Writers from Jorge Luis Borges to Alejo Carpentier have celebrated the role of literary journalism in Latin American cultural life. The periodical press mediates between author and public, between the heavy sea of tradition and the rising tide of the new, between the institutions that sustain convention and the spontaneous, vibrant eruptions that give life to the avant-garde. Literary journalism thus traces the struggles of writers against the canon while revealing their engagement in the political and aesthetic events of the day. But as one might expect, literary journalism also unravels the neat boundaries of the finished work or the book in the ongoing dialogue with contemporary publications and multifaceted speculations on culture. In this way, the pastiche of materials found in the modern review exposes the vivid heterogeneity of the intellectual field.

The existence of a division between what Italo López Vallecillos has termed the “agro-financial” and “agro-industrial-financial” factions of the Salvadoran elite has become what Enrique Baloyra calls “the consensus of scholarly opinion” on elite politics in El Salvador. As López Vallecillos describes the division, the agro-financial faction “opposes any attempt to transform the rigid framework of land concentration and low salaries in its devotion to the plantation economy that is the basis of its income and profits.” The agro-industrial faction, in contrast, “tries to introduce changes in the economic system … and opts for less authoritarian political forms, within the framework of liberal democracy, representative but restricted and controlled.” Oscillation between these two elite strategies has long characterized Salvadoran politics, and in the 1920s, the temporary dominance of the more liberal faction gave El Salvador the reputation of being the most progressive country in Central America. During times of crisis like the 1930s and the early 1980s, however, the positions of the two factions converged to support the retrograde policies of the more conservative “agro-financial” faction, which have given El Salvador an international reputation for ferocious authoritarianism.

Study of religious phenomena in Latin America and the Caribbean covered by the generic term Protestantism has opened up a fertile field of research for sociologists, anthropologists, and historians in the last thirty years. The exponential growth in new non-Roman Catholic religious movements since the 1950s and the breadth of their organized networks have stimulated research based more often on sensationalism than on a scientific perspective. The complex and pluralistic manifestations of this heterodox religious phenomenon have generally been reduced to a notion of Protestantism rarely found in scholarly usage. The multiplicity of non-Roman Catholic religious movements cannot be reduced to some catchall category of “Protestantism.” Moreover, one must also analyze the connection between usage of the term Protestant and a culture marked by the Spanish Inquisition, which shaped the Ibero-American collective unconscious for more than three centuries, in order to understand why a fair number of Latin American researchers look at religious dissidence rather superficially, reducing it immediately to “Protestantism.”

In the Andean field, social scientists and historians have only recently begun to ask “how peasants make politics” (Montoya 1986) or how they have “engaged their political worlds” (Stern 1987, 9). In the past, Andean peasants were frequently viewed as living outside politics or as being sporadic players at best on the stage of politics—albeit as reactive or perhaps millenarian rebels aligned against the state. When peasants did make a political showing, they were inevitably represented by the tactically mobile “middle peasantry” or independent smallholders (see Wolf 1969). In contrast, “traditional” estate peasants (service tenantry) were characterized as relatively passive, “prepolitical” victims. Further along the path of historical development and social differentiation, it was generally held, these same “prepolitical” peasants were brought into the post-feudal world of “modern political movements,” where they were soon endowed with “political consciousness” (see Hobsbawm 1959). In probing the ambiguous but historically significant “middle ground” between these extreme and rather static images of “politically modern” peasants and “prepolitical victims,” this article will raise a different set of questions. The middle ground can be found at the intersection of Herrschaft (domination) and Gemeinschaft (community) on the Andean hacienda in capitalist transition. Analysis of this middle ground reveals a highly contested terrain where the idioms of peasants' everyday political agency resound. This resonance from below, however, presents interpretive as well as political ambiguities.

