1

The History of Latin America, 1500 to the present day

Paper Convenor Dr Gabriela Ramos
This paper offers an overview of the most relevant issues shaping the history of Latin America from the
time before European arrival in the fifteenth century to the present. The paper studies the complex
interface between the region and the global processes that have outlined its history. Through the study of
specific cases we aim to understand the experience of individuals, groups, and nations as they dealt with
internally grown affairs and the global scene. The programme of lectures aims to present a broad range of
themes that include the multifaceted character of colonialism, the crucial role of religion, the pervasiveness
of ideas and practices about race and racism, diverse experiences of reform, revolution, and dictatorship,
the Cold War, and the present challenges the region faces at a juncture of significant economic growth
paired with the worlds deepest social inequalities. We approach these questions chiefly through the lens
of history, but will also make use of contributions from other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology,
and the arts. The main themes of the paper will be presented in sixteen lectures. Four seminar-style
discussions will focus in exploring in depth subjects that run across the history of the region, with the
support of the historical literature and the analysis of primary sources. Students taking this paper are
entitled to six supervisions.
1. Introduction
General Reading:
Bakewell, Peter. A History of Latin America: From c.1450 to the Present. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Bakewell, Peter and Jacqueline Holler. A History of Latin America to 1825. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010.
Benjamin, Thomas. The Atlantic World : European, Africans, Indians and their shared history, 14001900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Skidmore, Thomas, Peter H. Smith and James N. Green. Modern Latin America. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010.
Williamson, Edwin. The Penguin History of Latin America. London: Penguin, 2009.
2. The Pre-Columbian World
Burger, R., C. Morris, and R Matos M.,Variations in the Expression of Inka Power. Washington:
Dumbarton Oaks, 2007.
Carrasco, David. City of Sacrifice: the Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1999.
DAltroy, Terence. The Incas. Oxford: Blackwell, 2014.
DAltroy, Terence, Susan Alcock. Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
DeMarrais, Elizabeth et al. (1996). Ideology, materialization, and power strategies. Current
Anthropology, 37 (1):pp. 1531.
Dodds Pennock, Caroline. Bonds of blood : gender, lifecycle, and sacrifice in Aztec culture.
Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Hassig, Ross. Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1988
Smith, Michael. The Aztecs. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011.
Townsend, Richard. The Aztecs. London: Thames & Hudson.
Ogburn, Dennis. Power in stone: The Long-Distance Movement of Building Blocks in the Inca Empire.
Ethnohistory, Volume 51, n. 1, Winter 2004, pp. 101-135.
Silverman, Helaine and William Isbell, eds. The Handbook of South American Archaeology,
especially Part VII: States and Empires of the Central Andes, chapters by Alan Covey (Inca
empire) and Gary Urton (Khipus). Springer, 2008.Available at ebooks@cambridge.

