Book Reviews

In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community, and the Politics of History in Yucat an. Paul K. Eiss, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 337 pp. Paul Sullivan Independent Scholar Paul Eiss has delivered a new, epic work of social history/ethnography concerning an especially turbulent region of the Yucatan Peninsula. This is microhistory, which continually breaks out onto larger planes to illuminate broader social, political, and economic realities over equally broad expanses of timein this case moments and epochs from three different centuries. Eiss narrates masterfully these stories of a collection of places peopled predominantly by Maya-speaking peasants who have struggled nearly incessantly to prevent the despoliation of their lands and forests, the impoverishment of their families and, ultimately, the reduction of their lives to slavery on henequen plantations. In the process of that long struggle, the very concept of who was engaged in the struggle, and what was being defended el pueblosubtly evolved. At rst it was the corporate ethnic entity, the Maya kah, which resisted the enclosure of the forest by encroaching haciendas. Later, infused with the liberal political rhetoric of a difISSN 1935-4940. 4940.2011.01166.x
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ferent era, the class-based commune of like-working, hard-working peoples carried on the ght against a voracious commercial elite. Ultimately the struggles of isolated communities and small regions merged, by the time of the Mexican revolution, into a larger storm of peoples seeking liberation and the erection of a state that would respect the inherent rights of the pueblo. As Eiss discusses in ne detail, the meaning of the pueblo as an imagined collectivity was not just the shifting product of its constituents, but also a construct of external agents, especially during the years of the Mexican revolution when the nascent revolutionary state sought to frame this pueblo as a new object of governance and as its natural, enduring political constituency. In fact, the portion of the Yucatan Peninsula on which Eiss study focuses was supposed to become the shining showplace of the revolutionary regimes social, economic, and political triumphs. In that the revolution failed miserably, and Eiss relates fully the failure of agrarian reform in the region alongside political turmoil and descent into a cascade of vengeance and retribution. Eiss book, it should be noted, dovetails perfectly with the earlier work of Allen Wells and Gilbert Joseph, Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 456500. ISSN 1935-4932, online 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1935-

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and Rural Insurgency in Yucat an, 18761915. The monumental study by Wells and Joseph thoroughly exploded the notion of a relatively peaceful postCaste War Yucatan that awaited patiently the coming of change carried by enlightened generals from central Mexico. They documented that Yucatan had in those years been a boiling cauldron of violence and insurgency, and Eiss work now provides the most indepth study of an especially troublesome region from those times. The scale of this study is epic, and that presents formidable challenges to an author trying to construct coherent narratives and maintain reader interest. In this Eiss is a master. Each chapter presents a leap forward in time to a new episode in the struggles of his region, with a new cast of characters, new specics being fought over, and a new state and national context in which the struggles are played out. But each leap never quite leaves the past behind. Indeed, it is Eiss goal to manifest the continuing, constructed relevance of the past in each new stage of the present. Who is remembered, what is recalled, and how are past conicts invoked or ignored in the ever-changing projects of the present? And what role do written records and archives play, as well? Eiss grand work is not just the history of a region with much history, but a study of the construction of histories, oral and written, right down to the present day. Any Latin Americanist can tell you that el pueblo unido jam as ser a vencido. Most also know it is not true. The pueblo is often defeated. That is a third, somewhat understated theme of Eiss narrative, made most poignant in his discussion of the fate of agrarian reform around the town of Hunucma. Under L azaro Cardenas Hunucma nally received a denitive grant of its own lands, those they had

been ghting to preserve for over a century. But it was decades more before any survey was completed that would effectively dene what lands had been granted, and what resources legally belonged to the pueblo. But that time, few were left who cared. (Again, Eiss study is an excellent case of the broader theme of failed agrarian reform explored in Ben Fallaws C ardenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatan.) The nal cruel blow to the ancient aspirations of the people comes in the defeat of a bitter strike against commercial egg producers in the 1990s, to the local and state ramications of which Eiss devotes a full, engaging chapter. While waiting for their due, the people of the pueblo simply had to move on to labor in M erida and Cancun, to international migration, to work in multinational assembly plants and commercial agribusiness. And the pueblo had begun to forget, as well, its own long history of struggles, heroes, villains, and more. Two nal and more ethnographic chapters explore this gradual dissolution of the struggle and the notion of the pueblo into the ethers of 21st century immigration, globalization, and neoliberalism. In one chapter, Eiss relates how the people of his region rose above their long history of dispossession, poverty, and frustration through annual celebration of the miracle and grace of their Virgin. In another, readers meet a former leftist revolutionary turned poet and town chronicler and conservative-party politician who struggles almost Quixote-like against the inexorable trends of the present, trying with some success to remind his neighbors of the deep and dignied past of struggle in which their ancestors had engaged, all in the name of the pueblo.

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All told, this is a masterful work that will merit the attention of Latin Americanists for many years to come. El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy. Ellen Moodie, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 294 pp. Ainhoa Montoya University of Manchester It has been widely assumed by many in the international community that peace and democracy unfolded uneventfully after the signing of the 1992 Peace Accords that ended El Salvadors war and inaugurated the countrys political transition. Nonetheless, given that high levels of homicides have persisted in the post-war era, Ellen Moodie conducts a necessary exercise of unlearning by asking, What happened next? As she explains, her ethnography goes beyond the big story of the success of the transition to explore the stories behind it. In other words, Moodie focuses on post-war crime stories to examine how Salvadorans experienced and made sense of the contradictions of the countrys transition to democracy during the post-Accords decade. Moodie argues that crime stories, whether delivered by state ofcials, mass media, or ordinary Salvadorans, are themselves a means of knowledge production about the post-war era. Crime stories have provided Salvadorans with modes of making sense of the countrys post-war violence as well as practical ways of maneuvering their way through post-war risks and dangers. Moodies ethnography thus illustrates persuasively fundamental contradictions of neoliberalization. This is be-

cause crime stories orient Salvadorans in the countrys free-market democracy even as they implicitly critique it. Moodie offers a theorization of the critical code-switching of violence. This refers to a transition in the taxonomies publicly embraced by state ofcials in their categorization of homicides in the immediate aftermath of the war. These began to be labeled common crime so as to imply that they were no longer critical or leading to a state of exception. This shiftwhose ostensible purpose has been to buttress publicly the completion and success of the peace-building process and the countrys renewed suitability for businesshas turned violence into a private and depoliticized phenomenon. Moodie argues that, in contrast to retrospective war narratives that expose the systemic underpinnings of violence, crime stories operate through peoples active misrecognition (unknowing) of structural inequalities and the depiction of post-war violence as the result of individual deviance. Within crime stories, the criminal, gendered as male, is othered in terms of both class and race. Likewise, the resignication of violence as noncritical, rather than threatening of state institutions, legitimizes the broad spectrum of risk being managed privately in El Salvador, as elsewhere, today. According to Moodie, the resignication of violence in El Salvador occurred alongside the countrys transition to neoliberalism, which has yielded a marketoriented version of democracy. Initiated before the end of the war through privatization and deregulation, a neoliberal agenda was further promoted by El Salvadors governments in ensuing decades. In this context, the code-switching of violence has advanced the governing and

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orientation of citizens in El Salvadors freemarket democracy at a juncture characterized by not-knowing how to act in a new environment or what would come next. Crime stories circulating among ordinary Salvadorans in the 1990s contributed to replicating and consolidating an ofcial code-switching of violence even as they allowed for breakthroughs that question this code-switching. Moodie argues that the performative role of crime stories in engendering a neoliberal sensibility does not preclude these stories from expressing Salvadorans democratic disenchantment (145). Indeed, as she shows in chapter 5, democracy has not lived up to Salvadorans expectations vis-` a-vis the states role in caring for Salvadoran citizens, fostering a community of belonging, and promoting socio-economic development. Moodie approaches the Salvadoran publics widespread and cross-class worse than the war (84) sentiment about the post-war conjuncture as an expression of disillusionment with present-day democracy rather than a necessarily literal depiction of the countrys war and post-war moments. The worse than the war sentiment, says Moodie, also speaks about a future that was imagined as possible during the popular and revolutionary struggles of the 1960s and 1970s but has not been realized even after the war and the Peace Accords. It also, to some extent, evokes the idealization of the pre-war and wartime past, something Salvadorans have deemed retrospectively more predictable and manageable than the post-war conjuncture. In their orientation toward a possible future, the pre-war and wartime popular struggles constituted a method of hope as delineated by Hirokazu Miyazaki. Likewise, Moodie suggests, Salvadorans vindication of democracy beyond mere proceduralism

and their ongoing assertion of democratic rights after the war constitute a method of hope which, despite the generalized postwar democratic disenchantment and the shaping of neoliberal subjectivities, orients action toward an imagined future. Moodies interpretation of Salvadorans post-war political subjectivities allows her to end on a largely hopeful note, even though events following El Salvadors 2009 elections (beyond her research period) may demonstrate otherwise. While she argues that the post-war actions asserting democratic rights constitute a method of hope (168), enquiry into the temporal distance and nature of the horizons envisioned by Salvadorans in the post-war era may yield a different conclusion. Although the 2009 electoral campaign did manage to instill hope in the population, this hope seems to have been short lived in light of Salvadorans dissatisfaction with the continuity of neoliberal policies demonstrated by the Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front (FMLN) government. Rather than expressing a distinctive belief in a substantially different future while democratic disenchantment prevails, Salvadorans actions in pursuit of enhanced democratic inclusion might also be interpreted as merely pragmatic or even a matter of survival. From this vantage point, in contrast to Moodies assertion that there is a generalized misrecognition at work that allows the state, and the market . . . to continue to exploit and expel the refuse of used-up humans (179), it may be the post-war exhaustion of hope that is deeply individualizing and depoliticizing. Notwithstanding my minor reservation regarding this point, Moodies ethnography is a crucial analysis of ordinary Salvadorans lived experience in the midst of a democratization process, which

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poignantly shows the nuances and contradictions of the transformations undergone by El Salvador in the aftermath of war. It is also a creative and sophisticated ethnography that draws on participant observation and a welter of secondary sources while adding important strands in semiotic anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and affect theory. El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace reveals the complex dynamics of everyday post-war life beneath and beyond the routinary experience of violence. In light of its attempt to demystify the current and historical workings of violence in El Salvador, this is a must-read for audiences with a regional interest. It also makes an original contribution to anthropological discussions on neoliberalization, democratization, and violence. By examining ordinary Salvadorans crime stories not merely as texts descriptive of post-war violence, but as highly performative technologies, Moodie provides a nely grained analysis of their post-war political subjectivities in a democratization process marked by free-market tendencies. She shows how such technologies are part of a historically situated process of critical code-switching that resignies violence as new political and economic conjunctures unfold. Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life. Fernando Santos-Granero, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. 280 pp. Alf Hornborg Lund University Fernando Santos-Granero has produced an impressive and useful comparative and historical study of slavery in tropical

Amerindian societies. His sample ranges from the Calusa in Florida and Kalinago of the Lesser Antilles, through the Tukano and Conibo of western Amazonia, and on to the Chiriguan a of southeastern Bo of Paraguay. The anlivia and Guaicuru tiquity of his extensive list of sources suggests that the accounts reect truly indigenous (i.e., precontact) practices. Nonetheless, it is difcult to rule out the possible inuence of the European arrival, not least through demographic collapse. The eventual intensication of indigenous slave raids as a response to the European demand for slaves is, of course, beyond question. Santos-Granero argues persuasively that the predatory emphases of capturing societies in native South America were an expression of regional systems of interethnic power relations. Within these, some societies were specialized in capturing slaves so as to augment their own numbers and as a component in a more general political economy of life. In competing to appropriate sources of vital capital, these societies metaphorically classied enemies as game and captives as pets. Although young women and children of both sexes were important targets of their raids, other coveted sources of vitality included enemies body parts (e.g., trophy heads) and magical or ritual objects of various kinds. Captives themselves were a kind of personied objects who owed their existence to the productive agency of their masters, much as the produce of horticulture, hunting, or shing. This ideology is presented as Amerindian and has been identied in other parts of the Americas. The accumulation of people served several practical and symbolic purposes including the amelioration of defense, productivity, and political prestige of captor

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groups. Importantly, in exempting their masters from productive activities, slaves in some societies (particularly where captives and tributaries together represented between 20 and 40 percent of the population) liberated warriors so as to devote more time to raiding and capturing new slaves. This was the logic behind what Santos-Granero calls the slave machine (199). Although their role as labor in production was often signicant, slaves did not produce wealth as much as they were in themselves a form of wealth, which communicated their owners high status. Some of their symbolic services bring to mind the sophisticated etiquette of courtly societies (145). Santos-Granero agrees with scholars who argue that Amerindian slavery should be distinguished from slavery in several other parts of the world, but not with those who deny its existence in the Pre-Columbian Americas. He refers to an active trade in captive slaves with xed exchange rates and even annual interethnic fairs, where captives from various societies were brought in to be exchanged (222), an intriguing piece of information that unfortunately is not substantiated. Based on a denition of slave as property to be disposed of as the owner pleases, he concludes unequivocally that slavery (even chattel slavery) existed in native tropical America. Santos-Granero distinguishes between three forms of indigenous Amerindian servitude along a continuum of decreasing harshness of oppression: war captives, servants, and tributaries. Although these categories of people could not have been in more different situations, the distinctions between them were not sharp and absolute (8384). Societies recognizing all three forms of servitude and controlling larger numbers of dependents tended to treat

captives more harshly than those that had not subjugated servant or tributary groups. The proportion of captive slaves in the sample of societies discussed here is estimated to have uctuated between 5 and 19 percent of the total population, which accords with similar estimates for several Amerindian societies in North America. Captives and their children faced various destinies. Children of captives among were assimithe Conibo and Guaicuru lated fully into their captors societies. The most gruesome accounts of Kalinago cannibalism and ritual sacrice (even of men raised from childhood, and of sons and grandsons of captive women) may in part reect the prejudices of their European authors, but Santos-Granero appears to nd them generally reliable and consonant with Amerindian analogies between enemies and game. However, some captive men who were respected as workers or warriors could be assimilated to the point of marrying Kalinago women, and captive women frequently became their masters concubines or wives. Often, however, captives and servants were restricted to marrying each other, as among the Tukano and Conibo. Rank endogamy and social stratication were reinforced by the use of conspicuous markers of superior ethnic identity, such as head elongation (Conibo), lip plugs (Chiriguan a), leg bands (Kalinago), quartz necklaces (Tukano), and Slaves could be face painting (Guaicuru). branded with facial tattoos and property marks. Social subjugation and kinship relations were intertwined. When marriages did occur between differently ranked people in these societies, they generally appear to have followed the principle of hypergamy (i.e., wife-takers were ranked higher

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than wife-givers), inverting the normal pattern of uxorilocal bride service. This applies to the gendered treatment of captive slaves as well as to political marriages between conquering groups and their tributaries, and was in both cases geared to privileged polygyny. The use of ctive kinship to organize alliances between groups in complex tributary chiefdoms such as the Calusa suggests afnities with the political economy of indigenous Andean polities. As elsewhere, ideologies of mutuality and reciprocal exchange between dominant and subordinate strata rationalized fundamentally coercive power relations based on fear and submission. The cultural promotion of fearless violence appears to have characterized some ethnolinguistic groups (e.g., Tupi, Carib) more than others and given them an advantage vis-` a-vis less militant neighbors in late precontact times. It may not be a coincidence that three of the six cases discussed in this book involve the terrorization of Arawak agriculturalists (Lokono, Chan e, Guan a). Ironically, the ethnogenetic processes stimulated by such interaction sometimes Arawakized the conquerors as much as vice versa. The ambiguities of identity raised in these processes were linked to pervasive Amerindian concerns with the incorporation of (and interfusion with) otherness. Indigenous slavery illuminates how such concerns were in turn linked to a predatory cosmology based on the recognition that vital resources are nite and unequally distributed. Fernando Santos-Granero is to be congratulated for a masterful piece of comparative, ethnohistorical research, which serves as a corrective to romantic images of precontact Amerindian egalitarianism and to extend our detailed understanding of indigenous societies.

Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community. Tamara Mose Brown, New York: New York University Press, 2011. 212 pp. Christine A. Pinnock CUNY Graduate Center In spite of their continuous contributions to the childcare service sector, Caribbean womens domestic work in the United States has not received as much attention as that of Filipinas and Latinas. Thus Browns study is important, especially in relation to her attempts to present a deeper understanding of Caribbean domestics. While Browns central argument that Caribbean women create community in public spaces, as a temporary means of empowerment from the subordinate conditions of domestic work is troublingly partial, her ethnography nonetheless provides an important opening for readers. This is because it is directed at learning who domestics really are, what they do, and how their struggles might be represented and researched in the future. Browns arguments draw on a 3-year period of research. Her topic was spurred by the presence of Caribbean women from the English-speaking Caribbean who, while working as domestics, took their charges to public parks in the ethnographers recently gentried Brooklyn neighborhood. In chapter one, Brown provides a brief overview of Caribbean peoples presence in New York City and the subsequent tensions surrounding intragroup and intergroup identity construction. Chapter two continues in the vein of traditional domestic worker scholarship by emphasizing the conditional aspects of domestic work. Such approaches typically focus on the daily and mostly adverse circumstances under which women work. More

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recent domestic work scholarship is more likely to couple conditional aspects with an examination of the global/local processes that inform womens participation in domestic service. Chapter three is a brief exploration of indoor public play spaces. It illustrates how domestic workers participation in social activities becomes fodder for employers surveillance and evaluation of their performance as childcare providers. Chapter four focuses on food sharing practices and how Caribbean domestics create community, facilitate cultural exchanges, and speak to cultural variations in parenting practices. Chapter ve, an extension of surveillance issues, is an interesting look at cell phones and the role that technology plays in the power dynamics in the employeremployee relationship. Chapter six outlines the role of rotating credit associations among the Caribbean participants in Browns study. Finally, chapter seven discusses the challenges of organizing Caribbean domestics, and addresses the efforts of Domestic Workers United (DWU). Raising Brooklyn follows in a Chicago School tradition and looks at the role of the individual and the sociability of groups in public spaces. Here Brown is in conversation with a small segment of domestic work scholarship that highlights its isolating nature. Her main concern involves the ways Caribbean childcare providers establish community in public spaces. She argues that workers create community in the public spaces to which they are required to take their charges. According to Brown, community formation is facilitated through the gentrication process and the nature of contemporary, exible middle-class employment in which New Yorks new socio-economic landscape forces providers into public spaces.

