring the Circle: Recent Textbooks on Modern Latin American History

2007; Duke University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2006-134

1527-1900

Jürgen Buchenau,

Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy

Anyone who has taught the second half of the Latin American history survey has faced the daunting task of reconciling the three organizing principles of the course: time, place, and theme. Most course syllabi privilege one of these principles over the others, and at best, instructors manage to incorporate two of them. In courses focused on chronology, students get a good grasp of the broad sweep of Latin American history over time and some salient moments in that history, such as independence; caudillismo and nation building; the era of liberal modernization; populism, revolution, and military regimes; and contemporary Latin America. For such courses, the challenge lies in creating thematic unity and representing regional diversity. Students in courses that privilege geography learn the difference between Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, and they discover that “Latin America” is an imperfect term for a vast and highly diverse area of the world that is home to hundreds of indigenous and creole languages, as well as French, Portuguese, and Spanish. However, these courses are usually no more thematically unified than their chronological counterparts, and students often have trouble comparing historical trends or events across space. Finally, thematic courses offer instructors the opportunity to delve deeply into selected topics such as race, class, gender, or everyday life by picking case studies for analysis across time and space. Many instructors of such courses eschew the idea of teaching a master narrative of Latin American history, or even concepts, events, and people.The authors of Latin American history textbooks face the same three-dimensional challenge as the instructors they hope will adopt these books. Rather than attempting to square the circle, textbook authors have decided to focus on one or — at most — two of the organizing principles of time, place, and theme. Textbook authors are under pressure to expand chronological and geographic coverage, as well as to incorporate cultural and social history into a narrative that has long been dominated by political events and economic trends. As if this were not enough, authors face market pressures as well. The recent boom in the used-book market, abetted by the Internet and nationally networked campus bookstores, has increased the pressure on publishers to provide shorter and less expensive texts, as well as to churn out new editions at an ever-faster pace. Moreover, instructors can choose from a far greater variety of Latin American history textbooks than they could 20 years ago. Driven by burgeoning enrollments in courses on modern Latin American history, this field — once dominated by three text offerings from Brad-ford Burns, Thomas Skidmore and Peter Smith, and Benjamin Keen — now features almost a dozen textbooks, half of which have entered the market in the last ten years.1 By comparison, the choices for the colonial history survey remain limited to Mark Burk-holder and Lyman Johnson’s Colonial Latin America, now in its fifth edition; James Lock-hart’s and Stuart Schwartz’s Early Latin America, still in print after 23 years; Jonathan Brown’s Latin America: A Social History of the Colonial Period; and volume 1 of Cheryl Martin and Mark Wasserman’s recent Latin America and Its People.2This review seeks to provide an overview of the increasingly complex landscape of English-language textbooks on modern Latin American history, with an emphasis on new books and new editions published in the last five years. It includes textbooks devoted solely to the modern period, as well as those focusing on Latin America since independence, with a relatively brief treatment of the precolonial and colonial eras.Chronology remains the most significant organizing principle, and it provides the structure for Bradford Burns and Julie Charlip’s Latin America and John Chasteen’s Born in Blood and Fire. Both of these books include coverage of the pre-Columbian and colonial eras; however, their strength lies in the modern era, making them suitable for either a one-semester survey of Latin America or the second half of the two-semester survey.Latin America: An Interpretive History is the eighth edition of one of the foundational texts in the field. Authored by the late E. Bradford Burns and first published in 1972, the book marks the apex of the dependency paradigm in Latin American historiography, providing a concise and sweeping interpretation focused on the epic struggle between foreign capitalist exploiters and their Latin American allies on the one side and the impoverished masses on the other. As Burns asserted, “poor people inhabit rich lands” because the elites have “tended to confuse their own well being and desires with those of the nation at large” (p. xv). The text works well because of the passion in the author’s voice, providing a provocative synthesis of Latin American history that students can discuss and engage. Burns’s books divides Latin Americans into heroes and villains: the former, those who opposed the encroachment of international capitalism, whether conservative Guatemalan caudillo Rafael Carrera or the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas of Peru; and the latter, the comprador elites in alliance with foreign investors, as well as middle-class Latin Americans seeking to emulate foreign culture. Under Julie Charlip’s editorship, recent editions have downplayed the dependency paradigm in favor of a more nuanced approach, and the eighth edition contains a number of new statistical tables, as well as a new section, “Latin America through Art,” to complement the discussion of the novel as a historical source at the end of the book.Originally published in 2001, John Chasteen’s Born in Blood and Fire is even more concise than Burns and Charlip but far less committed to an interpretive paradigm. Chasteen compares the histories of the largest and most populous Latin American nations — particularly Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico — over time, eschewing full geographical coverage for a discussion of larger historical processes such