CLAH - The Conference on Latin American History

I. MESSAGE FROM PRESIDENT JEFFREY LESSER

What a great CLAH meeting! In addition to Distinguished Service Award winner William B. Taylor’s inspiring speech, we had a record number of panels and attendees at both the lunch and the cocktail party. Among the other highlights was CLAH’s “loan” of Barbara Weinstein to the AHA where she presided over that meeting and the award of the first Elinor Melville Prize, named in memory of our long-time colleague. CLAH members. This will be most noticeable in Jerry Dávila’s presentation of a formal budget for

The General Committee meeting was particularly productive this year. We are working, with the help of John Schwaller, on a careful financial plan to manage our solid resources to bring the most benefits to CLAH members. This will be most noticeable in Jerry Dávila’s presentation of a formal budget for approval at the next EC meeting.
I was pleased to see the growing number of graduate students participating in all aspects of the CLAH meeting. This is a result of the EC’s continuing commitment to keeping graduate student memberships low, to subsidize graduate student participation in the luncheon, and to encourage graduate students to present papers. Four excellent Scobie Prize winners were chosen by last year’s committee of Silvia Arrom (chair), Steven Topik and Justin Wolfe. I know everyone congratulates Brigitte Cairus (York University), Sarah Jaffe (Tulane University), Brad Lange (Emory University) and Andrea Vicente (Michigan State University) on the high quality of their proposals. Please encourage graduate students to apply for next year’s Scobie Awards which have a deadline of April 3, 2008.

We have also begun the process of electing a Vice-President (President-Elect) and filling two positions on the General Committee. The new Vice-President will succeed Mary Kay Vaughan whose term begins immediately following the next CLAH meeting. Please send your suggestions for all three positions to the Nominating Committee of Barbara Tenenbaum (Chair), Joel Wolfe and Linda Salvucci.

Finally I know that the entire CLAH membership joins me in thanking Jerry Dávila for organizing a wonderful conference.

With best wishes for a fine rest of the academic year,

Jeffrey Lesser

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II. MESSAGE FROM EXECUTIVE SECRETARY JERRY DÁVILA

We are already at work making preparations for the forthcoming conference in New York City. Having the American Historical Association meet in New York poses some particular challenges that the AHA, the CLAH and our Program Committee have been contending with. The main one involves the dates for the meeting, since the AHA will be held from Friday, January 2 through Monday, January 5, 2009. In other words, the whole meeting is shifted by a day, and both Friday and Monday will be full meeting days. Otherwise, conference participants would have faced exorbitant rates over the New Years’ holiday.

I am pleased to report that the Program Committee has received an especially large number of proposals for the New York meeting. I want to thank this year’s Program Committee, Matt Childs (Chair), Bianca Premo and Frank McCann for their great work generating and evaluating session proposals. Together with the AHA Program Committee and staff, we will work to find the flexibility to accommodate as many CLAH panels as possible. Please note, however, that the meeting space at the hotels in New York will be tighter than in previous years, both in terms of the number of rooms and in terms of their size.

We have most of completed the transition of the Secretariat to UNC-Charlotte. One of the outstanding items on our agenda is the redesign of the website. The new version of the site will go live in the coming months, and one important change is elimination of password protection to access the member directory. If you would like your contact information not to appear, please let us know. The online newsletter that you are reading is saving the organization over $2,500! We still send paper newsletters and member directories to those members who have requested them as well as to member libraries.

The General Committee has approved new guidelines for the CLAH operating budget and for managing the CLAH endowment. The details are described in the draft General Committee minutes that follow this message. The highlights points are:

•Establishing a November 1 fiscal year;
•Establishing a 3-year average for the market value of the CLAH endowment and annually drawing 4% of the endowment to pay for CLAH prizes;
•Arrange to have dividends from the CLAH endowment transferred to the CLAH general account;
•Designate a threshold for gifts: small gifts would go to the general account and be applied to the cost of prizes for the current year, and large gifts would be transferred to the endowment;
•Requiring that the CLAH Secretariat begin to submit an annual budget to the General Committee.

These changes will make both increase the ability of the CLAH to plan financially, and increases financial oversight by the General Committee. I especially want to thank Jeffrey Lesser and Fritz Schwaller for their time and insights over the months before the General Committee meeting that led to the development of this financial plan.

The General Committee also recognized the benefits of creating a Mexican History prize, similar to the Warren Dean Prize for books on Brazil. Chris Boyer, Chair of the Mexican Studies Committee (crboyer@uic.edu), is receiving pledges to fund the prize. According to CLAH guidelines, a total contribution of at least $10,000 is needed to bring a discussion of a new prize to the General Committee for approval.

At the suggestion of last years’ and this year’s CLAH Prize Committees, the General Committee approved changes to the guidelines for the CLAH Prize. The new prize guidelines appear later in this newsletter, but in essence there are three major differences from previous years: 1) Articles appearing in any journal, except the HAHR and The Americas, are eligible. There is no longer the requirement that it be a U.S.-based journal; 2) all articles must be nominated or self-nominated – the committee will not seek articles; and 3) the author must be a member of the CLAH both in the year the article is considered for the prize, and in the year in which the article was published.