In this study, the creation of community also strengthens identity construction and impacts how providers perceive themselves. Brown contends that food sharing creates community among domestics and provides rich opportunities for cultural exchanges between the domestics themselves and the children for whom they care. Food sharing also generates opportunities for these women to convey opinions on cultural disparities and parenting practices. While Browns intentions are important, and even laudable, in that she contests representations of domestics as isolated individuals, this contestation is developed via a specic rendering of community formation that is contingent on the performance of childcare work. Brown oversimplies the point by not factoring in enough detail about whether the women: (1) have pre-existing communal ties with one other, (2) may already consider themselves as belonging to a community, and (3) may see themselves as individuals with identities that are only partially constructed in association with the work they perform. In other words, Browns focus on specic types of public spaces which seem to be tied to domestic work in new ways may obscure the political importance of existing solidarities as well as Caribbean womens private lives in New York. Browns analysis in chapter ve of cell phone usage extends the discussion of public/private beyond community and identity formation and on to technology as a surveillance tool. Despite employers attempts to monitor and control domestics through the use of nanny-cams, blogs, and cell phones, domestics nd unique ways to conduct their work while simultaneously negotiating more acceptable (and respectable) terms. Nonetheless, Browns theoretical engagement of

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mobility and technology could be expanded to reect the movements or the conceptions of mobility and immobility of Caribbean women who not only live and work in New York City, but maintain ties locally and abroad. For example, how do issues of documentation and citizenship impact mobility both within New York and in a larger, transnational frame? How do undocumented Caribbean domestics navigate multiple surveillance techniques? And how do women whose physical mobility is circumscribed invent alternative modalities of mobility? Browns limited take on mobility is echoed in her analysis of the challenges of mobilizing Caribbean domestics in New York. Brown concludes that domestics are apathetic or uninterested in mobilization. Taken together with her transmission of one workers explanation of laziness (140141), this amounts to an extremely narrow focus for understanding mobilization. While Brown also cites fear of deportation and unemployment as issues hindering unionization, she ends with the assertion that workers ambivalence toward formal organizing ultimately reproduces their working conditions (154). Placing this burden squarely on the shoulders of the workers ignores important historical, social, and racial aspects of the roles of unions, and race in unionization, in the United States. Her approach does not address the fact that limited union participation is not specic to domestics today, but symptomatic of a downward trend in many industries. Further ethnographic analysis and the situation of this analysis in a socio-historical context might have revealed that while DWU has, and continues to perform advocacy work on behalf of domestic workers, this union does not provide health-care or pension plans. Thus

potential DWU members may code collective mobilization of domestic workers in a manner somewhat distinct from U.S. histories of unionization writ large. Additionally, recent attacks on collective bargaining by many U.S. states may further hinder mobilization efforts of all unions. Based on this study, one does not know whether domestics are aware of this history or whether they are reacting to personal and political histories forged in the Caribbean or in the immigrant experience. Raising Brooklyn should be considered a launching point and would be best suited for undergraduates in sociology, urban studies, and anthropology. The study must have been sent to the publisher before July 1, 2010, the date of the passage of the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in New York. This bill that guarantees certain labor conditions and rights may or may not have changed how Brown described mobilization efforts. Nonetheless, unionization may not solve the many issues of inequity that women of color experience living and working in New York. And a consideration of this important point might have pushed Brown to make an even more prescient theoretical intervention into the nature of collective mobilization, and hence political survival, of people specically engaged in domestic service at this particular juncture in U.S. labor history. Land Reform in Puerto Rico: Modernizing the Colonial State, 19411969. Ismael Garc a Col on, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. 164 pp. Patricia Silver Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College It is a challenge to produce a work that captures the often messy, on-the-ground

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perspectives and actions that shape and give meaning to everyday lives while at the same time giving attention to the political and economic forces within which actors struggle to give their lives security and meaning. One difculty involves examining the dynamics of structure and agency in ways that trace multidirectional lines of cause and effect. Ismael Garc a deceptively short book, an examColons ination of life and land reform in Puerto Rico between 1941 and 1969, meets that challenge. The research for Land Reform in Puerto Rico draws on archival documentation as well as oral history and par ticipant observation. Garc a Colons long and deep knowledge of his eld site complements the historical ethnographic research. His use of history and memory underscores the importance of historical understanding in cultural analyses. Past relations and practices emerge in this book not as mere context or backdrop; they are key ingredients in the analysis of how Puerto Ricans used the options and opportunities provided in the land reforms of the mid20th century to shape their lives. The result is a dense study that asks for a close reading and rewards that effort with a nuanced understanding of locally specic conditions during a crucial moment in Puerto Rican history. It is an era that included the formation of modern colonial state relations between Puerto Rico and the United States as well as between Puerto Ricans and the Puerto Rican state. Prior to the land reforms, Puerto Ricos landless workers (agregados) looked to their local relations with landowners for solutions to problems. As landowners in the wake of the reforms, they sought solutions in state-sponsored

but locally effected cooperatives. Garc a examines the communities created Colon via the reforms as sites where government programs promoted new forms of social relations and local residents engaged in new types of economic and political practice. The site of Garc a Colons ethnographic research is Parcelas G andaras, a land resettlement community in the eastern highland municipality of Cidra, Puerto Rico. The word parcelas refers to the individual plots of land assigned through a lottery system to landless workers following the Land Law of 1941. Through analysis identies of the laws text, Garc a Colon a contradiction between rhetoric about new freedom for the landless worker and the laws implicit intention of creating a new industrial proletariat in Puerto Rico to serve as a local workforce for Puerto Ricos transformation into an industrial economy. On the basis of oral histories and a tracing of individual family histories, he demonstrates how parceleros at times subverted that intention. Having a parcela provided many with the opportunity to continue the long-standing tradition of migration for work, now without having to uproot the family. The ethnography consists of six core chapters bracketed by an introduction (ch. 1) and conclusion (ch. 8). Each chapter succinctly accommodates the reader whose knowledge of Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican history may be limited. In reference to that larger history, Garc a weaves in archival and oral hisColon tory data from Cidra in order to establish the locally specic and often diverse ways in which historical forces actually play out. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 describe the New Deal-inspired land reform program that

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accompanied the rise to power of the Popular Democratic Party (PPD) in Puerto Rico. Although the land reform was an economic policy designed to create an infrastructure for industrial development, it served as well as a political instrument for bringing the former landless workers into the PPD. Implementation of the Land Law entailed the creation of a series of new Puerto Rican government agencies. Together these new agencies addressed the administrative needs of the new Agregado Resettlement Program (APS), which oversaw the assignments of parcelas to landless workers, or agregados. Chapters 5 and 6 follow the further development of the parcela communities by looking specically at how the reforms played out in Cidras Parcelas G andaras. argues that Puerto Rican Garc a Colon state programs that encouraged community development and local well being in the parcela communities succeeded in transforming the APS into an instrument of colonial state formation. But he demonstrates as well that outcomes were not always as intended, as women became the new industrial workforce and migration to the United States became a common economic strategy. Chapter 7 adds greater complexity by situating Puerto Rico into broader U.S. strategies for promoting capitalist development on a world scale and explaining how the reform process opened avenues for the 1968 win of the more conservative New Progressive Party (PNP). The APS and other social programs in Puerto Rico became models for Cold War era community development programs throughout Latin America, and Puerto Rican technical experts joined U.S. delegations to other countries. In Puerto Rico, greater material comforts gave legitimacy to new

state formations and led to the emergence of new practices and relations of consumption. In the introduction to Land Reform takes up in Puerto Rico, Garc a Colon Eric Wolfs 2002 criticism of The People of Puerto Rico for not dealing with the dynamic of the hegemonic and subaltern in the study of Puerto Rico conducted in 1948 and 1949, and presents his book as an effort to address this failing. In the conclusion, he appeals again to the importance of the past for an understanding of the present. In this hidden history of subject formation and political practice in Puerto Ricos parcelas, Garc a has contributed both a valuable Colon monograph to the anthropology of Puerto Rico, and a solid demonstration of a historically grounded anthropological analysis of the hegemonic and the subaltern. The topic of resettlement, state formation, and economic transformation also makes the book useful as a case study for political science, community development, and planning. Rumores de Festa: O Sagrado e O Profano na Bahia (Second Edition). Ordep Serra, Salvador, Brazil: EDUFBA 2009. 185 pp. Stephen Selka Indiana University Rumores de Festa [Festive Rumors] is a compelling study of an array of festivals that structure the rhythm of life in the Brazilian state of Bahia. In it, anthropologist Ordep Serra of the Federal University of Bahia explores relationships between the sacred and the profane in carnival, popular Catholic festivals, samba de roda (a form of samba performed in a circle with participants taking dancing in the center)

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and civic celebrations. Serras textured ethnography explores an emergent and dialogical, rather than xed and ahistorical, nature of the sacred/profane distinction in Bahian festivals. In this way, Serra deploys a classic anthropological dichotomy in ways that are fresh and productive. Moreover, although its substantive focus is on public celebrations, the book provides crucial insights into life in Bahia in general. The second edition opens with a retrospective prologue, written some 10 years after the original publication of Rumores de Festa, in which Serra addresses the wider backdrop of his book and his work on carnival, in particular. Here, he emphasizes the extent to which Bahian carnival has become a super-festa characterized by its orientation toward showbiz, pop stars, marketing, and the mass media. Serra maintains that through the emergence of a carnival industry, Bahian carnival has transcended its former limits of time and space. As it surpasses its limits, however, this super-festa does more than allow revelry to spill into new spaces; it reproduces deep social inequalities that characterize life in Bahia. With palpable nostalgia, Serra contrasts the hippie carnival of the 1970s and what he calls the yuppie carnival of today. Against the backdrop of Serras nostalgic prologue, however, hippies and yuppies might be understood not as antipodes, but as nodes on a continuum of cultural transformations. That is, as we know from cases of urban gentrication, bohemians often represent the vanguard of bourgeois appropriations and transformations of popular spaces and practices. Had a nostalgic tone dominated the book, it might have grown tiresome. Yet

Serra goes beyond saudades. In the rst chapter, Atr as do Trio El etrico Serra explores what he sees as Bahian carnivals enduring vibrancy. He focuses on the ways that trios el etricos, or massive multileveled trucks, usually supporting a stage and a powerful sound system, that wind through the streets of Salvador during carnival, have transformed the celebration in recent decades. Although Serra criticizes the commercial interests that have made a spectacle out of carnival, he also emphasizes the popular character of the trios. Indeed, Serra examines the trios el etricos as a fascinating cultural phenomena and he even narrates his own succumbing to the pull of these gigantic revelry machines. Serra points out that even the most massive trios el etricos are nothing without the revelers that congregate around them; he maintains that the common people (a arraia miuda) remain the animating force behind carnival. Although this is a romanticized view (one that the new prologue apparently seeks to hedge), it afrms the interplayintensied by increasingly sophisticated technologies through which blocos are commodied of appropriations and mediations that are crucial to understanding carnival in Bahia. Remaining chapters examine a variety of festivals and practices (festas de largo, samba de roda, civic rituals) through which Serra illustrates not only the shifting nature of the sacred and the profane, but how these are interlaced in contradictory unities. This is evident in one of Bahias most popular festivals, the Lavagem do Bomm, which juxtaposes a vibrant street festival, a solemn mass in a hilltop church, and the washing of the church steps by Candombl e practitioners. Similarly, Serra

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examines the interplay of erotic movements and religious references in the performance of samba de roda. He points out that this dance has origins in African religion and is also connected with popular Catholicism. To his credit, Serra employs the sacred/profane distinction throughout the book in a manner that provides a sense of the uidity of these categories and the ways they are at play in various contexts. The nal chapter, for example, deals with the interplay of secular and religious meanings of the caboclo in civic discourse and Candombl e practice in Bahia. At the chapters end, Serra takes schematic approaches to cultural analysissuch as that of the anthropologist Roberto DaMatta in particularto task for their inability to account for the richness of ritual life in Bahia, an argument that serves as the books leitmotif. I found myself wondering, while reading, about dissenting voices. At least 20 percent of Bahians are evangelical Christians who may see both the sacred and profane sides of the festivals that Serra discusses as demonic. Also relevant are the issues that Candombl e practitioners have raised with the appropriation of their sacred dances, songs, and symbols in public festivals. These important objections are not registered in the book. While they do not represent critical omissions, they would have provided more of a sense of the ways different actors contest the distinction between sacred and profane. On the whole, however, Rumores de Festa stands as an important investigation of festive life in Bahia. It is a central reference for scholars and students concerned with Bahia and Brazil.

Cocas Gone: Of Might and Right in the Huallaga Post-Boom. Richard Kernaghan, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. 308 pp. Bartholomew Dean University of Kansas, Universidad Nacional de San Mart n, Escuela de Posgrado Perus armed internal conicta civil war that claimed well over 70,000 lives from the 1980s through the late 1990s has been the focus of a burgeoning anthropological literature. Yet, relatively scant attention has been devoted to exploring the complex social topography of violence in the Alto Huallaga. These eastern foothills of the tropical Andes were scarred deeply by war and long ravaged by a roaring shadow coca-economy. Fortunately, a dearth in scholarship on the Huallaga did not hinder Richard Kernaghan, who has written a compelling and theoretically sophisticated book that provides a novel framework for understanding the Upper Huallaga in the years immediately following the mid-1990s decline in the commerce of unrened cocaine. Penned in a seductively engaging style with clarity of thought, Cocas Gone chronicles the uid state of power and ghoulish violence gripping the Alto Huallaga in the wake of the meteoric boom in the illicit coca economy, which had previously fueled a two decade old economic bonanza. Cocas Gone is a hauntingly rich ethnography of the immediate aftermath of the Huallagas postboomor what Kernaghan aptly deems, a phase of residual political emergency in which historical memory was formed collaboratively between incidents of violence and the

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ethical valuations people made as they sought to lend the boom a retroactive coherence (2). By the time Kernaghan arrived in 1995 to begin his doctoral eldwork in the small provincial town of Aucayacu, the price of coca leaf, the regions primary commodity, had fallen at. Backed by U.S. intelligence and counternarcotics agencies, the Peruvian Air Force had managed to virtually eliminate the clandestine aerial bridge between the Huallaga and Colombia. The Huallaga coca booms heady days of rags to riches fortune had all but evaporated. In the aftermath of economic dislocation accompanying the abrupt absence of life opportunities that coca had once afforded poor campesinos, Cocas Gone illuminates the vertiginous rise and fall of a slew of the Huallagas competing social actors. During this in-between time of pervasive fear and profound local insecurity, narcos (criminal bands associated with the cocaine boom), senderistas (members of Sendero Luminoso), and state security forces (police and army) were all pitted against one another in a protracted and bloody struggle over vying claims to legal authority, political power, and economic domination. In an effort to distinguish between the historical time of real events and the narrative spin people rely on to make such events intelligible, Kernaghan attends to the deeply contradictory connection between force and law shaping the Alto Huallagas postboom moral economy. He uses stories about the coca boom to relate a cruel time from the vantage point of those who experienced the Huallagas social trauma. But rather than a sustained account of those who participated directly in the so-called terrucada (sendersita way of life), Cocas Gone gives

voice to local Aucayacu residents lived experiences. It presents a series of rsthand descriptions that provide insight into the interlocking forces shaping peoples notions of time, violence and law. Tales of endemic, corrosive corruption, and toxic impunity in the face of systematic human rights violations punctuate residents narratives of daily life during the postboom. Based on conversations with Marusha, a human rights lawyer and central character of the text, as well as other residents, such Carlos, a municipal worker, or Mariela, a shopkeeper, Kernaghan chronicles two tortuous decades of the history of Aucayacu, one of the few towns in the Alto Huallaga with a well organized Sendero militia. This includes reference to la apogee de la cocathe rise and spread of coca production throughout the entire Huallaga Valley, followed by state-backed antinarcotics initiatives that milked the [drug] trade as they worked to displace it (44). Seeking to enforce its will through limpieza sociala blood-spattered campaign of social cleansingSendero Luminoso subsequently entered the Huallaga in full force, only to be repelled by the army which re-established state rule and unleashed a savage scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign against Senderos Urbana militia. The Civil Guards success in undermining Senderos operational capacity signaled the booms nal reprise, giving way to a local power vacuum and a time dominated by the rival Cristal and Champa drug gangs (rmas) battle for local supremacy. During the postboom an acute tension between town and country framed local life, as revealed by the way many residents of Aucayacu spoke of the bandathe outback region beyond two rivers and a rivulet