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Primary Sources:
Acosta, Jos de. Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Edited by Jane E. Mangan. Translated by
Frances M. Lpez-Morillas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
Betanzos, Juan de. Narrative of the Incas. Trans. & edited by Roland Hamilton and Dana Buchanan.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
Cobo, Bernab. History of the Inca Empire: An Account of the Indian Customs. Trans. & edited by
Roland Hamilton. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
Cobo, Bernab. Inca religion and customs. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.
Motolinia, Toribio. History of the Indians of New Spain. Washington DC: Academy of American
Franciscan History, 1951.
Sahagn, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain.
Zorita, Alonso de. The Lords of New Spain : The brief and summary relation of the Lords of New
Spain. London: Phoenix, 1965.
Sample questions:
- What was the role of religion in Aztec and Inca imperial ideology?
- What does archaeological evidence teach us about pre-Columbian history that written sources do not?
3. Conquest: significance and consequences
Interpreting the Spanish Conquest
Adorno, Rolena. The Discursive Encounter of Spain and America: The Authority of Eyewitness
Testimony in the Writing of History. The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 49, n.2, 1992,
210-228.
Clendinnen, Inga. Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty: Corts and the Conquest of Mexico.
Representations, 33, 1991, 65-100.
Guilmartin, John F. The Cutting Edge: An Analysis of the Spanish Invasion and Overthrow of the
Inca Empire, 1532-1539. In: K. Andrien and R. Adorno, eds. Transatlantic Encounters:
Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991, 40-69.
http://www.angelfire.com/ga4/guilmartin.com/Edge.html
Hemming, John. The Conquest of the Incas. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
Julien, Catherine, ed. Introduction. History of how the Spaniards Arrived in Peru. Edited and
Translated by Catherine Julien, 2007.
Matthew, Laura and Michel Oudijk, eds. Indian conquistadors: Indigenous allies in the conquest of
Mesoamerica. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.
Matthew, Laura. Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina, 2012.
Restall, Matthew. Seven myths of the Spanish Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Also available online through ebooks@cambridge
Restall, Matthew, Lisa Sousa, Kevin Terraciano, eds. Mesoamerican voices: native-language writings
from Colonial Mexico, Oaxaca, Yucatan, and Guatemala. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005.
Schroeder, Susan, ed. Chimalpahins Conquest: A Nahua Historians Rewriting of Francisco Lpez de
Gmaras La Conquista de Mxico. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Sousa, Lisa and Kevin Terraciano. The 'Original Conquest' of Oaxaca: Nahua and Mixtec Accounts
of the Spanish Conquest, Ethnohistory 50:2 (Spring, 2003).
Titu Cusi Yupanqui. History of how the Spaniards arrived in Peru. Edited and Translated by
Catherine Julien. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007
Townsend, Camilla. Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico. The
American Historical Review, vol. 108 (3), 2003.

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Population, Disease, and the Environment
Brooks, F. Revising the Conquest of Mexico: Smallpox, Sources and Populations. Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 24 (1993): 1-29.
Cook, N. David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
Cook, N. David. Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520-1620. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981.
Cook, N.D. and G. Lovell, eds. The Secret Judgments of God: Native Peoples and Old World Disease
in Colonial Spanish America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992
Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange. Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972.
Denevan, A. The Native Population of the Americas in 1492. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1992.
Guerra, F. The Earliest American Epidemic: The Influenza of 1493. Social Science History 12
(1988):305-25.
Lovell, G. Heavy Shadows and Black Night: Disease and Depopulation in Colonial Spanish
America. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 426-43.
McCaa, Robert. Spanish and Nahuatl Views on Smallpox and Demographic Catastrophe in Mexico.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 25 (1995):397-431.
McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977.
Melville, Elinor Land Use and the Transformation of the Environment. In: Bulmer-Thomas, V., ed.
The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, vol. I: The Colonial Era and the Short
Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: CUP, 2006.
Miller, Shawn William. An Environmental History of Latin America. New York: Cambirdge University
Press, 2007.
Newson, Linda. The Demographic Impact of Colonization. In: Bulmer-Thomas, V., ed. The
Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, vol. I: The Colonial Era and the Short
Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: CUP, 2006.
Empire
Brading, David A. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State,
1492-1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Elliott, John H. Empires of the Atlantic world : Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830. New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2007.
Lynch, John. The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change, 1598-1700. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man. The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative
Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian
Overseas Empires, 1500-1640. The American Historical Review, vol. 112, n.5, December
2007, 1359-1385.
Primary sources:
Cieza de Len, Pedro de. The Discovery and Conquest of Peru: Chronicles of the New World
Encounter. Edited and translated by Alexandra Parma Cook and David N. Cook. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1998.
Corts, Hernn. Letters from Mexico. Translated and edited by Anthony Pagden. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1986. (Spanish: Cartas de relacin de la Conquista de la Nueva Espaa
escritas al Emperador Carlos V).
Daz del Castillo, Bernal. The Conquest of New Spain. Harmondsworth, 1963 (Spanish: Historia
verdadera de la conquista de Nueva Espaa).