as caudillismo, modernization, and populism. Cultural and social history is given some attention, and the author weaves other places into his coverage when events there affect the rest of Latin America: for instance, the Venezuelan independence movement or the Cuban Revolution. The beautiful prose, brevity, and reasonable price of this volume has earned it significant market share in the five short years it has been on the market. A second edition appeared in 2006, updated to correct minor factual errors and to bring the book up to the present. A great strength of the book is that it enlivens discussions of broader historical trends with biographical vignettes, cultural trends, and a recurring section at the end of each chapter labeled “Countercurrents.” Because the Chasteen text is highly selective in its coverage, it is more useful as a basic text than as a reference work for students and instructors wishing to find out about lesser-known historical figures, trends, and events.The latest addition to the list of chronologically focused volumes is Cheryl Martin and Mark Wasserman’s Latin America and Its People, published in 2005. The second volume of this short two-volume work analyzes the history of Latin America since 1800. This new text departs from its predecessors in several ways: most importantly, in its attention to social and cultural history as it changed over time. In the words of the authors, the “texture of everyday life” is their “principal focus” (p. xxv). Three of the seven chapters discuss the ways in which ordinary Latin Americans experienced the changing world around them, analyzing issues such as war and society in the era of the caudillos, life on the great estate in the era of modernization, urbanization in the twentieth century, and the globalization of culture. Second, each chapter in the book contains three sections designed to help students “do” history: a “slice of life” illustrating the social issues discussed in the chapter by taking the reader to a specific place and time; a section entitled “How Historians Understand” that details how historians do their work and the ways in which historical knowledge is generated and discussed; and biographical sketches of both ordinary and famous Latin Americans. This is one of the few Latin American history textbooks that effectively incorporates recent research in cultural and social history into its organizational and analytical structure. The authors do so at the expense of a detailed coverage of political and economic developments, the strength of many other textbooks.For instructors who like to structure their course geographically, the choice is Thomas Skidmore and Peter Smith’s Modern Latin America, now in its sixth edition. Originally published in 1984, this classic text gives a brief chronological overview and then devotes most of its space to the recent political and economic histories of seven individual Latin American nations and two multistate regions. Chapters cover Argentina, Brazil, the Caribbean, Central America, Colombia, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, and there is a concluding chapter on U.S. – Latin American relations. As in the Burns text, the dependency paradigm prevails throughout: twentieth-century Latin American nations are victims of global (and particularly U.S.) capitalism, futilely trying to catch up to the technological and financial innovation that keeps the most-developed nations ahead of the pack. Discussions of political structures are detailed and persuasive, and students get a clear picture of the place of Latin American nations in the global economy. The main strength of the volume is its expressly geographic comparisons, in which the authors clearly explain some of the salient differences and similarities among the larger nations of Latin America. It is also more encyclopedic in coverage than either Burns and Charlip or Chasteen and is very useful as a reference work for national economic and political histories. However, the authors include little cultural and social history and do not discuss the relationships between different Latin American nations and societies; nor do they expand upon the larger regional effects of historical processes that originate in one country. For example, the Cuban Revolution had significant repercussions throughout Latin America. Indeed, one cannot understand the rise of both guerrilla warfare and military regimes throughout South America without an appreciation of the tactics of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and the regionwide reaction to those tactics.Two texts — volume 2 of Benjamin Keen and Keith Haynes’s A History of Latin America (now in its seventh edition) and Lawrence Clayton and Michael Conniff’s Modern Latin America (now in its second edition) — combine chronological and geographic approaches, even sprinkling in some thematic chapters. This hybrid structure allows the authors to focus on broad trends across the region for the first century following independence and then to treat the nation-state in the period of its full emergence after 1910.Like Burns and Charlip or Skidmore and Smith, the Keen and Haynes text is one of the classics in the field, and like them, A History of Latin America follows the dependency paradigm. In the preface to the seventh edition, Keith Haynes (who took over the preparation of new editions after Keen’s death) defends the dependency focus by pointing to the enormous economic and social costs of neoliberalism and late-stage globalization throughout the region. Volume 2 of this text provides relatively brief coverage on the nineteenth century and a much more detailed discussion of the twentieth century. Two chapters compare and contrast the histories of major Latin American nations in the first and second half of the nineteenth century, respectively. While previous editions limited themselves to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, the latest edition also includes very brief overviews of the histories of Central America, Colombia, Cuba, Peru, and Venezuela. A separate chapter analyzes nineteenth-century society and culture. The first eight chapters on the twentieth century are national and regional histories similar to those in Skidmore and Smith, followed by one chapter on U.S. – Latin American relations and one on society and culture. The