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that bordered the town. The Huallaga Valleys lush and verdant scenery was riddled by signs of deep conict: grafti and concrete garrisons revealed years of political strife and military action. Here in this realm with its own laws was the land of no one (la tierra de nadie) lled nonetheless with the likes of senderista rebels (terrucos), drug couriers (traqueteros), and hired gunmen (sicarios). Discussion of a fatal shooting in the community of Pacae that left two campesinos deadapparently at the hands of Sendero for allegedly being soplones (snitches)serves as a poignant rumination on violence in its various guises. People often expressed the broader history that gave local meanings to violent events, such as the Pacae murders, through stories in which the encounter with rotting human remains served as a central motif (165). Political violence was channeled through the grotesque exhibition of dismembered bodies that both Sendero and the Army used to transmit their messages of ghastly brutality. And so what emerges from Kernaghans portrayal of the Huallaga Valley during the height of armed conict is a nightmarish, phantasmagoric dreamscape of cruelty populated by mutilated corpses littered along the Marginal highway, or hastily stuffed into black plastic bags (costales) thrown into the turbid depths of the mighty Huallaga River. Kernaghans arresting depiction of the fear that held sway in Aucayacu and its environs includes nuanced descriptions of key protagonists of terror, like the sadistically cruel, army captain and giver of life that most knew only as Esparza(188). The name of the man many held responsible for putting an end to the Urbana militia, Esparza, became synonymous in the lo-

cal vernacular with one who kills without bounds. Cocas Gone is a tour-de-force in political anthropology precisely because of its efforts at making intelligible the seemingly ineffable dimensions of human brutality. Indeed, it resonates well beyond the classroom, succeeding in conveying the ambiguity and profound absurdity of violence, fear, and bloodshed in the Huallaga Valley. To wit, Kernaghans exceptional text underscores the value of ne-grained ethnography for understanding the cultural construction of violence, particularly in times of lawlessness and rampant fear. Cocas Gone thus reveals powerfully the salience of violence in shaping human experience, and illuminates many of the difcult ethical problems posed by its very representation, not to mention comprehension. Mobility, Markets and Indigenous Socialities: Contemporary Migration in the Peruvian Andes. Cecilie Vindal degaard, Burlington: Ashgate, 2010. 237 pp. Daniella Mar a Gandolfo Wesleyan University One could hardly spend time in Arequipa, Peru, during the 1970s and 1980s as I did frequently to visit my mothers familywithout hearing terried exclamations by native arequipe nos, of all class backgrounds, about pune nos taking over their city. Such anxious remarks gestured at all migrants, generally darker skinned and Quechua or Aymara speaking, who hailed from various places in the higher regions of the southern Andes, including Puno, the southernmost department in Perus Altiplano. This xation with Puno was not arbitrary: Since the 18th century

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Arequipa has been the political and economic center in the southern Andes, its hegemonic power fueled then by an economy of extraction of Punos resources (cattle, wool, and metals) based on nearly feudal relations with herders and peasants. This centuries-old regional dynamic entered a new phase in the late 1940s as the breakdown in the postcolonial order in the rural south produced massive migration toward Arequipathen as now, the second largest and most industrialized city in Peruand as migrants, seeking progress in the city, began to settle in new neighborhoods along its periphery. One of Arequipas new neighborhoods, rst settled in 1964 and located on the foothills of the picturesque Misti volcano, is Jerusal en. In Jerusal en, anthropologist Cecilie degaard spent close to 17 months living among migrants from Puno and Cusco. She was interested in learning how their experiences of migration were mediated by Andean forms of sociality, like reciprocity. More specically, she sought to understand how these helped shape migrants relations to one another and to their physical surroundings. degaard was also interested in learning about the multiple and complex meanings of the term progress as deployed by new urban residents who contrasted it with the rural poverty and marginalization they left behind as well as the backwardness that Peruvians in general often associate with indigeneity. What degaard found is that, while embracing the idea that modernity and prosperity are possible only through mobility and relocation to cities, migrants make use of rural or indigenous networking strategies (including ctive kin like compadrazgo and padrinazgo) and transmute into the urban milieu cosmological

understandings in which people, places, and things are bound through the reciprocal exchange of goods and services. These forms of sociality, at one level practical and neatly recognizable, are at another level linked to more mysterious, chthonic or material forces that can be manipulated positively through ritual pagos or negatively through brujer a. degaard argues that, on the one hand, these networks have become an important point of entry for state policy and the channeling of resources by the state and local and international NGOs. On the other hand, she asserts that the informal or even occult dimension of these networks, which gure prominently in migrants stated efforts to progress, present a limit to state regulation of these urban spaces. This renders them illegible from the perspective of the state. Migrant networks and related forms of sociality, ultimately, lie at the heart of a morality different from the set of values implied in state regulation. For example, among residents in Jerusal en who work as market traders, informal and even illegal transactions like contraband are by and large acceptable. The real limits to market freedom are determined by peoples relationships and commitments to one another while state law is viewed as unfairly limiting entrepreneurial initiative and possibilities to prosper. There is a great need for ethnographic knowledge about life in Perus so-called secondary cities, which account for much of the countrys 20th century urban explosion. In this sense, degaards publication is a welcome contribution. The reader must be aware, however, that this study is not quite about Jerusal en, or even Arequipawhat one learns about the neighborhood or the city and about peoples senses of place in either one is

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limited. Likewise, the study is an ethnography, if we agree that this term refers to a research and writing practice that seeks to dwell in the particularity of experience as the irreducible substance of any broader argumentation. My sense, in reading this book, is that degaard favors a different approach: She draws on the narratives of migration of a group of informants in Jerusal en, primarily the experiences of a woman named Angelina and her family. But in doing so she seems driven by the desire to make sense of their experiences, to explain them, in relation to more general arguments advanced by a body of secondary sources. These are mainly ethnographies by North American and Scandinavian scholars, and in particular the work of Sarah Lund Skar, whose urban focus is Lima. The result is that peoples unique stories of mobility and settlement and complex views on the social and material world, all offered to the author with what seems like candid openness, disappear into general and, at times, generalizing statements about Andean culture or the migrant experience. Repeated use of phrases like This indicates how . . . and This illustrates how . . . to show the relevance of peoples stories to broader anthropological elucidationbeyond being a problem of style, which is in itself distractingsuggests that the author, in fact, thinks of peoples experiences and opinions as mere illustration of wider, and sometimes only vaguely related, processes. The important question of what progress means for people and of how it can be achieved is explored from a variety of angles. These include citizenship and state-neighborhood relations (chs. 1 and 6), ethnic and class identity (ch. 2), cosmology (ch. 3), kinship (ch. 4), communal work and gender relations (ch. 5),

and market life (ch. 7). All stand out for their bold frankness: The author does not shy away from discussing difcult issues, including the role of violence in family relations, or from showing how deeply the long-standing racist and otherwise oppressive notions about indigeneity have been internalized to be deployed against one another in assessments of peoples worth. But some of these chapters suffer also from a lack of depth or ethnographic detail. Chapter 3, for example, focuses on immigrants interesting views about places and the landscape as having agency in their own right. Yet the discussion is a rather sketchy and disjointed examination of a variety of topics like ritual pagos, a nimo, brujer a, mal viento, and the gentiles (ancestors), among others. The texts second half is richer, ethnographically speaking; degaard is at her best when she takes the time to depict events and places, bringing out their real signicance. Overall, however, the analysis would have beneted from a narrower and deeper focus on (I guess we could say a thicker description of) Jerusal en as a place and the attitudes and beliefs people have brought to the city from their own, specic places of origin. This may have placed the questions that motivate this study squarely within the regions postcolonial history of exploitation, inequality, and attempts at modernization, which is largely absent from the analysis. I feel inclined to ask: Why is it interesting or important to scrutinize the spaces and lives of the poor in a place like Jerusal en if not as a vital facet of that recent history and if not as a specic and perhaps radical response to the regions unique patterns of economic, social, and cosmological hierarchy? For such history surely

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informs immigrants desire to move to Arequipa, as opposed to any other city, and helps shape their ideas about progress and prosperity, ethnicity and class, place and the power of landscape, and the state. A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock. Carolyn Dean, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, 320 pp. Sandra Rozental New York University Known for her work as an art historian of colonial Cuzco, Carolyn Dean has shifted attention to the stony traces of a prior period in the citys history. A Culture of Stone posits that the ancient rocks and pre-Hispanic architecture that remain in the landscape today reveal Inka beliefs and practices around and about stones as transmutable, potentially animate, and sentient beings. Building on this perspective, Dean hopes to remedy what she views as art historys indifference to Inka rock carvings and buildings. She contends that most scholars of Inka stone masonry, blinded by an inherently Western perspective that favors representational forms, have been hesitant to view Inka rocks as art and have focused instead on what these material remains reveal about pre-Hispanic engineering and technology. Thus, it appears that scholars have separated Inka carved stones from other aspects of Inka culture in very unInka ways (16). For Dean, it is precisely because Inka stonework contains meaning in its very materialityrather than in its representational formthat it is fertile ground for revealing pre-Hispanic, Inka epistemologies and ways of seeing. A Culture of Stone is elegantly written, with each of four chapters structured

around one of the many ways peoples within the Inka empire used, related to and understood stone objects. The book begins with an exploration of how rocks became agents of social life during Inka times, performing memory work as rememberedrocks that made specic moments and persons present in the landscape over time. Using Guaman Pomas accounts, as well as the renditions of other colo nial chroniclers such as Martin de Murua and Bernab e Cobo, Dean describes these presentational stones as wawqi (petried brothers), wanka (petried owners of places), saywa (territorial markers), puruawqa (petried warriors), saykuska (rocks that refuse to move), sukanka (pillars representing time itself), as well as echo stones and apachita (rock piles marking specic places). Dean suggests tangible ways to recognize these extraordinary rocks through visual cues such as framing, distancing, contouring, and carving. She then works to illustrate reciprocity between rocks and landscape, analyzing how stone architecture materialized the Inkas civilizing mission over the chaos of nature, especially through terracing and nibbled masonry. As Dean expresses it, While Inka walls are not texts, they can and do contain philosophical statements about how the Inka made their waynot in or through the world, but of it (85). The second half of the study focuses on rocks as instruments of power, rst as the tools of an expansionist empire during pre-Hispanic times, and then as the cornerstones of colonial attempts to transform all traces of the Inka empire into ruins from a distant past. By exploring how stones established Inka ownership over territory, Dean shows how their stony materiality made tangible the states power to mobilize labor throughout the

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Inka empire. The author uses examples of saykuska, or recalcitrant rocks which refused to move, to analyze Inka power not as absolute, but rather as a system of negotiation and rule: abandoned stones, she argues, made the Inkas relationship with the numinous quality of their building materials concrete while also displaying the power of the state over nature. The discussion of stone seats is Deans most insightful example of how rocks and state power were intricately connected in Inka times. Finally, Dean ties the ways in which these rocks were connected to power relations during Inka rule with the colonial project to transform Inka stones into traces imbued with mystery, rather than products of a powerful State. She cites anthropologist Quetzil Casta nedas work on pre-Hispanic ruins in Mexico to strengthen her own discussion of how Inka rocks have been ventriloquized by a variety of actors including government authorities, tourists and new-age pilgrims who visit Cuzco with their own ideas and expectations about Inka civilization. Using beautiful images (many in color) of Inka sites and monuments, and poetic descriptions of numinous waka, petried rulers, transubstantiations of stony essences, and stories of lithic personhood, Dean builds a new approach to ancient stones that pointedly critiques traditional art historical scholarship. Although she infuses her arguments with anthropological studies about material culture such as Alfred Gells work on anicons (nonresemblant things that are also iconic), this anthropologist wishes that Dean had delved more into how anthropology as a discipline, in contrast or perhaps even in response to art history, has studied artifacts as animate for most of its history. This anthropological tradition extends no-

tably from Emile Durkheims interest in totemic emblems, Marcel Mauss theories of objects in exchange, to scholarship about fetishes and inalienable possessions, and onto the recent wave of material culture scholarship that has emerged from the United States and United Kingdom. Deans monograph would have been greatly enriched by engagement with some of this literature. Yet Dean is adept at interweaving archival and ethnographic data in textual form: colonial accounts of the Inka written by both Spanish and indigenous chroniclers are brought to life by contemporary Quechua understandings about stones. Dean shows readers how both colonial and contemporary accounts reveal Inka understandings of stones as performative objects within social life by placing these sources in constant dialogue. Given the territorial expansion of the Inka empire across a multicultural region made up of different landscapes, peoples and languages, Deans Cuzco-centric study would be complemented by future work focused not on Inka per se, but on their indigenous subjects relationships to stones, specically to those used to signal imperial domination. This reviewer also wonders the extent to which the Christian theology embraced by most of Deans sources (many of them ordained clergy members on an evangelizing mission in the Americas) may have inected our understandings of Inka ontologies with regard to the material world. As a study of the rocks themselves, their material texture, location and relationship to other features in the landscape, as well as their social agency, A Culture of Stone is a welcome intervention in art history, and will also be of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, and scholars of Peru and Latin America.

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Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution. Rick L opez, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 408 pp. Michael Chibnik University of Iowa Even the most casual visitors to Mexico typically notice the wide variety of handicrafts in markets and shops. Pottery, ceramics, textiles, metalwork, and woodcarvings are symbols of local and regional identities and emblems of a national ideology emphasizing indigenous heritage. The sale of handicrafts to tourists, shops, and wholesalers is an important source of income in households in many parts of Mexico. Scholars writing about Mexican handicrafts often give the following shorthand explanation of their prominence in national ideology. Prior to the Mexican Revolution in the rst part of the 20th century, elites accepting European ideas about artistic merit largely ignored indigenous crafts. After the Revolution, however, intellectuals and politicians began to praise and publicize popular (usually Indian) arts and crafts. Famous muralists such as Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros extolled indigenous themes in their paintings. State agencies were established to promote and preserve popular arts. The postrevolutionary Mexican states interest in popular arts and crafts was ideological. Leaders sought to unite a country divided along ethnic, linguistic, and political lines. In particular, they worked to draw indigenous populations into the state by creating regional and national symbols of identity that reected pre-Columbian pasts. Although the goal was to integrate Indians into a mestizo state, the rst step

was to make all Mexicans value aspects of indigenous cultures such as dance, music, painting, weaving, and pottery. The syncretic nature of many of these culture features was rarely emphasized by intellectuals and politicians encouraging indigenismo. In Crafting Mexico, historian Rick Lopez provides a nuanced, detailed account of the role of intellectuals and the state in promoting popular visual arts in postrevolutionary Mexico. Although Lopez does not altogether reject conventional accounts of this period, he shows how they oversimplify ever-changing ideological currents and state policies. Per haps most strikingly, Lopez pays particular attention to the role of non-Mexicans in promoting popular arts. He argues that the collaboration between foreigners and Mexicans (many returning from extended periods of study in Europe and the United States) led to a paradoxical and profoundly transnational (18) process of using visual arts in nation formation. Lopez also rejects interpretations of mestizaje as consistent attempts by the state to erase Indian culture and enshrine Mexico as one-race nation. He suggests instead that intellectuals and politicians, following the lead of Manuel Gamio, viewed indigenousness and mestizaje as a continuum rather than a sharp dichotomy. In the 1920s and 1930s, these intellectuals and politicians made claims about Mexicos inherent unity at the same time they emphasized its diversity. In this context, they were willing to accept implicitly the syncretic nature of many popular visual arts. By 1940, however, politicians and intellectuals (including Gamio) had become disillusioned with this approachs potential. Even the indigenista, populist, president L azaro C ardenas argued by the end of

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his term that reformers should attempt to mexicanize Indians rather than indianize Mexico. Lopez divides his text into two parts. The rst and longer section describes the emergence of mestizaje as a postrevolutionary ideology, shows why and how nationalists turned to visual aesthetics and popular arts to support their political goals, and examines diverse people and institutions associated with the promotion and marketing of handicrafts. After an introduction that nicely presents the books principal arguments, two chapters draw on state and private archives, media, and oral interviews to show the uneven develop ment of what Lopez calls an ethnicized nationalist aesthetic. The next chapter examines foreign-Mexican collaboration in making popular visual arts an integral part of postrevolutionary mexicanidad. The remaining three chapters in this section describe state projects such as museums and institutes associated with the popular arts diffusion and marketing. Although two of these chapters include information about the period between 1940 and 1970, the coverage of these years is much less detailed than that of the 1920s and 1930s. The studys second section describes how the postrevolutionary promotion of popular visual arts affected the trade in lacquered boxes and gourds from the town of Olinal a in the southeastern state of Guerrero. Olinal a was one of the rst artisan communities regarded by postrevolutionary intellectuals as quintessentially Mexican and remains important in the nation alist imagination today. Lopez draws on oral interviews and ethnographic and archaeological studies in his examination of changes in the production and marketing

of lacquered art from the Aztec era to the present. Lopez presents the material on Olinal a in order to illustrate the interactions among national ideologies and institutions, local economics, politics, and culture, and the regional creation of popular visual art. As someone who has written about Mexican handicrafts, I am pleased that Lopez has provided a useful case history of lacquered art from Olinal a. Nevertheless, this largely descriptive, ethnohistorical section is so different from the rst part of Crafting Mexico that it might better have been published separately. Crafting Mexico is an important and original contribution to the literature on visual arts in national ideologies. The detailed history, sophisticated analyses, intriguing case studies, and wonderful blackand-white and color photographs make this book essential to the library of anyone interested in Mexican popular art. I espe cially appreciate the attention that Lopez gives to the activities of varied artists, politicians, and intellectuals. These lively descriptions esh out the books theoretical sections. Lopez notes only occasionally how his approach to the role of popular visual art in the nationalist ideology of postrevolutionary Mexico differs from that of other scholars. As might be expected of a historian, he concentrates instead on carefully documented details about events, people, in stitutions, and policies. Lopezs reticence, however, should not obscure the originality of his work. The nationalist project he describes was inuenced greatly by the activities of foreigners and transnational intellectual currents. This is not a standard picture of the emergence of postrevolutionary ideology.