4
Francis, Michael J., Invading Colombia: Spanish Accounts of the Gonzalo Jimnez de Quesada
Expedition of Conquest. University Park: Pennsylvannia State University Press, 2007.
Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. The first new chronicle and good government, abridged; selected,
translated and annotated by David Frye. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006.
Original manuscript: http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/en/frontpage.htm
Len Portilla, Miguel. The Broken Spears. Boston, 1962. (Spanish: La visin de los vencidos).
Lockhart, James. We people here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico. Berkeley: 1993.
Restall, Matthew, Lisa Sousa, and Kevin Terraciano, Mesoamerican Voices: Native Language
Writings from Colonial Mexico, Yucatan, and Guatemala, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005.
Restall, Matthew and Florine Asselbergs, Invading Guatemala: Spanish, Nahua, and Maya
Accounts of the Conquest Wars, University Park: Pennsylvannia State University Press, 2007.
Sahagn, fray Bernardino de. General History of the Things of New Spain. Book 12. Santa Fe, NM:
School of American Research, 1975. (Spanish: Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espaa.
Libro 12).
Titu Cusi Yupanqui. History of how the Spaniards arrived in Peru. Edited and Translated by
Catherine Julien. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007
Sample questions:
Have historians overestimated the importance of technology in assessing the conquest of the New
World?
How widespread was indigenous collaboration in the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru?
4. Forms of colonial rule
Burns, Kathryn. Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru. Durham: Duke University Press,
2010.
Caeque, Alejandro. The Kings Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial
Mexico. London: Routledge, 2005.
Caeque, Alejandro. Imaging the Spanish Empire: The Visual Construction of Imperial Authority in
Habsburg New Spain. Colonial Latin American Review, 19 (1), 2010, pp.29-68.
Dueas, Alcira. Indians and Mestizos in the Lettered City: Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy and
Political Culture in Colonial Peru. Boulder, Co.: University of Colorado Press, 2010.
Farriss, Nancy M. Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Garrett, David T., Shadows of Empire: The Indian Nobility of Cusco, 17501825, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Deagan, Kathleen. Dynamics of imperial adjustment in Spanish America: ideology and social
integration. In: Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History. Alcock, S. Terence
DAltroy, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 179-194.
Greer, Margaret R., Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan. Rereading the Black Legend: the
discourses of religious and racial difference in the Renaissance empires Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2007.
Martnez, Mara Elena. Genealogical Fictions.
Metcalf, Alida C., Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600, Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2005.
Muldoon, James. The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the
Seventeenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
Mumford, Jeremy. Vertical Empire. The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2012.
Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian justice in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

5
Ramos, Gabriela and Yanna Yannakakis, eds. Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial
Culture in Mexico and the Andes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Ramos, Gabriela. Indian Hospitals and Colonial Goverment in the Andes. Medical History.
Ruiz Medrano, Ethelia and Susan Kellogg, eds. Negotiation Within Domination: New Spain Indian Pueblos
Confront the Spanish State. University Press of Colorado, 2010.
Yannakakis, Yanna. The Art of Being in Between: native intermediaries, Indian identity, and local rule in
colonial Oaxaca. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Sample questions:
How successful were the Spanish in reforming the use of space to assert colonial rule?
Given that that in colonial Spanish America there were no armies or police during most of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, did coercion play any role?
How important were ideas about race and honour for colonial government in Spanish America?
5. Church, Missions and Conversion to Christianity
Barnes-Karol, Gwendolyn. Religious Oratory in a Culture of Control. In: Anne Cruz and Mary E.
Perry, eds. Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1992.
Boone, Elizabeth H. and Tom Cummins. Native Traditions in the Post Conquest World.
Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 1998.
Burkhart, Louise. The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989. (Available at
http://www.albany.edu/anthro/fac/burkhart.htm)
Charles, John. Unreliable Confessions: Khipus in the Colonial Parish.The Americas, Volume 64,
Number 1, July 2007, pp. 11-33.
Charles, John. Allies at Odds: The Andean Church and Its Indigenous Agents, 1583-1671.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010.
Durston, Alan. Pastoral Quechua. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2006
Lara, Jaime. City, Temple, Stage: Escathological Architecture and Lithurgical Theatrics in New
Spain. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004.
Lara, Jaime. Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico, Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
Larkin, Brian. The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010.
Mello e Souza, Laura de. The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular
Religion in Colonial Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Ramos, Gabriela. Death and Conversion in the Andes. Lima and Cuzco, 1532-1670. South Bend, IN: Notre
Dame University Press, 2010.
Schwaller, John F. The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: From Conquest to Revolution and
Beyond. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
Tavrez, David. The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline and Dissent in Colonial Mexico.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.
Taylor, William. Two Shrines of the Cristo Renovado: Religion and Peasant Politics in Late Colonial
Mexico. The American Historical Review, vol. 110, n.4, October 2005, 945-974.
Primary Sources:
Acosta, Jos de. De procuranda indorum salute. Translated and edited by G. Stewart McIntosh. 2
vols. Tayport: Mac Research, 1996