text includes more social history than either Burns/Charlip or Skidmore/Smith, although the discussion of social issues remains subordinated to a larger concern with political economy. The book features a great amount of detail, some of it overwhelming, and it is not an easy read. It is particularly useful for those instructors who use a textbook for its value as a reference work, a resource to allow students to deepen their understanding of class lectures.Clayton and Conniff’s Modern Latin America follows a different approach. First published in 1998, the text does not follow the dependency paradigm but instead advertises itself as rich in biographical detail and employing narrative style rather than the “social science jargon” (p. xiii) that, in the authors’ opinion, characterizes the competition. Indeed, the book is quite easy to follow, sacrificing an overarching analytical framework for the sake of stories, anecdotes, and biographical sketches. Each chapter begins with a document introducing the topic discussed in that chapter. The second edition features access to InfoTrac College Edition, an online database and a starting point for research into paper topics for students. The book gives greater attention to the nineteenth century, which accounts for 11 out of 26 chapters. The first four chapters on the twentieth century are comparative, analyzing topics such as early populism, Caribbean dictatorships, and revolutionary movements in Mexico. Sometimes, the comparison creates quite odd groupings of countries, such as Panama, Brazil, and Peru in chapter 14, where modernization and political centralization provide very tenuous grounds for comparison. The period between 1930 and approximately 1950 is discussed in topical chapters on the Great Depression, race and gender, World War II, and classic populism. The final section, on post–World War II trends, starts with four geographically organized chapters on Mexico, Colombia, the Caribbean, and Cuba and ends with three chronological chapters on the national security states, democratization, and the neoliberal era. The book is strongest in its use of themes, such as populism and ideologies of race, that serve to highlight similarities and differences between different Latin American countries. It is less successful in its treatment of social history, and it puts great emphasis on the role of individuals in history: for instance, the first five subsections of the chapter on postwar Mexico bear the names of the country’s five presidents between 1946 and 1976.There are only two thematically organized textbooks on the market: William Beezley and Colin MacLachlan’s Latin America: The Peoples and Their History and Peter Winn’s Americas. In its second edition, Beezley and MacLachlan’s text neither attempts to provide coverage of the most important political and economic events nor aims to achieve geographical coverage. Instead, the book contrasts popular and elite histories across time through an analysis of several significant themes. After an opening chapter on indigenous and colonial legacies, the book introduces the reader to politics, traditional and modern economies, society and everyday life, religious practices, cultural history, urban history, environmental history, and Latin America in its global context. The volume is rich in issues ignored by most other texts, such as discussions of festivals, sports, and outdoor religious ceremonies. Instructors looking for the familiar array of names, dates, and great events in Latin American history will be disappointed; instead, this volume is at its best in its analysis of everyday life, its exploration of the meaning of seemingly ordinary events for the people participating in them, and in its comparison of elite and popular visions and perceptions over a long period of time.Winn’s book, by contrast, is a companion volume to a PBS TV series available on VHS from the Annenberg/CPB Collection. Like previous editions, the third edition takes the present as its point of departure in order to delve into historical analyses of identities, politics, economics, and culture. Separate chapters analyze themes such as economic development in Argentina; Latin American revolutions in Mexico, Central America, Cuba, and Peru; the changing role of indigenous people; change and continuity in religion, particularly in Brazil and Nicaragua; women’s history in Chile; race and ethnic relations in Bolivia, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic; cultural identity in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Puerto Rico; and the influence of the United States, both as a superpower and as a destination for Latin American (and particularly Mexican) immigrants. Compared to the first and second editions, the third edition provides an update to include the rise of neopopulist regimes in South America in recent years. The volume works very well if the instructor assigns all ten of the 30-minute videos, but it is less useful on its own. Its particular strength is in the twentieth century, making it a good choice for courses that focus on the recent history of Latin America.In conclusion, the landscape of survey texts in modern Latin American history has changed significantly in the past ten years. While three books informed by the dependency paradigm once dominated the field, the newer textbooks — and even some of the new editions of older texts — have begun to emphasize the lived experience of the Latin American peoples over analysis at the macroeconomic and political levels. As a whole, the textbooks available still lag behind the scholarship they seek to assimilate, in part because a history of everyday life and ordinary people across a vast region of the world is a more difficult undertaking than a narrative of political events framed in an analysis of political economy. In addition, textbook authors continue to struggle with the fundamental challenge of reconciling the dimensions of time, space, and theme. At the very least, however, instructors and students can now choose from an array of textbooks that utilize different organizational principles and emphases.I acknowledge the inspiration provided by my friend and colleague at UNC Charlotte, Lyman Johnson, with whom I have sustained an ongoing dialogue over the past seven years regarding the teaching of Latin American history.