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Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill. Gabriela Soto-Laveaga, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. 331 pp. Risa Cromer CUNY Graduate Center Jungle Laboratories revises signicantly the history of the global hormone industry by including the experiences of Mexican peasants who made this industry possible. From the 1940s to 1980s, 100 thousand Mexican campesinos participated in digging up, processing, and transporting nearly a billion tons of barbasco to meet the demands of pharmaceutical researchers worldwide. Barbasco is an inedible wild yam indigenous to southeastern Mexican jungles that contains high concentrations of diosgenin, a chemical compound from which progesterone and cortisone were derived. These steroid hormones transformed reproductive medicine and pain management in the twentieth century (39), as any beneciary of oral contraceptives or arthritis medication might attest. When historians of science unearth the contributions of people not traditionally associated with scientic discovery, ideas about who produces science, and where, change. Gabriela Soto-Laveaga demonstrates how local knowledge was integral to the global hormone industry: Penn State chemist Russell Marker, whose research ndings ignited the global demand for barbasco, drew on the wisdom of Alberto Moreno, a store owner in Veracruz, to nd the wild yams for which he scoured the Mexican countryside in the 1940s. Marker acknowledged publicly his debt to Moreno in 1990, not an insignicant event in the history of science. SotoLaveaga emphasizes how relationships like

this one represent the dependence of U.S. researchers on Mexican knowledge. Moreover, she details the many debts owed to yam diggers without whom chemical experiments or commercial hormone-based medicines were not possible. But Jungle Laboratories details more than the important role rural Mexicans and the variegated relationships of power, class, and differential mobility between themplayed in modern scientic discovery. Soto-Laveaga reveals how, in the hands of savvy campesinos, middlemen, and a populist government, modern science had transformative power both locally and nationally. She illustrates how campesinos and middlemen appropriated the language and practice of chemistry to negotiate new avenues for social mobility. Eduardo Dom nquez, for instance, lived in the dry region of Amatepec where wild yams contained lower levels of diosgenin. This meant he and his neighbors were paid less for the barbasco they collected. When higher diosgenin-yielding material started coming from Amatepec processing plants, lab representatives realized that these campesinos were experimenting with basic steroid hormones (112) to their benet. At the national level, President Luis Echeverr as populist government (1970 76) turned the barbasco trade into a symbol of progress with the potential to transform a decaying rural economy and society. Echeverr as regime embraced science as powerful tool to usher an independent Mexico into modernity. Through her study of jungle laboratorieswhere science was appropriated at the local and national level in MexicoSoto-Laveaga captures the powerful role science played in challenging what it meant to be a peasant and Mexican in the mid-20th century.

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Soto-Laveaga traces the unlikely conuence of global hormone research and Mexican campesinos over nine engaging chapters. Chapter 1 details how the southeastern Tuxtepec region suffered economic hardship when the national economy transitioned over the 1940s60s from rural-driven agriculture to urbanbased industry. Chapter 2 illuminates how the pressing need to nd a plant-based resource for hormone research arose from 20th century pharmaceutical discoveries in Europe and the United States and, subsequently, how chemist Russell Marker ended up developing Syntex, a research lab, in Mexico. When growing numbers of unemployed peasants in barbasco-rich regions learned that labs like Syntex were buying sacks of wild yams, a veritable army of men, women, and children began the grueling, and often hazardous, work of digging up barbasco in order to survive rural Mexicos economic stagnation. The risk of snake bites, dehydration, and treacherous jungle ravines were a basic part of campesinos daily work of identifying, uprooting, and transporting wild yam to the nearest collection site. Stories from interviews with over fty former barbasco pickers enliven Soto-Laveagas examination in Chapter 3 of the new barbasco trades effect on rural society. Notably, elaborate networks materialized for moving wild yams from jungles to local collection sites, regional processing plants, and worldwide labs. Along with unprecedented cash ows into these communities came new class divisions, exploitation, and opportunities for social mobility. By the late 1950s, with U.S. corporations at the helm, Mexico was producing 90 percent of the worlds steroid hormones. Chapter 4 analyzes the central role of science in develop-

ing this successful, albeit dependent, Mexican-based steroid industry. Chapters 5 through 9 trace how and with what effects barbasqueros [barbasco pickers] shifted, from uninformed root gatherers to, eventually and surprisingly, vocal agitators for change in the countryside (51). In the 1970s, national concerns were mounting about overpopulation, rural and urban unrest, and Mexican dependence. Chapter 5 explores the various social and political factors that made barbasco an answer to these problems. In 1974, when worldwide demand had already signicantly diminished, President Echeverr as populist regime made a belated effort to nationalize the industry through the creation of Proquivemex. Proquivemexs goal was to regulate the extraction, processing, pricing, and selling of diosgenin in ways that ostensibly promoted campesino progress and empowerment. Chapters 6 and 7 analyze thoughtfully Echeverr as awed expectations that led to the failures of attempts to regulate natural resources and optimize output while attempting to control (co-opt) campesinos who provided the associated labor (167). Nevertheless, Proquivemexs teach-ins for barbasqueros about their role in the barbasco industry mobilized campesinos to take control of the means of production. Although Proquivemex was already a sinking ship by the time the peasant unions took charge in the early 1980s, Chapter 8s analysis of an uncommon sourceletters from barbasco leaders to President Echeverr areveals two gains from Proquivemexs social-commercial experiment: (1) barbasqueros expressed a collective identity with respect to their contributions to the barbasco trade, and (2) while using the language of those in power, barbasqueros

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articulated their own history of involvement. Chapter 9 outlines the eventual dissolution of Proquivemex and the many obstacles to peasant organizing around barbasco in the 1980s, including shifts in science away from plant-based toward synthetic sources for steroid hormones. Jungle Laboratories unites rigorous archival research with a compelling ethnographic sensibility. A methodological strength of this narrative about wild yam, Mexican science, and national politics is Soto-Laveagas telling of it through the stories of people who experienced the recent history (194289). Interviews with former pickers, union leaders, scientists, and middlemen do more than supplement lacunas in the archival resources; they enrich it thoroughly. For those wondering what jungle laboratories have to do with the making of the pill, look closer. Soto-Laveaga challenges readers to reconsider which histories and whose contributions count. Jungle Laboratories will be enjoyed by students of varying interests, from science studies to Mexican politics, economics, and movements to womens health. Begging as a Path to Progress: Indigenous Women and Children and the Struggle for Ecuadors Urban Spaces. Kate Swanson, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2010. Thomas A. Oft Baylor University Reg` alame. Most of those who have spent even a few nights in a Latin American city have heard this directed at them from an impoverished citizen or quasi citizen, often a woman or a small child, and in some cases a member of an indigenous group.

Beggars on the streets of cities, Latin American or otherwise, are ubiquitous. So too it seems is a commonplace explanation as to why individuals beg; namely, begging is the last recourse of those least able, who through a calculus of bad luck or moral decit, are reduced to seeking out daily survival by seeking to mobilize the sympathy of those with whom they share the streets. Kate Swanson, a geographer, spent more than 18 months in Ecuador investigating a small group of indigenous women and children who beg on the streets of Ecuadors two largest cities, Quito and Guayaquil. She hoped to provide a more nuanced portrait of a particular group of beggars, and as her title indicates, she found that begging can be a means for progress, rather than a last resort. As a colleague said recently at the AAA meetings, anthropology is a discipline that revels in the exception. And Swanson, as an anthropologically inclined geographer, presents her interlocutors begging as a creative and a nancially viable practice that stands in contrast to the logics mentioned above. That she focuses on the seemingly most vulnerable and excluded subset of beggars, namely indigenous women and children, only adds to her arguments force and originality. Swanson begins with a chapter entitled Unraveling Myths. This lays out her primary focus on the geographies of gender, race ethnicity, and childhood within the context of both modernization and globalization . . . [and] the differentiated ways . . . indigenous people are pulled into the modernization project (2). She argues that a chance at an escape from poverty and subsistence agriculture, alongside the lure of increased educational opportunities and participation

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in the consumer culture that is the sine qua non of modern identity has pulled the women and children of Calhuas , a small village in Ecuadors central Andes, into the modernization project. Rejecting their assigned positions in Ecuadors social and racial hierarchies (3), Calhuase nos seek their futures as beggars. How and why they have made this choice, as well as the results of this decision, is the subject of the books rst three chapters. In chapters 4 and 5, Swanson then situates these Calhuase nos experience in the larger contexts of urban revanchism and the whitening of the streets of Quito and Guayaquil. Swansons project is no small task, especially in a narrative of 118 pages. Her methods involved research in two cities and Calhuas , 125 interviews, a survey of 42 primary school students, and participant observation and library research. She has attempted to combine the intensive eld methodology of ethnography with the detailed theoretical nuance of geography and the national and global reach of political economy. The result is at once an ethnography of beggars, a geography of ruralurban youth migration, and a political economy of urban renewal. Despite some real shortcomings, the overall product is excellent. While the story of rural to urban migration among indigenous men is well covered, there is relatively little work on the perspectives of young women and children as agents and participants in this process. Due to the broad spatial perspective that Swanson employs, we now have not one but two ne studies of the issue, both from the sending rural community and the receiving urban one. Nonetheless, women are also largely neglected in social scientic approaches to street work: Except for prostitutes and market ven-

dors, women working on city streets are rarely found in the ethnographic literature. Swanson enters this gap also by focusing on a profession practiced by more young women than men. In doing so, she shows how they negotiate the particular dangers and opportunities that street work provides for young women and children. Child labor is almost uniformly portrayed as detrimental to long-term economic advancement (of the type that education offers), yet as Swanson states Although they remain very poor, their newly earned money (from begging) has allowed them to improve their material conditions and better their educational opportunities (85). Swansons study thus counters the popular conception that the desire to work and consume by youths is antithetical to their continued school attendance: It may in fact be precisely the activity that allows them to continue their educations. Despite its creative richness and importance, the shortcomings of Begging as a Path to Progress are most evident in relation to Swansons ethnographic portrait of beggars. Her provocative title, and the volumes cover that portrays two young boys laughing through a broken window, suggest a detailed ethnography of child beggars, which will confound popular logic. In reality, as the author admits, less than one-third of her detailed interviews were with actual beggars. These included young women as old as 24, and with an average age of 13. Most work was done instead with adult professionals all of whom were connected to issues surrounding indigenous beggars (9). More than 60 percent of this group were nonindigenous. Confusingly, she argues that the vast majority of indigenous women and children begging in

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Quito hail from Calhuasi (19), a hamlet with a population of 1,250. If true, this means that either there are fewer indigenous beggars in Quito than in comparable Latin American cities or that the author is incorrect and Calhuase nos make up a smaller percentage of Quitos overall begging population. This anomaly leads one to question her other data generated with regards to begging, (income earned, advantages over other occupations, possibility of continuing education while working on the streets, indeed begging as a path to progress). Also, Swansons beggars are all either selling gum or working as street entertainers by performing cartwheels at intersections. But she considers much of this disguised or intercalated with active begging. Nonetheless, and while it can be said that selling a commodity as ubiquitous and insignicant as gum is not full-on street vendingjust as performing amateurish cartwheels is not miming or juggling on a unicyclea successful argument that these vernacular performers are beggars would require clearer methodological delineation, something Swanson does not provide. While her prole of the street job (and it is indeed work) of begging may be an exception and difcult to generalize to other settings, Swansons overall ndings about what rural to urban migration is like for poor indigenous youth, especially women, how young women and children adapt to street work, and the vital role of work in providing a means for poor children to maintain school attendance are exceptional. This book is of particular interest to anyone seeking to understand better rural to urban migration in the global south or street labor as practiced by women and children.

Blackness in a White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay. George Reid Andrews, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 241 pp. Erika Denise Edwards University of North Carolina-Charlotte Blackness in a White Nation opens with a lively description of the Llamadas, an African-inspired carnival comparasa (drum and marching corps) that George Reid Andrews experienced in 2002. In response to this joyous scene that included African drums, African rhythms, African names, and white performers Andrews asked, How can this be? How did an African-based cultural form come to be practiced and populated mainly by white people? And further, How did a nation that has historically prided itself on its European heritage and traditions . . . come to embrace African-based cultural forms as core elements of its cultural identity? (1). Andrews analyzes the appropriation of black culture and its consecration within Uruguay. He provides a historical narrative that moves from the 19th to the 20th centuries in order to explicate this paradoxical acceptance and denial of black contributions. Critical to Andrews argument is the contention that as much as black culture is accepted as the national norm, blacks are not: In order to be accepted into the national scene, Afro-Uruguayans often had to succumb to stereotypical labels. Divided into six chapters, Andrews history of exclusion and selective inclusion explores the meanings of race and nation. The author looks closely within the black community in order to explore the meaning of being black. He does so from an explicitly outsider perspective

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indicative of that of the larger white population and then form a more insider perspective meant to explicate how the Afro-Uruguayan community sees itself. Additionally, close reading of AfroUruguayan newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries, help elucidate an intracommunity understanding of racial identity, and in particular, class struggles within the black community. These multiple perspectives permit the reader to appreciate a complex and often dynamic dialog. Andrews expands his use of AfroUruguayan newspapers with oral histories and musical lyrics that provide a perspective from the point of view of Uruguays black community. Yet employing 19th century journalistic accounts can be controversial since there exist questions about the extent to which such sources indeed represent well the entire community. This is in large part a function of limited literacy levels. Yet Andrews reads deftly and in the process reveals a black perspective on the nation and Afro-Uruguayans struggles and triumphs. Andrews also interviews prominent Afro-Uruguayans who were former carnival dancers, candombe musicians (a genre rooted in African drumming found in the R o de la Plata), and politicians. Here Andrews asks questions of a variety of performers, including people who played the role of the black, sexual vedette, or featured female dancer. This dancer was modeled after the show girls in Parisian musical reviews and the term was appropriated from French. Asking questions about their former days as vedettes, Andrews explores in oral histories how black women have adjusted to lives out of the spotlight. Unfortunately for the former dancers their publicly exhibited sexuality, so much a part of these black womens in-

corporation in the nationalist spectacle of carnival, continues to leave them open to stereotyping. Throughout his analysis, Andres employs candombe and carnival as key examples of how black culture was appropriated and transformed in the Uruguayan national narrative. Photographs make the reader want to get involved in carnival, and numerous examples of lyrics demonstrate its evolution during the 20th century. At the same time, the reader learns how a communitys culture can be popularized and commercialized. Moreover, feelings of lament and regret are revealed in oral histories with past dancers and drummer core leaders who criticize what they claim are todays watered-down versions of their music. Nonetheless, some black drummers argued to Andrews that although their music had become commercialized, they were still the only ones who could drum because it was en la sangre (in the blood) (126). According to these musicians, percussion schools may be able to teach technique, but the true rhythm is exclusive to the black community. In order to test the drummers theory, Andrews becomes his own topic of study. He asks, Why are so many white people taking up drumming . . . and more interesting . . . can white people drum? (126 and 128) and enrolls in Mundo Afro percussion school for four months. He notes that while teachers attempted to teach the history and culture of the drum, most of the overwhelmingly white group of students showed little interest. And that was, he concluded, the benchmark in understanding why blacks thought whites could not drum: It had nothing to do with blood, but rather the lack of long-term exposure to black-drumming

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techniques, which ultimately is found in the black homes and families. Nonetheless, this compelling and intuitive perspective leaves open a pressing question: After four months of playing . . . Can Andrews drum? Given the emphasis on the ludic aspects of black culture, one might be carried away by this oftentimes richly enjoyable cultural history. Yet, Andrews grounds the reader again and again with concrete examples of discrimination experienced by Afro-Uruguayans. This takes place in relation to education and employment. These sobering examples strengthen his overall argument: black culture can be appropriated, but black people cannot. The ability to take cultural aspects such as carnival and candombe and make them national emblems of Uruguay reveals a historical tendency in Uruguay to accommodate its black population within roles of entertainers, musicians, and dancers. Yet, when the black community began to question its socioeconomic status and attempt to go beyond such roles, a dissonance takes place. Within education, Uruguay guarantees equal opportunity for all. Yet Andrews interviews reveal blacks laments about overcrowded and underfunded schools. He also explores peoples feeling of ostracism by classmates. Andrews calls attention to an often overlooked and understudied black history in Uruguay. In doing so, he often makes comparisons to other AfroDiasporic communities such as Brazil, the United States and, especially, Argentina. Both Uruguay and Argentina share similar histories of mass European immigration and moments of pride related to their putative status as white nations. These comparisons allow the reader to make key connections and see the AfroUruguayan experience in the wider Afro-

Diasporic context. Furthermore, by comparing their experiences in the nation, Andrews demonstrates that although the struggle for racial and national acceptance is a universal theme throughout the Diaspora, context is crucial. The denition of discrimination and how blacks experienced it in each country would ultimately play an important role in how to combat it. For example, Andrews discussed African Americans, such as Ellen Irene Diggs, who visited Uruguay during the 1940s and 1950s, with U.S. State Department support. Diggs experience with overt racism in the United States did not allow her to see Uruguays ostensibly subtle racism. In fact, at the end of her stay, she could not understand the lack of a collective advancement by Afro-Uruguayans and how they could not advance in a country that offered ideal conditions. Like Andrews now-classic The AfroArgentines of Buenos Aires 1800-1900, this new study arises from a road less traveled. The text is accessible to anyone interested in Latin American history, popular culture, and candombe. In addition to being of signicant interest to specialists on race relations and nationalism in Latin America, it would work well in classes that examine the African Diaspora, gender, and cultural politics in and across the nationstate. The Dictators Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo. Lauren Derby, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. 432 pp. Ryan Mann-Hamilton CUNY Graduate Center In power from 1930 to 1960, Rafael Trujillo attempted to bring unity to a

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nation in disarray since, in his own words, there did not exist here a Nation enjoying its just attributes. Instead there was a group of humanitya group tormented by unrest, insecurity, compromise, injustice and servitude (Trujillo 1960:13). Scholars have described the Trujillo regime as absolute and tyrannical, with much of the literature focused on the economic and political manipulations that occurred in relation to violence associated with Trujillo himself. In The Dictators Seduction, Lauren Derby complicates existing framings of the Trujillo regime by focusing on the role of the masses in their acceptance of his policies. This is a signicant contribution to studies of state and subject formation in the Caribbean and adds much to Dominican historiography as Derby emphasizes symbolic forms of domination and the mix of private and public spectacle usually left out of analyses of the Trujillo regime. These were critical to the regimes performative showcasing of its power. In this light, she examines a slew of examples that permit readers to understand more clearly the networks that allowed the regime to stay in power and, even after Trujillos demise, to continue to inuence politics and everyday life in the Dominican Republic (DR). Derbys challenge to existing scholarship draws on archival and ethnographic data as well as the analysis of literary, religious, and musical sources. She explores how the regime was perceived. In the process, she delves into the historical trajectory that grounded the rise and acceptance of Trujillo and explores the mythmaking that supported him as dictator. Rather than limit her focus to coercion and violence, she sheds light on the everyday forms of domination that bred what she

dubs a culture of compliance (7). She investigates how the state, as both a visible and invisible actor, extended its tentacles into civil society in part by setting the terms for the construction of Dominican masculinity, femininity, and racial and religious ideologies. Derby links the rise of Trujillo to a crisis of manhood precipitated by the United States violent incursions into Dominican affairs. United States claims to protect the island-engendered resentment, and prompted various sectors of the elite to resist the occupation and intensied desires for a sovereign Dominican nation. Derby ties the military intervention to the drastic economic and social transformations that began with the appropriation of the Customs House in 1916, which provided the greatest source of revenue for the edgling Dominican state. Always conscious of the high levels of physical violence under Trujillo, Derby dedicates much of her study to the lived experience of the population and their ambivalent relationship with their dictator. She argues that public acts of violence were integral to building a collective paranoia as a part of the Dominican national character. Derby focuses on this cultural history within Santo Domingo, a space she describes as a circumscribed arena for the production of law and power. Trujillo promoted processes whereby the everyday person could denounce moral and political corruption within Dominican society. Thus denunciation and praise became important speech forms in what Derby calls the theater of the state (5). These are ways of involving the population in forms of address that permit them to perceive themselves as constituents of the nation. This is one reason Deb uses