6
Ruiz de Alarcn, Hernando de. Treatise on the heathen superstitions that today live among the
Indians native to this New Spain, 1629.
Sell, Barry D., and John Frederick Schwaller, A guide to confession large and small in the Mexican
language, 1634 (Don Bartolome de Alva), Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,1999.

Sample questions:
The evangelization of Spanish America owed principally to the image and only secondarily to the word.
Discuss.
Why did missionaries describe indigenous religion and popular religious practices as idolatry?
6. Slavery and mining
Slavery
Anderson, Robert Nelson. The Quilombo of Palmares: A New Overview of a Maroon State in SeventeenthCentury Brazil. Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 28, n.3, Oct.1996, 545-566.
Hawthorne, Walter. From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Klein, Herbert S. and Ben Vinson III. African slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007
Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Vidal Luna, Francisco and Herbert Klein. Slave Economy and Society in Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo, Brazil
in 1830. Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 36, n.1, February 2004, 1-28.
Mining
Bakewell, Peter. Miners of the Red Mountain. Albuquerque: University of Nex Mexico Press, 1988.
Brading, D. A., and Harry E. Cross, Colonial Silver Mining: Mexico and Peru, The Hispanic American
Historical Review, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Nov., 1972), pp. 545-579
Carneiro, John. Labour Systems. In: Bulmer-Thomas, V., ed. The Cambridge Economic History of
Latin America, vol. I: The Colonial Era and the Short Nineteenth Century. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Cole, Jeffrey A. The Potos mita: compulsory Indian labor in the Andes, 1573-1700. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1985.
Garner, Richard L., Long-Term Silver Mining Trends in Spanish America: A Comparative Analysis of
Peru and Mexico, The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 4 (Oct., 1988), pp. 898-935
Gavira Mrquez, Concepcin. Labour Discipline and Resistance: The Oruro Mining District in the Late
Colonial Period. Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 22, n.1, 2003, 1-26.
Tandeter, Enrique. The Mining Industry The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, vol. I: The
Colonial Era and the Short Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: CUP, 2006.
Primary Sources:
Garofalo, Leo J. and Erin E. OConnor. Documenting Latin America: Gender, Race, and Empire. Vol.
1. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011.
Germeten, Nicole von, Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute,
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2008.
Lockhart, James and Enrique Otte. Letters and People of the Spanish Indies. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1976.
McKnight, Kathryn Joy and Leo J. Garofalo, eds. Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early
Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009. (selection of primary
sources).

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Mills, Kenneth, William B. Taylor, and Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Colonial Latin America: a
documentary history, Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2002.

Sample question:
How did the slave trade and African slavery transform the New World?
Why did the silver boom not create wealth in colonial Latin America?

7. Reform, revolution and the crisis of the colonial regime

Adelman, Jeremy. Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006.
Cahill, David P. Genocide from below: The Great Rebellion of 1780-82 in the Southern Andes. In:
Dirk Moses, ed. Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance
in World History. New York: Berghan Books, 2008, 403-421.
Paquette, Gabriel. Enlightenment, governance and reform in Spain and its empire, 1759-1808.
Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.