Hayden White suggests in The Content of the Form that historiography depends upon the existence of a social center that allows the historian to locate events in relation to one another and “to charge them with ethical or moral significance” (White 1987, 11). This center makes it possible for the historical narrative—as opposed to the annals and the chronicle—to achieve closure. White specifies, however, that “in order to qualify as historical, an event must be susceptible to at least two narrations of its occurrence” (White 1987, 20). According to this perspective, the historical narrative is informed by the historian's need to assert his or her authority over other competing accounts of the past. In questioning the privileged position traditionally held by historians and suggesting that historians' discourse is only one of many paths leading to a truthful (re)presentation of the past, White's version of historiography holds particular appeal for those of us who, despite having been trained in fields other than history, consider ourselves to be authoritative interpreters of Brazil.

As interest grows in examining women's lives and writings in colonial Latin America, the autobiographical accounts written by scores of nuns during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been undergoing a reevaluation by historians and literary critics alike. Studies of the literary production and the circumstances surrounding the life of the most famous nun of the period, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695), have long been in vogue, but writings by her contemporaries have only recently caught the attention of many scholars. These colonial documents illustrate a well-established feminine literary tradition and reveal the female experience with religious institutions and spirituality: the appeal of the religious life for many women, the roles they played in the convent, and the relationships among nuns, confessors, and other members of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Less frequently, autobiographical accounts include significant details about the author's life before taking the veil. Although rare, such manuscripts provide information on the makeup of upper-class creole households and the roles of women in the family that helps fill the gaps in knowledge about women's daily lives in Latin America. The focus of this article is the first volume written by an Augustinian Recollect nun describing her secular life on an agricultural farm (hacienda de labor) from 1656 to 1687.

The development of the Mexican sugar industry during the twentieth century has reflected both the general problems of industrialization in the hemisphere and the distinct historical conditions that were shaped by the Revolution of 1910. The broader problems can be assessed in terms of the implications of peripheral capitalist development for the internal dynamics of social class relations and for the corresponding political factors that set the boundaries for government policy options.

El tema de la vinculación de los productores y la producción agraria con los mercados es hoy un tema bastante bien explorado en la historiografía colonialista americana. De estos estudios surge como una visión más o menos generalizada la progresiva tendencia al control sobre los mercados de productos agropecuarios de parte de las grandes haciendas españolas. Sin embargo, últimamente esto ha sido matizado destacando el alto grado de participación mercantil del campesinado y de las comunidades indígenas, por lo menos en ciertas regiones y períodos, incluso tardíos.

“What I suffer is pleasant because it shows that I am putting myself above the run of common men, that I am worthy of my Patria and of you…”

Insurgent officer to his wife, 1893

The appeal of sacrifice so frequently encountered in expressions of nationalism is an equally familiar theme in the rhetoric of political warfare in Latin America. Stories of political warfare take up a considerable part of Latin American historiography. The intent of this exploratory article is to suggest how the rhetoric and narrative written about nineteenth-century insurgency can be read to illuminate the political history of Latin America. Two South American civil wars of the 1890s constitute the empirical starting point for my speculations, although they are scarcely a convincing sample of the hundreds of insurgencies that have occurred since independence. Consequently, these observations on a Latin American discourse of insurgency must largely be content to ask questions, raise issues, and suggest hypotheses.

Protestantism has grown strikingly throughout Latin America in the last two decades. Estimating such growth is hazardous in the absence of firm national survey data, but the phenomenon is clearly embracing sizable segments of national populations. In Guatemala, estimates of Protestants in the national population ranged from 20 to 25 percent by the early 1980s, with more recent estimates approaching 30 percent.

Interracial marriage is common in Brazil today despite an overall preference for racial endogamy. Fully one-fifth of all Brazilian unions in 1980 were racially exogenous (Silva 1987), although only a small portion of those marriages involved persons of widely differing colors. Indeed, 93 percent of interracial unions in 1980 were between whites and browns (pardos—persons of mixed race or mulattos) or between browns and blacks; only the remaining 7 percent (1.3 percent of all unions) took place between whites and blacks (Silva 1987, 73). Because intermarriage is the ultimate indicator of social distance or assimilation, these rates suggest little or moderate social distance between persons who are proximate in color but greater social distance between persons at the extremes ends of the color spectrum.