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the metaphor of the theatre to formulate an image of Trujillos regime in which the director, principal actors, and audience all shared a space constructed through mutual adherence. The Trujillo states theatrics produced a spectacle of pomp and prestige that controlled both performers and audience to make the theatrics appear like a simple production. The theater of the state and its webs of deceit and coercion were constantly reinvented and repositioned to establish and maintain the regimes hegemony. The image of Trujillo as a watchful patriarch permeated public sites as his minions penetrated every corner of the country and sought to denounce those who opposed the regime or claimed power for themselves. Gift givingtied intimately to notions of reciprocitybecame a central form of manipulation. Rather than producing benets, these gifts generated a debt. This did much to create a peasant culture of reciprocity that demanded an acceptance of and acquiescence to the regimes policies (265). Communities not willing to succumb to these inuences were forced violently to comply. Derbys analysis emphasizes the Trujillo regimes gendered and racialized plays for power. In the DR, as is true in a variety of sites, race and nation are interdependent processes and race played a pivotal role in Trujillos vision of dominicanidad. Derby species how the foreign intervention constructed racial dichotomies that were less clearly dened before the U.S. arrival. Thus Dominican identities were deeply inuenced by imported U.S. racialization processes that exacerbated existing racial preoccupations. Color distinctions between people of African descent were also used to formulate homogenous im-

ages of blackness that permeate Dominican society. Trujillo manipulated nationalism to serve his interests, by emphasizing distinctions between Dominicans and Haitians most pronounced in the border regions. These supported the establishment of racial hierarchies whereby race became a metaphor for class (53). Additionally, as part of the play for power and assertion of machismo, it was necessary for the regime to construct an image of Dominican woman as subservient. While the regime claimed to equalize womens role in island society, they were instead projected as beings to be controlled. Hence, male status became central to the conceptions of violence and virility through which power was conceived. Derbys work opens new areas of interest for those intrigued by Dominican history and state power more generally. Even after his assassination, Trujillos name still incites strong feelings from Dominicans and demands scholarly work to address those feelings. There is no doubt that this book provides various insights into a crucial period of Dominican historiography that had reverberations across the Caribbean and Latin America. It pushes scholars toward new forms of comparative research and incites questions about the role of populations within hegemonic structures of power. In the end, one is forced to ask whether the theater of the state has yet to be dismantled.

Reference Cited
Trujillo Molina, Rafael 1960 The Basic Policies of a Regime. Santo Domingo: Editora del Caribe.

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A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950. Jesse HoffnungGarskof, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 319 pp. Daniel Reichman University of Rochester This exemplary work describes the history of migration from the Dominican Republic to New York. It combines archival and oral historical research to explore how concepts of Dominican national identity have been shaped by the countrys ambivalent relationship with the United States. Hoffnung-Garskof traces how changing political economic ties between the United States and the Dominican Republic have transformed Dominican concepts of identity and belonging. The rst four chapters situate historically the genesis of Dominican migration to New York and in the process present a history of the Dominican Republic from the colonial period until the mid-1960s. Hoffnung-Garskof focuses on the growth of the city of Santo Domingo, which, in 1893 was a town of only 14,000 people, but ballooned to more than two million within a hundred years. During this period, the Dominican national project was guided by racialized concepts of cultura and progreso. Early liberal elites dened the nations latinidad in opposition to the blackness of neighboring Haiti (23). In the 20th century, the country was economically dominated by the export sugar industry and became a de facto colony of the United States. The Santo Domingo customs house was seized by the U.S. military in 1904, and the U.S. military invaded again in 1916, ruling the country for eight years. In 1965, following the death of Pres-

ident Rafael Trujillo, the United States invaded once again. In the mid-20th century, sugar prots fueled modernization and development projects, which drew thousands of rural people to the city of Santo Domingo. Hoffnung-Garskof argues that imperialism and neocolonial dependence created a classic ambivalent relationship. Dominicans both admired and deplored the neighbor that so dominated them (68). This was especially strong in the 1960s, when the U.S. invasion prompted intense anti-imperialist sentiment at the precise moment when urban Dominicans were beginning to embrace North American consumer culture. The ambitions of everyday Dominicans were tied to the attractions of the U.S. system (94). People saw the United States as the cause of their frustrations at home, but they sought to escape these frustrations by migrating to the very place they resented. The U.S. government viewed migration as a safety valve that would alleviate the pressures caused by the 1965 invasion, and they increased the number of available visas to improve public opinions of the United States. Hoffnung-Garskof illustrates the ambivalence of this period by describing a piece of grafti that reads, !Fuera Yanqui!over which someone has written, y ll evame contigo! Chapters 5 and 6 shift, somewhat abruptly, to neighborhood politics in New York City during the mid-1960s. The reader (like Dominican migrants themselves) is rapidly brought from Santo Domingo to Washington Heights, New York, where an Irish and Jewish enclave is being transformed by the growth of the black and Puerto Rican population. Dominican migrants, who did not necessarily

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self-identify as black or Hispanic, quickly become embroiled in debates over busing, school desegregation, and racial politics. Using the archives of neighborhood activists, Hoffnung-Garskov describes how Dominicans were recruited into a blackSpanish political coalition, and how this process transformed their own sense of identity. Hoffnung-Garskof is a skilled observer of popular culture and he is at his best when describing cultural attitudes towards migrants. He has an almost uncanny ability to pick up on small cultural details that illustrate broad popular sentiments. Chapters 78, which describe how migration transformed cultural life back in Santo Domingo, are lled with memorable images that capture the anxieties that accompanied the rise of migration. For example, he describes how gold chains came to symbolize an array of cultural ills that Dominican returnees were thought to have brought with them from New York. These ranged from base materialism to criminality, and on to consumerist selfaggrandizement. All of these qualities were crystallized in the term caden u, a derogatory word that described returnees with their gaudy gold jewelry. Though criticized, gold chains became an expectation for New Yorkers returning (241). There were even rumors that a man ran a business in New Yorks Kennedy Airport, renting out gold chains to people ying home to Santo Domingo! Rather than simply including cultural observations as humorous asides, Hoffnung-Garskof describes them as symptoms of structural changes in Dominican society. In this case, the caden u symbolized two widespread anxieties: one

was the role of young Dominicans in the cocaine trade in New York, which is described with great sensitivity in chapter 8; another anxiety concerned the rising consumerism of Dominican society, driven by the rapid growth of television and the presence of returned migrants. For some, returnees symbolized an immoral, socially corrosive encounter with U.S. culture, in which consumerist hyperindividualism eclipsed other models of cultura and progreso. Despite its considerable strengths, the ve-page Conclusion to A Tale of Two Cities does not do justice to the insights and importance of Hoffnung-Garskofs analysis. In many ways, the story of Dominican migration helps us to understand the experience of other countries that have transformed from exporters of primary commodities to remittancedependent suppliers of cheap labor in the neoliberal economy. A similar process has taken place throughout the Americas, most notably in El Salvador and Honduras, yet the book only alludes to these connections, which are striking to readers, like me, who do not specialize in the Dominican Republic. Criticisms aside, Hoffnung-Garskofs narrative is, quite simply, one of the best academic texts I have read in years. It is meticulous but not overwrought, briskly written but not simplistic, and contemporary but not dependent on trendy jargon. I will certainly use it in undergraduate classes on immigration. I would also recommend it to anyone who remains unconvinced about the value of transnational scholarship as a tool to help make sense of the contemporary world and its transformations.

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From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492. Reinaldo Funes Monzote, trans. Alex Martin, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 357 pp. Thomas D. Rogers Emory University Reinaldo Funes Monzotes detailed examination of the impacts on Cuban forests of sugar, shipbuilding, and logging arrives at a moment of exciting growth in the eld of Latin American environmental history. Catalyzed over the past 7 years by the Sociedad Latinoamericana e Caribe na de Historia Ambientals ve international conferences, including one in Havana, the eld has advanced rapidly and drawn the attention of energetic historians around the hemisphere. With From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba, Funes has made a sophisticated and exhaustively researched contribution. His book ties environmental change to economic processes, political and bureaucratic debates, and shifts in agricultural technologies. While his title makes reference to 500 years of history, Funes acknowledges that his real interest lies in the period from the end of the 18th century to 1926. This stretches from Cuban sugars rst signicant expansion, through its consolidation as a vast, multinational agroindustry, and up to the Machado governments belated passage of restrictions on deforestation. Funes highlights a handful of key turning points that helped seal the forests fate during this period. Most stemmed from a dispute between sugar interests and the royal navy and this provides the central drama for at least half of the book: Havana played an important role in the Spanish Empires shipbuilding and the navy had long con-

trolled the forests, frustrating expansionminded cane growers. From the 1760s, a woodlands director oversaw the Royal Forest Reserves and a Wood Committee formed in 1777 served as a key battleground. The navy held an early advantage but the sugar industry began to accelerate rapidly when the Haitian Revolution halted St. Domingues extravagant production. For Funes, the decisive moment came in 1815, when the Crown allowed local landowners control over the disposition of forests, seriously weakening the navys attempts to control ingenio owners inuence. Though Havanas ships reputedly lasted twice as long as ships from Europe because of timber quality, woodland was essential for sugar production: burned forests provided the organic material that enriched soils for sugarcane, and hardwood or pine logs provided the raw materials for building mills, boiling houses, purging houses, oxcarts, tools, and slave quarters. Most proigately of all, res burned under kettles of cane juice during the entire harvest period, year after year, with each ingenio consuming an estimated 100 acres worth of wood each season (58). Yet quarrels with the navy on the part of promoters of plantations involved more than wood. They drew on competing visions of statecraft and land use, including articulations of and reactions to the emergent norms of liberalism. The navy emphasized security and argued that without [forests, the economy] . . . cannot exist . . . to achieve this conservation [of forests] the abuses and freedom of men must be repressed (106), while local ofcials wondered why they should not prot from the immense and useless forests of unpopulated areas (108). The enduring sugar boom

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ignited by the Haitian Revolution decisively tipped the balance and compelled the king to support the sugar planters in 1815; Cuba would go on to supply as much as a quarter of the worlds sugar. Funes unravels the relationships between politics, economic forces, and environmental transformation from the moment of the 1815 shift in power, on through canes continual expansion, and into the period of U.S. inuence. He argues that a catalogue of destruction means little without a sense of the arguments and justications that drove deforestation. The two perspectives represented by the planters and the navythe rst model privileging large plantations and extensive slaveholding and the second envisioning a society of small farmers and free laborreemerged at various points, whether among competing agricultural experts, colonial ofcials, or U.S. advisors. Students of Cuban history will recognize this opposition between the visions of big Cuba and little Cuba from the classic works of Fernando Ortiz and others. Though the former view won out consistently after 1815, Funes argues that the island could have followed an alternative path at several key moments (153). Predictably, Cuba followed other plantation commodity producers toward slave labor as a source of rapid enrichment, resulting from a rapacious worldview with respect to human beings and the environment (128). In outlining this trajectory, Funes contributes to a larger argument that Warren Dean, Augusto P adua, and I, among others, have made in the Brazilian context: the histories of agroenvironmental change and labor are intimately linked. Dean described his masterful With Broadax and Firebrand as a memoir of the destruction of Brazils Atlantic Forest. Fu-

nes provides a worthy companion to that book, claiming that his aim is to stress the importance of forests in the formation of the Cuban nation, rather than to consider them as a mere backdrop that is spoken of nostalgically (5). Cuba and Brazil shared the disadvantage of abundance: the very vastness of their forests, and their value when reduced to ashes, led to shocking rates of deforestation. Conservation innovations such as the Jamaica Train and cane pulp furnaces came late to these areas, and sugar elds continuously displaced mature forestland. Even as pulp-burning reduced sugar mills need for rewood, the expansion of railroads and the ever-increasing appetite for sugarcane continued the assault on the forests. Funes suggests that sugar in Cuba represented one of the most representative cases of early industrial agriculture in the Americas (265), and the scale and mechanization of canes expansion in the 1800s lends itself to this interpretation. But it was the spread of railroads and the arrival of U.S. capital that drove the industrys truly dramatic impacts. In just the rst 25 years of the 20th century as much as 30 percent of the country was deforested (228). UNC Press has done a great service in bringing out Alex Martins excellent translation of this important study, already a prize winner in its Spanish edition. It is richly illustrated with maps and images and, though it lacks a full bibliography, it offers a concise bibliographic essay. From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba will probably appeal most to Caribbeanists, Latin Americanists, environmental historians, and their graduate students, but it should also nd a place in undergraduate courses. Its attention to environmental impacts provides an important complement to traditional treatments of Cuban

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development, the late 19th century commodity boom, and U.S. relations with the island. White But Not Equal: Mexican Americans, Jury Discrimination, and the Supreme Court. Ignacio M. Garc a. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2009. 248 pp. Lee Bebout Arizona State University In 1951, following an altercation at a bar in Edna, Texas, Pete Hernandez shot and killed Joe Espinoza. What seemed a clear case of murder became one of the most signicant Latino civil rights cases in U.S. history. After the initial conviction, Hernandezs legal team of Mexican American reformersGus Garc a, Carlos Cadena, John Herrera, and James De Andaappealed on the grounds of jury discrimination. Ultimately, Hernandez v. Texas went to the U.S. Supreme Court since, despite a sizable population, Mexican Americans had been excluded from jury service via de facto segregation in Edna. Engaging the growing elds of Mexican American Legal History and Latino Critical Theory, Ignacio Garc as impressive White But Not Equal examines the development of a body of legal theory adequate to the task of articulating the positions of Mexican Americans in U.S. law and society. At the time, Mexican Americans were positioned between the black:white binary. While legal classication as white should have secured full citizenship rights, social marginalization excluded Mexican Americans from jury service. Moreover, because they were not Black, Mexican Americans were not nec-

essarily protected under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, Hernandez was not simply about the need for a citizen to have a jury of ones peers. Rather, contextualizing the case within the emerging generation of Mexican American reformers, White But Not Equal convincingly argues that Hernandez was a key moment in the broader struggle for equal citizenship. Jury service would allow Mexican Americans to decide the fate of Anglos and determine what qualied as discrimination. Additionally, for middle-class reformers, it could also change the image of Mexican Americans in the dominant social imaginary. White But Not Equal positions Hernandez v. Texas within a cultural, legal, and political history. According to Garc a, Edna, Texas, had only recently Mexicanized because of shifts in agricultural labor. This created a signicant economic and social divide between local Mexicans and Anglos. Despite sharp ethnic and class stratication, county ofcials held to their argument that Mexican Americans were white and thus not discriminated against. Signicantly, Hernandez was not the rst jury discrimination case. Tracing a lineage of similar efforts, Garc a exposes the development of the legal arguments that would eventually succeed before the Supreme Court. The thrust of Garc as analysis examines the efforts the Hernandezs legal team as part and parcel of a new, post-WWII generation of Mexican American reformers. Drawing upon the intellectual and nancial resources of LULAC and the American GI Forum, Hernandezs team fought a pivotal battle in the 1950s struggle for Latino civil rights. Fascinatingly, Garc a places the Hernandez case beside and against the rather ugly history of

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Mexican American vilication of Mexican immigrants, for both were efforts to claim full citizenship. Garc a concludes his analysis by gesturing to an inchoate political shift within the Mexican American community. While the Supreme Court did not specically acknowledge Mexican Americans as a distinct race, the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s would position Mexican Americans as people of color. Despite limits in what has been archived, White But Not Equal weaves a compelling story. The court transcripts and legal motions work as the central narrative thread. The arguments concerning race and discrimination create a dramatic tension. Moreover, the obstructionist tactics and rhetoric of local ofcials ring eerily similar to political discourses today. For instance, ofcials used color-blind rhetoric as a means of exclusion and argued that without an intent to discriminate, discrimination could not have occurred. As Garc a convincingly argues, a Latino legal theory that positioned Mexican Americans as white but not equal was needed to counter such segregationist efforts. While not explicitly connecting the social context of Hernandez to today, Garc as work suggests the importance of recuperating Latino legal and civil rights history while suggesting some of the ways these or related theories may be needed today and in the near future. White But Not Equal is at its best when exposing the complexity and tensions within the Mexican American community. While Garc a relies predominantly upon a generational paradigm to explain the political activism of post-WWII Mexican Americans, he also examines tensions over citizenship and class standing. According to Garc a, Mexican American re-

formers sought to realize full citizenship by means of efforts to serve on juries as well as maneuvers through which they distanced themselves from undocumented Mexican immigrants and braceros. Moreover, efforts to achieve full citizenship overrode class tensions. For instance, while Pete Hernandez had killed a middle-class Mexican American, it was middle-class Mexican Americans that rallied to his defense, as part of their cause. Indeed, White But Not Equal could benet from an even greater interrogation of Mexican American heterogeneity. This might involve a deeper exploration of exactly how earlier members of LULAC had conceptualized their racial past and indigenous glories (88). Such an examination would cement the differences with the post-WWII reformers and could also lay the foundation for the later discussion of the Chicano movement in the conclusion. Rich analysis and lively writing make White But Not Equal a valuable text for the classroom. One could easily incorporate Garc as work into graduate and upperlevel undergraduate classes in a variety of elds, ranging from Chicana/o Studies and History to Political Science and Legal Studies. Indeed, pairing White But Not Equal with other recent works such as Laura Gomezs Manifest Destinies or Ian Haney Lopezs Racism on Trial elicits particularly fruitful questions. For instance, how did Mexican American jury participation in New Mexico shape their racial and political positioning in contrast to Tejanos? Or how did the rhetorical and legal strategies of the Chicano movement emerge or diverge from the post-WWII legal reformers that Garc a explores? Ultimately, students and scholars will nd White But Not Equal a signicant contribution to the rapidly growing eld of Latino legal studies.