Dubois, Laurent.
Belaubre, Christophe, Jordana Dym, and John Savage, eds.. Napoleons Atlantic: The Impact of
Napoleonic Empire in the Atlantic World. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
Lasso, Marixa. Race war and nation in Caribbean Gran Colombia, Cartagena, 1810-1832. The
American Historical Review, vol. 111, n.2, April 2006, 336-361.
Macfarlane, Anthony. Rebellions in Late Colonial Spanish America: A Comparative Perspective. Bulletin of
Latin American Research, vol. 14, n.3, September 1995, 313-338.
Serulnikov, Sergio. Disputed Images of Colonialism: Spanish Rule and Indian Subversion in
Northern Potos, 1777-1780. The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 2 (May,
1996), pp. 189-226.
Walker, Charles F. Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780-1840.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

Sample questions:
To what extent can we agree with the view that qualify the Bourbon Reforms as a second conquest
of the New World?
What has been the role of race in the uprisings and revolutions of the late eighteenth century and
early nineteenth century?

8. Independence and the new nation states

Adelman, Jeremy. Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006.
Cahill, David P. 2008 Independence Movements in the New World, in Toyin Falola and Kevin
Roberts (eds.), The Atlantic World, 1450-2000 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007),
pp. 253-310.
Chasteen, John. Americanos. New York: Oxford University Press.
Geggus, David and Norman Fiering. The World of the Haitian Revolution.

8
Ferrer, Ada. "Speaking of Haiti: Slavery and Freedom in Cuban Slave Testimony," in David Geggus
and Norman Fiering, eds. The World of the Haitian Revolution Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 2009.
Rodrigues, Jaime. The Independence of Spanish America.
Rodrguez O., Jaime. The Emancipation of America. The American Historical Review, vol. 105, n.1
Echeverri, Marcela. Popular Royalists, Empire, and Politics in Southwestern New Granada, 1809-1819,
Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 91, n.2, 2011, 237-269.
Kinsbruner, Jay. Independence in Spanish America, 2004.
Mndez, Cecilia. The Plebeian Republic. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Russell-Wood, A.J.R. From Colony to Nation: Essays on the Independence of Brazil. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1975.
Chambers, Sarah and John Chasteen, eds. Latin American Independence: An Anthology of Sources.
Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011.
Garca Mrquez, Gabriel. The General in his Labyrinth. [fiction].
Sample questions:
Why was monarchy as a form of government popular in Latin America after independence?
To what extent were the origins of Spanish American independence solely the result of external
power relations?
9. Latin America in the nineteenth century and the changing global order
Beezley, William H. Mexico in world history. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Brading, David A. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State,
1492-1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Dunkerley, James. Power in the Isthmus: A political history of modern Central America. London:
Verso, 1988.
Gootenberg, Paul. "Beleaguered Liberals: The Failed First Generation of Free Traders in Peru" in Love,
Joseph L. and Nils Jacobsen, eds. Guiding the Invisible Hand: Economic Liberalism and the State in
Latin American History. Praeger, 1988.
Gootenberg, Paul. Paying for Caudillos: The Politics of Emergency Finance in Peru, 18201845" in Peloso,
Vincent C. and Barbara Tenenbaum, eds. Liberals, Politics, and Power: State Formation in
Nineteenth-Century Latin America. London: University of Georgia Press, 1996.
Love, Joseph L. and Nils Jacobsen, eds. Guiding the Invisible Hand: Economic Liberalism and the State in
Latin American History. Praeger, 1988.
MacClahan, Colin and William Beezley, eds. Mexicos crucial century: 1810-1910. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2010
10. The Mexican Revolution and the land question in Latin America
Baitenmann, Helga. Popular Participation in State Formation: Land Reform in Revolutionary Mexico.
Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 43, n.1, February 2011, 1-31.
Cant, Anna. Land for those who work it: A visual analysis of Agrarian Reform Posters in Velascos Peru.
Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 44, 1-37, 2012.
Dunkerley, James. Rebellion in the veins: political struggle in Bolivia, 1952-1982. London: Verso, 1984.
Gonzales, Michael J. The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2002.
Gotkowitz, Laura. A revolution for our rights: indigenous struggles for land and justice in Bolivia, 18801952. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Hammond, John L. Land Occupations, Violence, and the Politics of Agrarian Reform in Brazil. Latin
American Perspectives, July 2009 vol. 36 no. 4 156-177.
Knight, Alan. The Mexican Revolution. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Mayer, Enrique. Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

