Title: Facundo: Or, Civilization and Barbarism
Author: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
ISBN-13: 9780140436778
Ostensibly a biography of the gaucho barbarian Juan Facundo Quiroga, Facundo is a work of history, sociology, political commentary, and Latin America's most important nineteenth-century essay. It is a study of the Argentine character, a prescription for the modernization of Latin America, and a protest against the tyranny of Juan Manuel de Rosas’s government (1835–1852). The book brings nineteenth-century Latin American history to life raising questions still debated today regarding the "civilized" city versus the "barbaric" countryside, the treatment of indigenous and African populations, and the classically liberal plan of modernization.
Title: Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Author: Ivan Jaksic
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN-13: 9780521791953
This is the first book-length biography of Andrés Bello, the nineteenth-century Latin American intellectual, to appear in English. Bello was also a poet, a literary critic, and an influential statesman whose contributions to nation-building and Spanish American identity are widely recognized across the region. This work provides a comprehensive interpretation of Bello's work, gives an account of Bello's life based on new information from archives in four countries, and sheds new light on this critical period in Latin American history.
Title: José Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race
Author: Ilan Stavans
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN-13: 9780813551043
In this volume, Vasconcelos’s influential 1925 essay “Mestizaje,” key to understanding his role in shaping multiethnic America, is showcased and analyzed for the first time. Translated by John H. R. Polt, “Mestizaje” argued that Latin America’s Brown Race was destined to dominate the world, a thesis embraced by activists and scholars on both sides of the Rio Grande. Ilan Stavans examines the essay’s historical and biographical context and its influence on Chicano political activism. The volume also includes Vasconcelos’ 1926 Harris Foundation Lecture, “The Race Problem in Latin America.”
Title: José Martí: A Revolutionary Life
Author: Alfred J. López
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN-13: 9781477323779
Alfred J. López presents the definitive biography of the Cuban patriot and martyr. Writing from a nonpartisan perspective and drawing on years of research using original Cuban and U.S. sources, including materials never before used in a Martí biography, López strips away generations of mythmaking and portrays Martí as Cuba’s greatest founding father and one of Latin America’s literary and political giants, without suppressing his public missteps and personal flaws. López traces Martí’s eventful life, from his childhood in Cuba, to his death on the battlefield at Dos Ríos.
Title: Simón Bolívar, A Life
Author: John Lynch
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN-13: 9780300126044
The book illuminates the inner world of Bolívar, a revolutionary who freed six countries, the dynamics of his leadership, his power to command, and his modes of ruling the diverse peoples of Spanish America. The key to his greatness, Lynch concludes, was supreme will power and an ability to inspire people to follow him beyond their immediate interests, in some cases through years of unremitting struggle. Encompassing Bolívar’s entire life and his many accomplishments, this is the definitive account of a towering figure in the history of the Western hemisphere.
Title: San Martín, Argentine Soldier, American Hero
Author: John Lynch
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN-13: 9780300126433
In the first full English-language biography of San Martín in more than half a century, John Lynch shines new light on San Martín and on the story of Spanish America’s revolutionary wars. Lynch offers a series of dramatic set pieces: the Peninsular War, in which San Martín fought the French and learned his military skills; the crossing of the Andes, when his army battled the forces of nature as well as enemy fire; the confrontation with imperial Spain in Peru; and the standoff with Bolívar which led to San Martín’s resignation and exile in Europe.
Title: A Life Together, Lucas Alaman and Mexico, 1792-1853
Author: Eric Van Young
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN-13: 9780300233919
Lucas Alamán (1792–1853) was the most prominent statesman, political economist, and historian in nineteenth‑century Mexico. Alamán served as the central ministerial figure in the national government on three occasions, founded the Conservative Party in the wake of the Mexican‑American War, and authored the greatest historical work on Mexico’s struggle for independence. Van Young’s balanced portrait draws upon fifteen years of research to argue that Alamán was a conservative modernizer, whose north star was always economic development and political stability as the means of drawing Mexico into the North Atlantic world of advanced nation‑states.
Title: Latercomer State Formation, Political Geography and Capacity Failure in Latin America
Author: Sebastián Mazzuca
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN-13: 9780300248951
Latin American governments systematically fail to provide the key public goods for their societies to prosper. Sebastián Mazzuca argues that the secret of Latin America’s failure is that its states were “born weak.” State formation in post-Independence Latin America occurred when capitalism forged countries. Pursuing the short-term benefits of international trade, Latin American leaders created chronically weak states with, notably patrimonial administrations and dysfunctional regional combinations. Mazzuca analyzes pathways leading to variations in country size and pacification: “port-led” state formation in Argentina and Brazil; “party-led” in Mexico, Colombia, and Uruguay; and “lord-led” in Central America, Venezuela, and Peru.