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Religion and the Politics of Ethnic Identity in Bahia, Brazil. Stephen Selka, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. 175 pp. Diana Brown Bard College A question that has dogged inquiries for decades is why, given the racism in Brazilian society, this country with the largest African-descended population in the Americas has failed to develop a unied and effective black movement. This question underpins Stephen Selkas research on racial activism in Candombl e, Catholicism, and Evangelical Protestantism in Salvador, Bahia. Based on interviews with church leaders, attendance at public rituals, and a questionnaire administered to practitioners in this most African of Brazilian cities, Selka explores the potentialities of organizations and groups to foster racial consciousness and activism and thus to contribute to Brazils Black Movement. After laying out his argument, Selka provides a brief overview of the three religions histories in Bahia and a detailed review of the literature that girds evolving interpretations of Brazils racial situation. This ranges from arguments about white superiority to celebrations of mestic agem (or racial and cultural mixture as the ideal of racial democracy), to the current uneasy coexistence of an ideal of hybridity with acknowledgments of racism, on to allegations of American researchers dualist bias in interpretations of Brazilian racism rather than the multiplicity of racial categories based on phenotype, and to the inuence of global racial justice movements on Brazil. Successive chapters present Selkas research, emphasizing progressive voices

and sometimes openly conictual dialogs concerning the role of Afro-Brazilian religion in racial politics. His research with Catholic leaders of the centuries old Confraternity of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Blacks of Pelourinho and the recently formed Archdiocesan Coordinating Center for the African Pastoral (CAAPA) reveals efforts to valorize and reafrm AfroBrazilian identity through cultural and educational activities and to strengthen Afro-descendents participation by holding inculcated Masses that incorporate Candombl e music, drums, and deities. These activities are intended to afrm Candombl es equal status as a religion and to accept double religious belonging. Most who attend also participate in Candombl e and approve of these Masses. But some Catholics do not, and wish to avoid mixing the two religions. Others voice resentment at what they see as essentialist assumptions of these progressive Church leaders that Afro-descendents will naturally be drawn to expressions of AfroBrazilian religion and culture. Selka interprets these efforts as representing cultural strategies for raising Afro-Brazilian consciousness, rather than political strategies to promote political activism. This analytical distinction is central to his argument. Turning to Candombl e, Selka notes that through its central position within the citys cultural and economic life and tourism it enjoys hegemonic status in Salvador and serves as a major locus for black identity. Yet both its identity and politics are contested: Candomblecistas are internally divided between a majority, most of them also Catholics, that favors maintaining Afro-Catholic syncretisms and approves Candombl es incorporation into Catholic Masses; and antisyncretists, who disapprove, having rejected Catholic

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inuences as impositions of a white, hegemonic Church. Instead they have sought to reAfricanize practice to exclude Catholic elements and to oppose commercialization and folklorization. Not surprisingly, Candombl e dominates the politics of the Black Movement in Salvador. Yet Selka points out the dangers of this alliance: Candombl e is undoubtedly a source of strong Afro-Brazilian cultural identity, but this identity is primarily a cultural one, rather than overtly political. Selka thus argues it contrasts with secular carnival groups that engage in political activism, maintaining close links to the Movimento Negro Unicado (Unied Black Movement [MNU]) and the Partido Trabalhista (Labor Movement [PT]). The fallacies of essentialist linkages between Afro-descent and Afro-Brazilian religio/cultural identication, and the existence of distinctions between cultural identities and political activism, emerge most clearly in Selkas discussion of progressive Evangelicals. The predominant image of Brazilian Evangelicals is that they are reactionary and intolerant. Selka, however, focuses on the small but growing group of progressive Evangelical voices, as represented in the Progressive Evangelical Movement (MEP). This is an interdenominational national organization that he nds conservative and orthodox as to the authority of the Bible, but progressive on social issues as well as active in antiracist politics allied with the PT. In interviews in two churches with a majority of black members, and with leaders within the MEP and the Progressive Evangelical Seminary (ITEBA) Selka nds discussion of racial, class, and gender discrimination, the absence of any negative references to Afro-Brazilian religions, and tolerance for Candombl e. He concludes, as have other

researchers like John Burdick (1998a) and John Collins (2004), that the stereotype of the intolerant evangelical fails to account for the diversity within this movement. A distinct black evangelical identity combined with anti-racism seems to be emerging in Brazil. Selka describes a complexity of alignments between religion and racial politics in Salvador that reveals different forms of Afro-Brazilian identity, racial consciousness, political action. While he celebrates the potential contributions to racial awareness and participation in racial politics within each of these religions, the overall picture he draws mirrors the heterogeneous positions and fragmentation that has characterized the black movement. Counterintuitively, Selka nds that Candombl e temples, even with their strong afrmation of the Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage, do not tend to generate racial political activism and the greatest potential for this lies instead in progressive groups within Evangelical Protestantism. He agrees with Burdick (1998b) that Evangelicals potentially form a major lost constituency of the black movement. These are not new arguments: the issue of religious black activism, and even many of the groups highlighted in this study, have already been the subject of considerable research in Brazil. Selkas strength lies in his ability to integrate and analytically synthesize his own ndings with previous research, rather than in ethnographic innovation. His mapping of the tides of black politics and black identity within religious thinking and practice in a single city provides a portrait of religious dialogs, of the heterogeneity of identities and political positions, and especially of the complex interconnections, conicts and unlikely concordances among these

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religions that challenges stereotypic images of each of them. Selka shows himself a thoughtful analyst. Yet his reliance on interviews as his primary basis of ethnography, and his dependence on restating previous studies, excludes a fuller examination of practice, in racial politics in everyday life, in broader dynamics of shifting political economies and power relations within which these take place. Perhaps because of this, and while he notes that Salvador and its environs provide a special case, the particularities of location become lost as he draws upon and integrates his research with the ndings of social scientists in other areas of Brazil. Yet particularities emerge most clearly through contrast, and Brazil is noted for its strong regional variations. Some contrastive data drawn from this wider literature would have done much to clarify Salvadors, and Candombles, special positioning within the Brazilian panorama of religion, racial consciousness, and political action. Selkas concern with representing the complexity and heterogeneity of voices within these religions also makes for some dense reading. And his arguments sometimes get lost in the details of his emphasis on multiple and competing views of what it means to be Afro-Brazilian (149). It is unfortunate that he develops his theoretical position only in the nal chapter, rather than as an analytic introduction to his ethnography. But these concerns do not detract from the overall value of the book, which is recommended to specialists on Brazil, particularly those interested in race, racial mobilization, and religion. More broadly, it will be of interest to scholars of comparative religion, Africana and Diaspora studies, and social movements.

References Cited
Burdick, John 1998a Blessed Anastacia: Women, Race, and Popular Christianity in Brazil. New York: Routledge. The Lost Constituency of Brazils Black Consciousness Movements. Latin American Perspectives 25(1): 136155. Collins, John 2004 X Marks the Future of Brazil: Racial Politics, Bedeviling Mixtures and Protestant Ethics in a Brazilian Cultural Heritage Center. In Off Stage/On Display: Intimacies and Ethnographies in the Age of Public Culture. Andrew Shryock, eds. Pp. 191224. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1998b

Review Essays
Tourism in Latin America: Encounter or Lucha? Nadine T. Fernandez SUNY Empire State The Tourism Encounter: Fashioning Latin American Nations & Histories. Florence E. Babb, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 264 pp. Cuban Color in Tourism and La Lucha: An Ethnography of Racial Meanings. L. Kaifa Roland, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 144 pp.

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The burgeoning importance of tourism in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America has bought new scholarly attention to the impact of this global enterprise on host nations and their citizenries. These two ethnographies explore some of the social implications of the growing presence of foreign tourists and tourist installations in countries that have experienced revolutions or violent internal conicts. Babbs study takes a comparative approach to tourism in four nations in Latin America: post-revolutionary Cuba and Nicaragua, post-conict Andean Peru, and Chiapas, Mexico. Rolands work examines racial dynamics both in tourism and in Cubans daily struggles to eke out livelihoods in the late socialist period. While she does not specically address tourism as a development strategy in a late-revolutionary context, Roland does pay close attention to the contradictions of promoting tourism in a socialist country and she questions whether or not tourism threatens the socialist revolution. The two ethnographers employed similar methods, combining both semiand unstructured interviews with their participation in tourist activities such as tours and village and hotel stays. Babb administered questionnaires (a sample might have been included in an appendix) to tourists in all locations and, like Roland, spoke with tourists in hotel settings, cafes, and while on excursions. In a sense, then, both anthropologists played the explicit role of tourist in their eldwork settings. As a result, they incorporate their own tourist experiences alongside their observations about other visitors activities. Here Roland espouses a notably selfreexive position, with her own tourist experiences guring centrally. Babb, in contrast, keeps her anthropological iden-

tity more present as she shares and analyzes the excursions and events she attended, describing them from a more explicitly or recognizable ethnographic locus. The two ethnographies focus primarily on local populations, their historical situations and sociological contexts, and the social impact of tourism. Nevertheless, the authors work hard to include tourists perspectives alongside those of locals. In relation to this, tourists in all the locations examined seek an authenticity as well as an otherness that foreign travel may provide. In both books we learn few specics about the tourists lives, as this is not the focus of the anthropologists theorizing; rather, both authors draw on other scholars work to conceptualize tourists motives and desires. Babb takes a refreshing four-country, comparative approach that capitalizes on her long research experience in various locations. In addition to the introduction and conclusion, she devotes a chapter to each country (Cuba, Nicaragua, Peru, and Mexico) and two chapters that address common themes across two of the nations (sex tourism in Cuba and Nicaragua; race and gender issues in Andean Peru and Chiapas). She employs tourism as a lens to view how nations are remaking their images, histories, and cultural heritages after periods of revolution or violent internal conicts. All four sites attract tourists who seek edgy or adventurous travel, and the formerly off-limits reputations of these areas only add to their allure. With increasing tourism, however, the attraction of the once forbidden may fade. Babb highlights how histories of revolution and violence are treated differently as each nation refashions itself in a post-revolutionary/post-conict period. In Chiapas and Cuba revolution and

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uprising can be marketed as tourist attractions in and of themselves, complete with ubiquitous Ch e Guevara paraphernalia and masked Zapatista dolls. In Nicaragua, by comparison, the Sandinista revolution may appeal to political pilgrims and solidarity groups but not necessarily to many Nicaraguans living abroad who return to vacation in their homeland. In Andean Peru, the recent history of violent struggles with the Shining Path is for the most part suppressed, and it is the distant past of Incan civilizations and traditional indigenous cultures that draw tourists to this former hotspot. As a result, Babbs close look at manipulations and presentations of time and history make for fascinating comparisons across sites. While recognizing that tourisms impact is far from benign and can deepen inequalities, Babb still suggests that it holds the potential to advance transformative programs in the interests of wider sectors of society (191). In the four nations she examines, tourism has in one way or another picked up as a development strategy where social revolutions have left off. Race and gender gure centrally in all locations Babb examines. In Peru and Chiapas, she describes how indigenous populations become active stakeholders in identity construction as residents market cultures though Inca, Maya, and Lacandon experiential tourism that gives visitors a chance to try on briey the locals lifestyles. Here images of the exotic Indian entice tourists to experience remote, authentic communities where women are seen to be more traditional, and thus more Indian, than men. Here tourist interest has revalidated specic facets of indigenous cultures and supported transformations of Indian identity from liability to asset. However, Babb cautions that in Peru, for example,

this may lead to more subtle forms of racism and sexism as indigenous women may come to be seen as nonmodern and resistant to change. In a similar dynamic, Roland observes how Afrocuban performances have also been revalorized as important cultural contributions as a result of tourists interests. Yet she worries, on the other hand, that this could lead to cultural commodication. Both studies thus develop nuanced approaches to tourisms double-edged sword. In Nicaragua and Cuba, gender themes emerge in Babbs analyses of sex tourism. In both longer term and eeting encounters, women in Cuba and Nicaragua are active agents who often manipulate foreign mens fantasies and capitalize on racial and sexual stereotypes as part of complicated power plays. Yet Babbs comparative project highlights some key differences between Cuba and Nicaragua: Though she argues that sex tourism seems to be more prevalent in Cuba, in Nicaragua it may be more institutionalized in the form of brothels and strip clubs that serve local men, as well as foreigners. Nicaraguan ofcials also worry about child prostitution, and recently some women sex workers have begun to organize. Babb recounts several tourist/local interactions that she observed in both countries and describes her conversations with some of the women who engaged in these relations. Her analysis is based on these interactions and on interpretations of social interactions observed in bars or other public places. Studying such exchanges can be difcult and the sometimes impressionistic, empirical information presented by both authors around certain topics appears to reect challenges related to access and intimacy.

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Sexual encounters between tourists and foreigners gure centrally in Rolands book, though she admits not being able to talk with the woman who had sex with tourists. While this limits what she can say about these engagements, she does present some of the male tourists views alongside her own situated observations. She describes a continuum of sex-money exchanges from prostitution to longer term romances, which in some cases lead to marriage. Roland discusses briey the relatively new phenomenon of Cuban-foreign marriages (she herself was married for a time to a Cuban man). She emphasizes both the monetary cost of these proceedings and the specter of material interest that she argues makes all transnational marriages suspect, regardless of the participants intent. She also observes the centrality of racialized sexuality, which Cuban women may employ strategically to attract foreign partners for sexual engagements or longer term commitments. Importantly, Roland situates these sexual hustlers in the larger context of the economic crisis of post-1990 Cuba. She details how young men and women work to survive and make ends meet in a deteriorating socialist economy where race and sex become some of the most easily exchangeable forms of cultural capital. Rolands focus on racial dynamics within tourism and the post-1990s period in Cuba is a key contribution. She argues that tourism is reasserting prerevolutionary meanings of race and class while introducing new inequalities and entitlements on the island. She situates these dynamics within a larger global racial hierarchy. In this context, tourism racializes Cubans as black (poor and excluded) and foreign tourists as white (monied and privileged). She argues that

the scarcity experienced during the economic crisis of the 1990s (known as the Special Period) darkened Cuban national identity, particularly in comparison to the foreign tourists arriving during the same period to enjoy spaces of luxury and leisure that were off limits to Cubans. Her analysis highlights persistent race/class connections in Cuba and adds a global element introduced by foreign tourists. While Roland uses color as a symbol of power and privilege, she also deploys it as a metaphor to discuss the relative position of Cubans vis-` a-vis the richer, whiter tourists. However, her experiences as a black researcher from the U.S. challenge such easy color/class/nation distinctions. Crossing and blurring categories in ways that demonstrate their salience, she receives bad service in tourist sites if she is mistaken for a black Cuban, and ne service if she is recognized as a foreigner. She suggests that the global racial hierarchy metaphor may have a limited ability to describe other groups who cause categorical confusions, such as the Chernobyl victims who are in Cuba receiving free medical treatment. They are white, but nonmonied so she suggests they might be raced as mulatto. While this may push the metaphor too far, it does raise important theoretical and future research implications. Roland states that she strives to extend theories of belonging. By this she means Cubans rights and privileges in the national context. Nonetheless, her studys strength lies instead in its analysis of racialized and sexualized dynamics as seen through tourism. Her format provides many important observations and examples of contemporary social situations that arise in the tourism arena in Cuba. Nonetheless, at times she fails to provide

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sufcient social or historical context in this relatively short study that should work well in undergraduate classrooms. In contrast, Babbs comparative approach and her books narrative structure help overcome a tendency toward Cuban exceptionalism by rmly situating Cuba among other post-conict/post-revolutionary nations, which promote tourism and struggle to remake national images and reframe histories of tumult. Taken together, then, both ethnographies present different aspects of the racialized and gendered consequences of tourism development. They might thus work quite well together if juxtaposed, especially in an undergraduate course. Both are accessibly written and well organized. And their ethnographic detail and analysis certainly contribute positively to the growing literature on tourism, as well as social change and inequality more broadly, in Latin America and the Caribbean. Afro-Colombian Struggles over Development, Territory, Nature, and the Right to be Black Fatimah Williams Castro Rutgers University Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacic Lowlands. Kiran Asher, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. 272 pp. Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes. Arturo Escobar, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 435 pp. The two ethnographies reviewed here are cutting-edge studies of black identity, black social movements, and development in the Colombian Pacic region. Published

within one year of one other, both are long-awaited additions to a growing body of literature on ethnic struggles in postconstitutional reform Latin America, an era some scholars describe as characterized by multicultural politics. Unlike most other book length manuscripts that analyze Latin American constitutional politics and ethnic group rights, Black and Green and Territories of Difference concentrate on the situation of black people and black movements. In this way they add to a robust, existing body of literature focused primarily on indigenous experiences with these political and legal reforms. Asher and Escobar situate their texts in the Colombian Pacic and this site proves integral to the themes, conceptual frameworks, and theoretical approaches developed. As the authors emphasize, there is a long historical trajectory wherein colonizers, travelers, natural scientists, geographers, and anthropologists have described the Colombian Pacic in terms of its biological abundance and diversity (Asher 58, Escobar 3334). Yet it was not until the late 1990safter the recognition of black cultural and territorial rights in Colombias Law 70 as part of the 1991 ratication of the nations rewritten constitutionthat the regions rainforests, ecosystems, biological life forms, and waterways became center stage for hypercapitalist development, sustainability projects, illicit drug cultivators, narcotrafckers, massive displacement, and political violence. It is no coincidence then that Territories of Difference, which is organized around six main concepts, begins with a chapter on place before continuing on to capital, nature, development, identity, and networks. Both works consider how the Pacic region of Colombia became what Escobar calls a developmentizable entity

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(161) and a theater of imperial globality (18) from the perspective of an important black movementthe PCN, or Proceso de Comunidades Negras. In distinct ways, Escobar and Asher explore how a region marked by underdevelopment and isolation became such a prominent and contested terrain, and how local inhabitants and the movements that represent them participated in, inuenced and resisted these political economic changes. The subject taken up by both Escobar and Asher is strikingly similar black resistance in a time of overwhelming capitalist development and discourses of sustainable development in the Pacic littoralyet there are some conceptual, methodological, and narrative distinctions between the two approaches. Difference, or more specically colonial difference, is the organizing concept for the ethnographic and theoretical analysis in Territories of Difference. According to Escobar, subaltern knowledges are produced in relation to groups encounters with suppression and subordination by dominant cultures (12). The suppression of subaltern knowledges and cultures are distinct features of coloniality, a global process anchored in Eurocentric, dominant approaches to modernity. Taking seriously subaltern epistemologies that emerge out of colonial difference, Escobar examines issues of development, nature, culture, and networks from the perspective of black people of the Pacic region. When considering this epistemological perspective alongside dominant practices of development, Escobar shows how Afro-Colombians have created alternatives to modernity wherein they envision and construct a world outside the dominant logics of capitalism, development, and modernity (168).