9
Ondetti, Gabriel. An ambivalent legacy: Cardoso and Land Reform. Latin American Perspectives,
September 2007, vol. 34, n.5, 9-25.
Tutino, John. From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence 17501940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Sample questions:
-Why has land reform in Latin America been closely linked to the concept of state formation?
-To what extent was the Mexican Revolution a bourgeois revolution?
11. The Cuban Revolution and its impact in Latin America
Eckstein, Eva. Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Prez, Louis A. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Prez-Stable, Marifeli. The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994.
Harmer, Tanya. Two, three, many revolutions: Cuba and the prospects for revolutionary change in Latin
America, 19671975, Journal of Latin American Studies, 45:1 (2013)
Moore, Robin. Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba. University of California Press,
2006.
Poniatowska, Elena. The Night of Tlatelolco.
Sample questions:
It was mass mobilisation, not Castro and the nationalist leaders, that pushed Cuba toward socialism.
Discuss.
What circumstances led to the idea that the Cuban Revolution could be exported to the rest of Latin
America?
12. Modernisation and the rise of mass political movements
Brennan, James P. and Marcelo Rougier. The Politics of National Capitalism: Peronism and the Argentine
Bourgeoisie, 1946-1976. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009.
Hentschke, Jens R., ed. Vargas and Brazil: New perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Karush, Matthew B. and Oscar Chamosa, eds. The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in
Mid-Twentieth-Century Argentina. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Romero, Luis Alberto. A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2002.
Conniff, Michael, ed. Latin American Populism. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999
Martnez, Toms Eloy. The Peron Novel. [Fiction]. London: Anchor, 1998.
Martnez, Toms Eloy. Santa Evita. [Fiction]. London: Doubleday, 1997.
Sample question:
The rise of populism in Brazil and Argentina reveals the difficult relationship between modernisation and
democracy in Latin America. Discuss.
13. The Cold War and the age of military dictatorships
Dvila, Jerry. Dictatorship in South America. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. 2nd ed., Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011.
Harmer, Tanya. Allendes Chile and the Inter-American Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2011.
Joseph, Gilbert. In from the Cold: Latin Americas New Encounter with the Cold War. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008.

10
Schlesinger, Stephen. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard 2005.
Holden, Robert and Eric Zolov, Latin America and the United States: A documentary history. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011.
14. Latin Americas tortuous return to democracy
Degregori, Carlos I. How Difficult it is to be God: Shining Paths Politics of War in Peru, 1980-1999.
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.
Guillermoprieto, Alma. Looking for History.
Guillermoprieto, Alma. The Heart that Bleeds: Latin America now. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Collins, Cath. Post-Transitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.
Feitlowitz, Marguerite. A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011.
Film: No. By Pablo Larran (2012).
Sample questions:
How should historians interpret the mixed results that Truth and Reconciliation Commissions have had in
the transition to democracy in several Latin American countries?
The Shining Path does not represent the failure of reform but the failure of Marxism to solve the problems
of inequality in Latin America. Discuss.
15. Neo-Liberalism, populism, and social movement
Foweraker, Joe. Grassroots Movements and Political Activism in Latin America: A Critical Comparison of
Chile and Brazil. Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 33, n.4, 2001, 839-865.
Levitsky, Steven. An Organised Disorganisation: Informal Organisation and the Persistence of Local Party
Structures in Argentine Peronism. Journal of Latin American Studies,vol. 33, n.1, February 2001, 2965.
Bruey, Alison. Limitless Land and the Redefinition of Rights: Popular Mobilisation and the Limits of
Neoliberalism in Chile, 1973-1985. Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 44, n.3, August 2012,
523-552.
Olvera, Alberto J. The Elusive Democracy: Political Parties, Democratic Institutions, and Civil Society in
Mexico. Latin American Research Review, vol. 45, pp. 78-107, Special Issue, 2010.
Weyland, Kurt. Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics.
Comparative Politics, 34, n.1, October 2001, pp-1-22.
La Torre, Carlos and Cynthia J. Arson, eds. Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century.
Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2013.
Sample questions:

- To what extent has neoliberalism been responsible for the resurgence of populism in Latin America?
- How can historians account for the flourishing of identity movements in some Latin American countries
and not in others?
16. Economic growth and inequality: Latin America in the 21st century
Amman, Edmund and Werner Baer, Neoliberalism and its Consequences in Brazil, Journal of Latin
American Studies, vol. 34, n.4, 2002, 945-959.
Borsdof, Axel, Rodrigo Hidalgo and Rafael Snchez, A New Model of Urban Development in Latin America,
Cities, 24, n.5, 2007, 365-378.

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Fisher, Brodwyn Fisher, Brian MacCann. Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin
America.
Bethell, Leslie. Brazil and Latin America. Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 42. n.3, August 2010,
457-485.
Duarte, Regina Horta. It Does not Even Seem Like We Are in Brazil: Country Clubs and Gated
Communities in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1951-1964. Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 44, n.3,
August 2012, 435-466.
Eakin, Marshall. Tropical Capitalism: The Industrialization of Belo Horizonte. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Weyland, Kurt. Neoliberalism and Democracy in Latin America: A Mixed Record. Latin American Politics
and Society, 46, n.1, 2004, 135-157.
Film: La Zona, directed by Rodrigo Pl.
Sample questions:
-To what extent has economic growth contributed to furthering democracy in Latin America?
- What does spatial segregation in cities reveal about Latin American institutions?
Classes
4 classes will discuss major themes in Latin American history:
1. Empire and globalisation
Gootenberg, Paul. Between Coca and Cocaine: A Century or More of USPeruvian Drug Paradoxes, 1860
1980". (2003). The Hispanic American Historical Review. 83 (1): 119150
Gootenberg, Paul. Cocaine in Chains: The Rise and Demise of a Global Commodity, 18601950" in Topik,
Stephen, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr L. Frank, eds. From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American
Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 15002000. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006.
Topik, Stephen, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr L. Frank, eds. From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American
Comodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006.
Paquette, Gabriel. After Brazil: Portuguese Debates on Empire, c. 1820-1850. Journal of Colonialism and
Colonial History, vol. 11, n.2, Fall 2010.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian
Overseas Empires, 1500-1640. The American Historical Review, vol. 112, n.5, December
2007, 1359-1385.
2. Religion, culture and politics
Buttler, Matthew. Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexicos Cristero Rebellion: Michoacn, 1927-29.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Schwaller, John F. The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America. New York: New York University
Press.
Voeckel, Pamela. Alone before God. Durham: Duke University Press,
3. Race
Applebaum, Nancy, Ann MacPherson and Karin Alejandra Rosenblatt, eds. Race and Nation in Modern
Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Alberto, Paulina. When Rio was Black: Soul Music, National Culture, and the Politics of Racial Comparison
in 1970s Brazil. Hispanic American Historical Review, 89:1 (February 2009).
Gotkowitz, Laura, ed. Histories of Race and Racism. Durham: Duke University Press,
Graham, Richard. The Idea of Race in Latin America.
Katzew, Ilona. Casta Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Martnez, Mara Elena. Genealogical Fictions. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Rappaport, Joanne. The Disappearing Mestizo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
4. Memory
Bickford, Louis. The Archival Imperative: Human Rights and Historical Memory in Latin Americas Southern
Cone. Human Rights Quarterly, 21, n.4, 1999, 1097-1122.
Harris, Olivia. The Coming of the White People: Reflections on the Mythologisation of History in Latin
America. Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 14, n.1, 9-24, January 1995.
Robben, Antonious. How Traumatized Societies Remember: The Aftermath of Argentinas Dirty War.
Cultural Critique, 59, 2005, 120-164.