Chapter 4 (Development) presents three ethnographic cases of this subaltern counter work to show that this seemingly utopian thought and practice are possible. Examples include a coconut and coca cooperative, the Gente Entintada y Parlante [people of the ink and of the word, p. 180] literacy project, and the Proyecto Biopac co conservation project. Asher frames Black and Green around the argument that political-economic processes and struggles for social change shape each other in uneven and paradoxical ways (7). Her ethnographic study explores how black struggles to dene development, culture, identity, and nature develop in relationship with state and NGO discourses of the same. Asher draws upon Foucauldian notions of biopower/biopolitics and Gramscian approaches to hegemony to argue that these concepts emerge as part of a dialectical process between state and movement actors. However, she is careful not to fall into a deterministic analysis of economic development or the related processes of globalization and modernity. The AfroColombian movements engagement with state apparatuses legitimizes that state and helps to establish its authority, particularly in regions like the Pacic where government presence has been notoriously weak. Dialectically, the black movement and its discourses are shaped by participation in processes of state formation. Hence, the state is being formed at the same time and through the same processes that black movements, approaches, and discourses are being formed. Ashers detailed ethnography of local struggles of the PCN and of black women illustrates overlaps between state, NGO, and movement conceptions of black rights, conservation, and development. By conceptualizing state

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and movement approaches to development, land rights, and the meanings of Law 70 as co-constitutive, Asher highlights a tension that radical, grassroots movements like PCN also confront, namely the issue of their level of cooperation with and separation from state discourses, agendas, and funds (128). Movements that struggle against the state and espouse an antiinstitutional stance, though never existing as entirely autonomous entities, constantly contend with how to create espacios propios (Asher 101) and pensamiento propio (Escobar 169). Both texts make clear that ethnographic examination of subaltern struggles in a time of intense political economic and social change presented the authors with unique theoretical and methodological challenges. To begin, black movements organize in defense of place, for the right to be black, and to advance development on their own terms, and they do so in multiple scales simultaneouslyin the Pacic region, across Colombia (including urban Andean centers), and in transnational sites. Escobar develops his analysis of this organizing within the framework of complexity theory and explains the self-organizing, autopoietic character of the movement (259). Bridging network theory with PCN approaches to networks and mobilization, Escobar describes movement engagements between and in place as meshworks. In relation to issues of networks, both authors discuss the transnationalization of the black movement with a specic focus on the PCN at the height of violent onslaughts on the Pacic and its black residents (Escobar ch. 6; Asher ch. 5). Massacres and disappearances of black communities leaders, massive force displacement, and intense capitalist expan-

sion into black territories without prior consultation [consulta previa] are some of the most prominent factors that facilitate Afro-Colombian organizing abroad. The sheer number and diversity of networks that PCN has cultivated around the world, even if only on short-term projects, is striking. These include advocacy organizations, academics, politicians, grassroots movements, environmental groups, and churches, to name a few. Although such transnational activity provides a ripe area for future research, it also speaks to the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Colombian Pacic: It is no wonder that some movement leaders have recently dared to describe this scenario as ethnocide against Afro-Colombians in the Pacic and as a threat to the survival of black culture and life. At the start of her eld research, Asher unexpectedly stumbled upon the heterogeneity of the black movement and, as a result, was forced to abandon her initial research goal to identify and formulate generalizable models of resource use in black communities collective lands (18). Rather than conceal the complexity and barrage of voices within the black movement, Black and Green highlights certain tensions among black actors. These involve denitions of black ethnicity, the scope of cultural rights, the prominence of territorial rights, and conceptions of development. While some may nd the narrative style of Black and Green primarily ethnographic, others will appreciate this book for its synthesis of diverse textual genres from gray literature, to ethnography, to academic literature, including key works by Colombian scholarsthat provide a critical overview of the processes leading up to and following the ratication of Law 70. The introduction and chapter 1, in

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particular, provide a concise narrative of the political economic opening and legal reform that put black identity, collective land rights, and development in the Pacic littoral on the proverbial map. Hence they provide a foundation from which future research can expand upon themes addressed, though not analyzed at length. Some of these might include the study of urban Afro-Colombian movements, aspects of Law 70 not limited to the Pacic region or to territoriality, and transnational articulations of the Afro-Colombian movement. There is a need for more analysis on Law 70 that would explore the states commitment to establish mechanisms for the protection of Afro-Colombian cultural identity and ethnic rights and to promote black economic and social development (extracted from Law 70). Perhaps attention to these areas of the law would produce new questions about blackness and political struggle in Colombia. Nonetheless, the texts reviewed here will be of great interest to scholars of development, political ecology, social movements, Afro-Latin America, and Latin American Studies. Black and Green is suitable for course adoption at the advanced undergraduate level or graduate level, while Territories of Difference is best left, due to its density and theoretical depth, to graduate level readers and specialists. Development practitioners and transnational advocates would particularly benet from Escobars discussion of pregurative politics (258) and Ashers description of espacios mixtos (105106). There the authors explain the logic of subaltern approaches to political organizing, which differs widely from dominant approaches: issues of time, progress, and hierarchy do not gure as principle approaches in black movement organizing.

Thus, while actors on the sidelines of subaltern movements may often see repetitive lengthy meetings that seem not to result in concrete action steps or tangible advancements, these movements may see instead a participatory space for the productive sharing of experiences and knowledges. Patterns of Organization and Upheaval: Recent Works on Bolivia Carwil Bjork-James CUNY Graduate Center A la Conquista de un Lote: Estrategias Populares de Accesso a la Tierra Urbana. Amonah Achi Chirit` ele and Marcelo Delgado, Serie Investigaciones Regionales Cochabamba 6. La Paz, Bolivia: Fundacion PIEB, 2007. 189+xvii pp. Roosters at Midnight: Indigenous Signs and Stigma in Local Bolivian Politics. Robert Albro, Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research, 2010. 252+xii pp. Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism. Mark Goodale, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. 245+xv pp. Los Ritmos del Pachakuti: Movimiento y Levantamiento Ind gena-Popular en Bolivia. Raquel Guti errez Aguilar, La Paz, Bolivia: Ediciones Yachaywasi, 2008. 335 pp. Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics. Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, London: Verso, 2007. 177+xxiv pp. Dispersing Power: Social Movements as ul Zibechi, Oakland: Anti-State Forces. Ra AK Press, 2010. 163+xvii pp.

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Recent social scientic work in and on Bolivia has engaged longstanding as well as novel theoretical questions prompted by the last decades politically inuential uprisings of indigenous people, the urban poor, and other popular sectors. Where work published as recently as 5 years ago often sought to explain stabilizing factors in political life and the co-optation or seeming quiescence of certain sectors, new books on Bolivia must speak to this mobilization and a shift in political cultures that has brought the Movimiento al SocialismoInstrumento Pol tico por la Soberan a de los Pueblos (MAS) to power. The urgency of this demand applies both to historical examinations of nationwide political mobilization and to ethnographically detailed monographs that explore politics in a particular place. Revolutionary Horizons and Los Ritmos del Pachakuti provide relatively comprehensive overviews of Bolivias 2000 2005 political upheaval. Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson make this period understandable in terms of long-term historical processes while Raquel Guti errez Aguilar focuses on the political visions of the movements involved. Each of the works is theoretically rich: Revolutionary Horizons is grounded in international left theories of revolution and Los Ritmos reects the rich conversations currently taking place among engaged Bolivian political theorists. The authors of both works never replace an engagement with, or search for, historical reality with preconceived political ideals. And unlike earlier texts that explained the political upheaval in terms of a global anti-neoliberal backlash (Kohl and Farthing 2006) or a hemispheric wave of indigenous organizing, these studies address Bolivias recent transformations in terms of longer

political trajectories that are specically Bolivian. Hylton and Thomson nest contemporary political trajectories within a history of Bolivian indigenous resistance across four centuries. They concentrate on moments of insurrection, analyzing each for the dynamics of collaboration between indigenous uprisings and other political forces. Their long view is useful for two principal reasons: First, Bolivias contemporary movements situate themselves within this tradition of resistance, one of ten symbolized through Tupac Kataris 1781 rebellion. Hylton and Thomson thus draw attention to ways the long-term history of indigenous resistance provides a framework of indigenous self-rule invoked in turn by todays movements. In this way, Revolutionary Horizons marks an initial English-language attempt to reconnect revolutionary processes with a longnegated, underground history that has scarcely begun to be written (30). Since domination has clear economic as well as ethnic dimensions, successful revolutions require collaboration between political streams even as such collaboration has more often than not fragmented in the wake of taking state power. In this light, Hylton and Thomson make a second helpful move: they identify a recurrent process of encounter and des-encuentro between indigenous rebellion and urban or criollo political projects. They draw on this cycle as a structuring motif for Bolivian political history, using Thomsons previous work on 18th century insurrection and Hyltons on early 20th century left indigenous collaboration. Through this rubric of attempted, but often unsuccessful encounter, Revolutionary Horizons offers a bridge between 20th and 21st century politics. More specically, from the 1930s

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to the 1980s, a national-popular political alliance prevailed in Bolivias cities and mines, uniting the urban and mining proletariat and other sectors behind a vision of national economic development. Revolutionary Horizons traces how indigenous movements, concerned with ending nearfeudal work conditions in the countryside and redistributing land built unstable partnerships with these urban allies. Nonetheless, once their alliance with the government collapsed indigenous peasants turned to independent, indigenousinected unionism and joined forces with underground, but still strong, labor movements to end military rule. The cyclical narrative of Revolutionary Horizons culminates in Bolivias early 21st century uprisings. Again the focus is on the emergence of an alliance among multiple movements in which left and indigenous visions converge. Hylton and Thomson chart how contemporary political actors emerged from the kaleidoscopic shifts in the Bolivian socioeconomic landscape in the wake of externally imposed neoliberal policies. El Alto, La Pazs twin city, mushroomed into what some describe as an urban extension of the Aymara Altiplano; massively enlarged cities had much smaller classes of formally employed workers and new concerns about public services; Bolivias miners were stripped of regular jobs and dispersed across the country; and settlers in the Chapare rose to become the powerful coca growers movement. Hylton and Thomson use the recurrence of desencuentros within indigenous-nationalist alliances to place contemporary divides in historical perspective. They point to instability among the coalition of rural communities, indigenous-identied urban communities, and white urban leftists like Vice President Alvaro Garcia

Linera who make up the MAS ruling coalition. In Los Ritmos del Pachakuti, Raquel Guti errez Aguilar is also concerned with political horizons, at least in the sense of comprehensive political aspirations embodied by the actions of social movements (their horizons of desire, 19ff). More specically, she is interested in how movements challenge economic oppression and move against and beyond the state (39). Guti errez is herself writing from within recent movements since she was involved in the Cochabamba Water War and incarcerated in the 1990s for active militancy in the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army along side her former partner, Alvaro Garc a Linera. And she works to look beyond these movements so as to identify the new forms of democracy, mobilization, and political belief they embody: Autonomy, communal control over common resources, and democracy through collective deliberation are the hallmarks of these politics. Such practices and beliefs suggest an alternative political and ethical order, which is only dimly reected in the alternative state project led by the MAS and Evo Morales. So Guti errez devotes much of the latter part of her study to understanding how movements oriented toward autonomy came to collaborate in the relatively centralized Bolivian effort. Guti errezs argument emanates from a detailed examination of the composition and practices of different currents in post 2000 worker and peasant mobilizations. Her framework helps highlight the movements specic perspectives, and the impact of their forms of organizing on their visions of self-rule. Movements examined include the antiwater privatization Coordinadora in Cochabamba; the network of Altiplano peasant unions mobilizing in

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coordinated road blockades; the urban uprisings over water, taxes, and gas in El Alto and La Paz; the coca growers movement; and the coordinated national revolts in 2003 and 2005. In each case, Guti errez nds political ideals embedded in historical details, beginning with the 6-month mobilization to expel the foreign-owned corporation that privatized Cochabambas water. She describes the distinct political logics of rural irrigators, factory workers, and professional environmentalists, but also their methods of practical coordination and mobilization, leading up to a chronicle of the 19992000 street confrontations that made up the Water War. This is followed by a description of the political spaces, created during and after the Water War, for coordinating action in envisioning a political future. Guti errez draws attention to how the popular assembly was imagined and pregured as an instance of political organization . . . through which workers (men and women) recover the capacity to deliberate and intervene in common issues (74). Similar horizons emerge from political action throughout the book. The expulsion of police from Aymara Altiplano communities illustrates a vision of de facto local autonomy. La Paz and El Alto neighbors embraced a double demand for local structures free of interference and the widening of their inclusion in the state, and collective economic rights, and in social benets through negotiated concessions by the government (98). Los Ritmos del Pachakuti reads these movement ideals as deeply opposed to state control of all kinds. After laying out the radical demands made by Altiplano peasant strikers in 2001, for example, Guti errez interprets the governments counterproposal. In her view, the governments strategy was to di-

lute and formalize popular demands in an effort to capture and translate indigenous demands and proposals in ways that retained government control (147). Both Los Ritmos del Pachakuti and Revolutionary Horizons consider the transfer of state power that began with the dramatic ight of President Gonzalo S anchez de Lozada after the 2003 Gas War. Hylton and Thomson dene 20002005 as a revolutionary breach, which gave way to a new order at the December 2005 election. Their work builds on left theories of revolution expressed by Leon Trotsky and the author of the introduction to Hylton and Thomsons study, Adolfo Gilly. In this framework, dual power between the state and grassroots forces opens the way for revolutionary changes in the state itself. What sets apart the Bolivian case is the coincidence of indigenous and left revolutions whose importance and instability form the central axis of Revolutionary Horizons. The indigenous-left alliance ends up with the classical, but challenging, task of rebuilding a stable political order that lives up to both movements expectations. In Guti errez reading, however, it is the breach in political control itselfthe duality of state and grassroots power that is the source of political possibility. This makes the MASs role inherently problematic. As a body designed to bring the cocalero movement and its allies into power through electoral means, the MAS sought to articulate movement demands, while channeling popular energy to the ballot box rather than constructing alternate forms of politics. It separated itself from other movements during intense periods of mobilization, pursuing, for example, a compromise position on gas privatization in 2003, and endorsing participation in President Carlos Mesas

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referendum in 2004. For Guti errez, these events mark points of inection between the pursuit of autonomous power by social movements up to 2003, and the increasing prominence of a state-based project afterwards. Despite continuing social movement independence and direct actions after 2003, Guti errez identies a failure of social movements to translate their political horizons into projects for the broader society. The seismic shifts in Bolivias political landscape identied by authors like Hylton, Thomson, and Guti errez cannot be understood fully from a nationwide perspective since political transformations take place at the personal, neighborhood, and city or provincial levels. This makes close ethnographic engagement invaluable. The remaining studies reviewed here examine political life in greater detail: three focus on Bolivias rapidly growing urban peripheries and Dilemmas of Modernity (discussed below) considers legality in a rural province. Dispersing Power concentrates on El Alto as a self-constructed and highly mobilized city; A La Conquista de Un Lote considers land acquisition and neighborhood building in Cochabambas Zona Sur; and Roosters at Midnight examines political actors in Quillacollo, a community that has gone from being a rural market center to an urban edge of the Cochabamba metropolis. In recent decades, such peri-urban spaces have replaced the countryside as the main home of Bolivian indigenous and popular sectors and thus have come to serve as important spaces of mass politics. Zibechi focuses on El Alto, where Raul extremely rapid urbanization and limited state planning mean that new residents must either provide their own basic services or organize to demand at-

tention. Zibechis goal in Dispersing Power and his more recent Territorios en Resistencia (2008), which considers urban popular movements across Latin America, is to highlight new urban communities political potential. Their orientation to self-sufciency and self-government represents an alternate horizon to the state-focused political projects that have captured so much attention in the region. Zibechi highlights how this selfconstructed city takes shape in a jigsaw puzzle of collectively organized neighborhood units that secure and divide land, organize schools, and press for connections to water, gas, and sewage services. Dispersing Power argues that such peri-urban settlements take form as a reterritorialization of Aymara community self-management. They are thus implicated in a variety of important political consequences. Zibechi links the communal structures of a rural Aymara heartland to El Alto neighborhoods by building on the concept of anti-state powers as put forth in the work of Pierre Clastres (1998). Yet he adapts Clastres and numerous studies of the rotating character of leadership in Andean rural communities (ayllus) to an urban context. Such societies without a state, a concept Zibechi borrows from Clastres, are characterized by continual restrictions imposed by the group at large upon leaders, a division of larger social units to maintain cohesion and closeness between leaders and led, and a lack of separation between the organizing structures of daily life and of political mobilization. Aymara societys internal bias toward the communal ayllu structure, as opposed to hereditary authorities and formal union structures, illustrates Clastres point that societies can best avoid

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authoritarian power by actively orienting their culture against it. In both rural and urban Aymara community life, structures of resource management and collective politics encourage solidarity, mutual dependence, and collective identication. In El Alto, this occurs in unions of petty traders, neighborhood councils that divide land and create common areas, and parents associations. In the urban context, argues Felix Patzi (one of many Bolivian political analysts interviewed in the book), the power of the movement lies in the ownership or management of these three resources (territory, trade, education) . . . [within] a communal system (29). Zibechi also proposes that mass mobilizations have their own logic, which dissolve[s] both state and social movement institutions (11). Because all-out efforts to paralyze the economy (such as in the 2003 Gas War) require mass cooperative participation, power structures shift. The many new participants produce innovative and impromptu modes of cooperation that ignore organizational hierarchies in favor of informal collaboration. The capacity to mobilize thus depends on a preexisting setting in which people are already coordinating in quotidian matters, so that during mass mobilization, daily life [connections are] deployed as an arena for insurrectionary action (46). Dispersing Power focuses in detail on how leaders are bypassed during mobilizations; how specic protest tactics rely on geographical extension and rotating personnel to spread out power; and how neighborhood plazas and community radios become spaces of egalitarian coordination. Three factors create emotional solidarity: the communal systems described above, mutual dependence established when actors confront depriva-

tion and danger, and shared, collective suffering. These features of daily life under conditions of urban poverty all recur at a heightened level during confrontational protest. Zibechi also considers the roles of the so-called informal economy and community-led violence against criminals in constructing El Altos practices and identities of independence. He argues that increasing informalization of the urban economy has moved the central arena of conict away from the workplace toward the dispersed, acephalous world of neighborhood organization. While this is no doubt an important dynamic, the idea that this move encourages more autonomous and more horizontal ways of organizing ought to be balanced against the decreased leverage and resources available to grassroots movements due to the deindustrialization of the Bolivian working class. In fact, past urban revolts, in Bolivian and elsewhere, have combined strong power in centralized workplaces with neighborhood-based mobilization. Zibechi devotes a chapter to lynching and other controversial forms of popular violence. He draws attention to the political character of alte nos reprisals against criminals, which is a symptom of a powerful territorially based local organization (91). Yet, the maximal violence of lynching inverts traditional community justices preference for shame and social ties as the basis for punishment. Zibechi thus draws a careful distinction between the current reality of such attacks, which he calls a violent form of self-defense, and the political ideal of community justice. El Alto justice appears an example of how unied community self-rule has yet to bring criminal behavior under collective control. On this and other issues, Zibechi encourages

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readers to see El Alto as a simultaneously inspiring and incomplete example. Whether due to differences in emphasis or on-the-ground realities in two different cities, Amonah Achi Chirit` ele and Marcelo Delgado nd substantially different dynamics in the new neighborhoods of the Cochabamba periphery examined in A la Conquista de un Lote. Central is the gure of the loteador, or the person who divides and sells land to tenants seeking to build on formerly rural land. Deance of regulations often mixes with outright fraud to create a legal gray zone for new and aspiring residents. Thus, the normalization of legal status and the provision of public services become collective goals with a similar motivating power to territory, trade, [and] education in El Alto. However, Cochabamba residents also face barriers to joint action. These include major class differences, absentee tenants, people who purchase lots to speculate rather than to build and live, and free riders who are unwilling to join in collective efforts. Rather than focus simply on mobilization and cooperation, Achi Chirit` ele and Delgado examine in depth these internal difculties and the strategies with which communities combat them. A la Conquista de Un Lote shows how residents seeking to build and own homes must rely on mobilization as much as, or even more than, legally conrmed property rights as they navigate the legal gray zone of urban land tenure. Achi Chirit` ele and Delgados ethnographic work consisted of accompanying the members of two Zona Sur communities, one built atop the elds of La Tamborada and the other the woman-centered community of Maria Auxiliadora. Campesinos who owned communal property nearby began to subdivide the university-owned

land at La Tamborada for new construction in the 1990s. The public Universi had its own dad Mayor de San Simon ambitions to sell the land, leading to extended conict. Unable to enforce eviction of the agrarian communitys numerous settler-purchasers, the University turned to counter-mobilization instead. An association of former miners and farmers, Agromin, was formed to occupy and purchase the land from the university, rather than from the rural community. The competing efforts by Agromin and the campesino-loteadoresincluding occupations, general assemblies, and house contstructionhave the character of the self-created city of El Alto, but evince also a deeply competitive dynamic between them. On both sides, residents eager for a home are creating common identities in struggle. They simultaneously collaborate with, and seek tenancy independent from, their commercially interested allies, a local process of alliance and desencuentro. The H abitat para la Mujer Comunidad Mar a Auxiliadora neighborhood is an exceptional settlement. Founded in 1999, Mar a Auxiliadora took as its mission the provision of a new start for women eeing abusive husbands or controlling parents. A variety of family units make up the community, but all must embrace collective land ownership, womens rights, and community solidarity. Women hold tenancy rights on behalf of their families. These rights cannot be sold or rented, and can only be passed on at the original purchase price. In addition, mutual aid in construction, cyclical lending, and circumstantial support during traumatic events all make up experiences lived from the heart that make residents feel concretely and freely that they are more than

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neighbors (101). Mar a Auxiliadora illustrates several dynamics of new urbanedge communities, including the stress of maintaining collective participation and the opportunity they present for women to escape patriarchal situations. Common land ownership, authorized by rural tenancy law, turns out to be one structural solution to the problem of participation. However, in Mar a Auxiliadora the way has been made much easier by aid groups and eventually politicians interest in supporting the neighborhoods unique political mission. A la Conquista de Un Lotes inside look at the dilemmas and difculties of community cohesion provides a useful, and at times sobering, complement to Dispersing Powers focus on the maximal mobilizing potential of communities. It also delves more deeply into the difcult relationships urban popular movements cultivate with the state, outside supporters, and the legal system, while still maintaining a focus on collective mobilization. The individual work so much a part of mediating such relations is, on the other hand, the focus of Robert Albros ethnography. Roosters at Midnight employs a rather classical ethnographic form to describe the lives of street-level politiciansboth union representatives and elected ofcials in neo-populist partiesin the periurban, mixed-identity city of Quillacollo. Robert Albro weaves popular use of language, symbols, political and apolitical rituals, rumors, insults, and occasionally literature, song, and poetry into a multifaceted description of meanings in political life. He shows how these political mens life stories circulate and become the medium in which their alliances, appeals, and careers are made and unmade. The result is an up-close look at clien-

telist politics from the perspective of middlemen who exchange political loyalty for state favors. Like many of the subject positions explored in the book, this role is socially stigmatized. In this case, the epithet llunku suggests that such men are unreliable, driven by need, and give too much away for too small a gain. After illustrating the shame associated with this position, and how it is linked to stereotypes of the unreliable cholo (or urbanized Indian), Albro also reveals the llunkus simultaneous cleverness, his capacity to move between and to manipulate multiple cultural domains (53). The culture of politics in Quillacollo includes pol ticos stories of estrangement from their families, the symbolic importance of chola women as bearers of authenticity, and political patronage as enacted through ritual presentation of new state-provided goods and political party-sponsored meals. Familial ties whether biographical, afrmed through compadrazgo, or simulated through relations with authentic cholasemerge as a key feature of politics. Albro emphasizes how such vectors provide political capital to entrepreneurial leaders. While few women appear in the role of politician, their experiences as clients, and thus as participants in political culture, are explored seriously. Another concern of Roosters at Midnight involves the legitimacy of the culturally mixed cholo/chola position. The dominance of criollo elites has long since given way (in politics at least) to indigenous and cholo political operators, who became subject to local elections in the 1980s. Albro reveals Quillacollo as the cradle of an identity of humble people and cholos, one with porous boundaries, but shared roots in working class and indigenous

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experience. Both economic strategies and cultural ties are often variegated for the towns residents and its politicians. Nevertheless, links to indigenous culture and experience overcoming economic difculties are essential political credentials. The humble biographies of politicians supported local neo-populist politics in the 1980s and 1990s, and authorize a political alliance with the indigenous countryside in the 21st century. Albro is an eloquent advocate for this stratas cultural legitimacy, although the specic terms of its politics are largely left aside. Albros case would have been strengthened by a clear narrative of the role of neo-populist political parties in both the upheaval and the MAS government that followed. In El Alto, by contrast, Zibechi narrates how local forces in revolt gained their sense of autonomy precisely by breaking ties with the neo-populist parties that had previously co-opted them. In Dilemmas of Modernity, Mark Goodale offers a meditation on the practical and emotional meaning of law, human rights, and development for residents of rural northern Potos . Goodale, an academic critic of liberal modernity, nds in Bolivia a positivist and essentially optimistic engagement with the project of modernity by a range of social actors and institutions (16). He narrates this ideological encounter around local legal actors who embrace what he sees as awed tools provided by that modernity. The argument rests on a close ethnographic portrait of the legal system in Alonso de Iba nez province and its capital Sacaca, a heterodox interpretation of the historical role of liberalism in Bolivia, and an expansive reading of the importance of ideological origins in history. Unfortunately, only the rst of

these three is a solid base for Goodales argument. Dilemmas of Modernity offers a rich description of legality in Alonso de Iba nez, which despite a paucity of lawyers is populated by numerous legal actors, including ayllus, union hierarchies and no fewer than nine types of governmental authorities. By revealing legal institutions inner workings in great detail, Goodale seeks to illustrate how legality frames the spaces in which public life can be performed, and culture produced (58). Here the singular importance and legitimacy of legality for Bolivian institutions, whether liberal, syndical, or communal, is illustrated vividly. Goodale argues compellingly that despite its diversity of legal traditions, North Potos stands alongside more ostensibly cosmopolitan La Paz in constructing the same legal universe, or one in which native Andeans become primary producers of legal categories . . . in a kind of diffuse symbiosis with the law of their colonial oppressors (77). This is in tune with recent historical scholarship on the region that emphasizes the engagement of rural and indigenous communities with legality in both the colonial and Republican periods (Serulnikov 2003; Thurner 1995). In Goodales imprecise text, however, liberalism expands to become a sort of pluripotent stem cell of modern life including genetically modied potato seeds, potable water, . . . the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention and globally televised media spectacles like professional wrestlingall of which it both encapsulates and no doubt makes possible, uniquely (146). Taking this point to its logical conclusion, participants in a 1991 joint indigenous-campesino march were with each passing kilometer, (re-)constituting themselves as rights-bearing modern

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subjects in the way liberal Bolivia had always envisioned (19). However, rightsclaiming communities and unions make the collective the unit of political and social action [emphasis mine] (127) in direct opposition liberalisms girder, a rational individualist ontology (88). In short, Goodales expansive notion of liberalism collapses the central conicts of political life into a single pattern of intention, suggesting at a minimum that it is inadequate for understanding the Bolivian situation. Goodale devotes nearly a third of his study to gender. Unfortunately, he subsumes both feminism and gender analysis within liberalism. In this representation, and unlike the legal world, local gender relations exist in an almost hermetic separation from outside perspectives. A lawyers admonition to the couples he marries to practice equality embeds [their] profoundly specic set of circumstances within a different universe (117) and Goodales own violent intervention into a public scene of domestic violence is questioned as disrupting another gender framework (87). This prompts anguished reection: Was I liberalizing him at the end of my well-worn Timberland boot? (87). With the exception of a wellconsidered portrayal of implicit gender power in the ofce of Sacacas juez instructor, feminist (and particularly Bolivian and Third World feminist) analysis fails to complement anguish. To compound this situation, no female informants speak of their own experience. Of the nine described individually, just one is quoted, and that is to conrm that women may take leadership roles in an unusual situation such as hers. Instead of opinions, women have situations; four of the nine appear in a sin-

gle paragraph describing the abuse they ed to enter a shelter. Readers do not even see in the text how many women reclaim the expectations of modernity alongside the men whose perspectives are the focus of the book. This voicelessness has consequences: when the Sacaca shelter and legal support center for abused women was closed, Goodale can only speculate, it is difcult to know for sure how transformative it could have been (139). He does not take up the question with any of the 1,100 women who lived at one time in the shelter, nor does he review any of the literature on the impact of womens shelters in similar contexts. Further, he attributes the Claretian monks decision to close the center to a fear of its liberalism, rather than investigating their worldview or dependence on local patriarchal elites. Lacking in any gender analysis, the explanation that the monks are still committed to worldview in which the source of justice . . . is the Catholic God and not . . . humanness sounds thin (140). A key problem for Goodale is why indigenous peasants embrace human rights and welcome foreign promoters of sustainable development, or the very discursive regimes that shapeand, at times, producetheir marginalization? (151). His answer is essentially emotional: these discourses assert moral worth, and promise participation in a glorious future. In short, modern encounters offer locals the grandeur they crave. This encounter appears in two forms: through men who adopt the human rights framework and through experiences and physical objects of modernity. The latter include monuments that record development projects, The Simpsons watched by children, and a human rights workshops technocratic timetable. The men who

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vernacularize human rights are addressed with a curious respect in the textphoto captions label them rural-legal intellectual and moral philosopher and legal visionary, although readers learn relatively little about their philosophical work. The detailed scenarios in which modern objects are encountered, symbolically received, and practically ignored (and this is the common sequence) are voiceless disencounters (they watched me watching them at the same time as they tried to watch the screen, 144). Local reactions are not so much recorded as they are imputed. Ultimately, people are rooted to locality through a vision of radical timeless alterity and isolation. This thick otherness, in which encounters with modernity merely intrude on what are otherwise the daily rituals (162) of north Potos life, seems ungrounded given the scarcity of details about such rituals and locals thoughts about this encounter. Where others (including the two historical works cited above) have interpreted rights claiming by indigenous peoples as serving their own purposeful goals, Goodale can only see them as othered subjects on an emotional quest for grandeur. All the authors surveyed above offer a contribution to understanding Bolivias post-2005 political situation. A La Conquista de Un Lote is the only work not to address head-on the national turmoil of 20002005 and the indigenous-identied MAS government that followed. Yet its central subject, namely the mobilizing capacity exercised by the new urban settlements, is not limited to defending tenancy or demanding services but has been applied to metropolitan and national politics. The most generalizable conclusion of Achi Chirit` ele and Delgados work may be this: in the absence of a willingness and/or

capacity to impose legally mandated decisions from above, political actors of all stripes must rely on numbers and mobilizing capacities to win conicts. Conicts between left and right and between the MAS government and members of its fractious coalition have all followed this pattern in the past 5 years. Goodale and Albro both extend their central frames to post-2005 politics. In Goodales concluding chapter, the MAS is interpreted as twenty-rst century liberal revolutionaries due to their use of the structures of a Constituent Assembly and the banner of human rights. He argues that this formal familiarity helps explain MAS cross-class and cross-ethnicity backing. However, tensions continue between the MAS and more 19th-century liberal viewpoints that reject indigenous jurisprudence, caps on land ownership, and limitation on free expression under a new law against racism. Albros notion of the humble political subject is an alternate explanation for the reach of MASs hegemonic alliance. The cholo political identity in Quillacollo is one of many to be included in MASs irreducibly plural, transactional, and coalitional project (198). However, this inclusion is complicated by the uneasy t between the MASs essentially territory-focused program for indigenous autonomy and the dispersed, multiple- and mixed-identity reality of life for many humble and indigenous people who live on the urban periphery, particularly outside of the Altiplano. On this front, too, political tensions continue to simmer. For Zibechi, the post-2006 period represents more of a threat than an opportunity for social movements. He sees their central challenge as continuing to build indigenous autonomy (in the countryside and in self-made cities like El Alto)

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as something new . . . built from below (121). The unifying, containing, and representing involved in a state-centered project undermine, in this view, the power that movements gain in their multiplicity and dispersion, and separates even democratically selected leaders from communities. In short, the key dangers Zibechi sees are demobilization and dependence. Guti errez shares these concerns, but identies the turning point in the post-2003 shift from a communitarian-popular vision toward a national-popular vision. Despite escalating confrontation after 2003, movements did not have the same interior quality (305). This now-diminished ideal includes: a focus on enacting selfrule and creating new spaces for deliberation and cooperation; collective recuperation of social wealth (242); and questioning existing ways of making public decisions. The closure of these possibilities remains incomplete, according to her, but, under Evo Morales, the present is too much like the past to be satisfying (297). Hylton and Thomson identify similar tensions within the left-grassroots coalition, while taking more seriously the possibility of it representing popular movements, giving space to both the continuation of autonomous indigenous aspirations and to Vice President Garc a Lineras theory of a new time of occupying structures of power rather than streets or government buildings. Between this perspective and more autonomous grassroots forces, however, they see a new period of des-encuentro arising. However, their emphasis is not on the dangers of this period, but on the ac-

cumulated experience of organizing, and the memory of popular power (154). If anything unites these six texts, then, it is their authors shared commitment to illuminate the many forces, experiences, identities, and memories that make up Bolivias current political reality.

References Cited
Clastres, Pierre 1998 Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. New York: Zone Books. Kohl, Benjamin H., and Linda C. Farthing 2006 Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Resistance. London: Zed Books. Serulnikov, Sergio 2003 Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes. Durham: Duke University Press. Thurner, Mark 1995 Republicanos and La Comunidad de Peruanos: Unimagined Political Communities in Postcolonial Andean Peru. Journal of Latin American Studies 27(2):291318. Zibechi, Raul 2008 Territorios en resistencia: Cartograf a pol tica de las periferias urbanas latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires Argentina: Lavaca.

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