Financial summary pertaining to the operation of the Secretariat for 2007 and expenses related to the Washington, D.C. meetings in January, 2008:

Income		Expenses
Journal Subscriptions	$7,008	Journal Subscriptions	$7,566
Luncheon	$3,710	Luncheon	$6,120
Interest/Dividends/Royalties	$1,655	Cocktail Party	$3,404
Transfer from Endowment	$9,832	Prizes and Awards	$11,350
Member Dues	$17,635	Other Conference Expenses	$1,611
Total	$39,840	Website Maintenance	$1,019
		Postage	$2,604
		Newsletter/Directories/Program	$1,443
		Accounting Fees	$1,105
		Secretariat Transfer	$1,022
		Credit Card Processing Charges	$1,223
		Total	$38,467

Finally, I would like to thank all of the members of our organization that have helped make the transition of the Secretariat to UNC Charlotte work so smoothly, especially Tom Holloway, who has answered countless queries of mine with patience and with the same thoroughness he brought to the Secretariat at UC Davis.

Best wishes for the year ahead,

Jerry Dávila

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III. MINUTES OF THE GENERAL COMMITTEE MEETING

Draft Minutes of the CLAH General Committee, January 3, 2008, Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, DC (subject to correction, amendment and approval by the General Committee at its next meeting, in January 2009):

1. Call to order and roll call of voting members of the General Committee
The meeting was called to order at 5:05 pm by President Jeffrey Lesser. He welcomed everyone and asked for self-introductions. Members present: President Jeffrey Lesser, Vice President Mary Kay Vaughan, Past President Mark Wasserman, Executive Secretary Jerry Dávila, Elected Members Peter Beattie, Hendrik Kraay and Karen Racine; Ex-oficio Members Donald Stevens (The Americas Editor), George Reid Andrews (HAHR Editor), John Schwaller, Michael Innis-Jiménez and Dennis Hidalgo (H-Latam Editors).

Members absent: Ada Ferrer, Elected Member; Lara Putnam and Alejandro de la Fuente (HAHR Editors).

Also in attendance: James Green; (2008 Program Committee Chair); Matt Childs (2009 Program Committee Chair); Barbara Tenenbaum (2009 Nominating Committee Chair); Barbara Ganson (Chair, Borderlands/Frontiers Studies Committee); Marc Becker (Chair, Andean Studies Committee; Chair, Teaching and Teaching Materials Committee); Jane Mangan (Secretary, Andean Studies Committee); Chris Boyer (Secretary, Mexican Studies Committee); Jurgen Buchenau; Cynthia Radding; and Ben Vinson III.

2. Approval of minutes of the meeting in Atlanta, GA, January 4, 2007
The minutes of the General Committee meeting held January 4, 2007 in Atlanta, GA were presented by Jerry Dávila. The minutes had been distributed separately and had appeared in draft form in the CLAH Spring 2007 Newsletter. The minutes were approved as distributed.

3. Approval of Election Results, CLAH Prize Committees and Prize Awards
The results of balloting by CLAH members for two new members of the Program Committee and secretaries of the Regional and Thematic Committees were presented to the General Committee and unanimously approved.

4. Report of the Program Committee:
James Green, Program Chair for the 2008 Washington meetings, explained the difficulties experienced by the committee in handling the dual submission deadlines for the CLAH (January) and the AHA (February), and noted the confusion created by having two calls for proposals which leads some CLAH members to submit directly to the AHA rather than through the CLAH submission process. James Green also noted that despite good relations between the CLAH and AHA program committees, the AHA program committee disregarded the ranking of panels recommended by the CLAH program committee. Members of the committee discussed possibilities for resolving this problem, but resolved that this is a perennial difficulty with no clear solution beyond the procedures that are already in place. Matt Childs, Program Chair for the 2009 New York meeting, discussed contacts his committee has already held with CLAH members interested in submitting proposals.

President Jeffrey Lesser congratulated the 2008 Program Committee for organizing the largest CLAH program in memory.

Executive Secretary Jerry Dávila relayed communications from AHA Conference Director Sharon Tune, noting that the facilities for the 2009 meeting in New York are more limited than those of recent years, and that there is an expectation that fewer panels can be approved for presentation, despite efforts to expand the program schedule.

The General Committee discussed a pre-circulated question about the scheduling of the 2009 CLAH luncheon and cocktail party. The 2009 meeting will take place on an unusual schedule, beginning on Friday, January 2 and ending Monday, January 5, because of the New Year’s holiday. The Committee discussed the various permutations for holding the luncheon and cocktail party on different days or on the same day. The General Committee empowered the Executive Committee to review the options, consult with the AHA Conference Director about space availability and report back to the General Committee.

5. Report on Management of the Endowment and CLAH Finances
Lesser reported on discussions held with Fritz Schwaller and Jerry Dávila on ways of managing the CLAH endowment and finances. In recent years, the CLAH has operated entirely off of membership dues and all endowment revenue has been reinvested into the endowment. The CLAH maintains, in addition to the endowment, held in a TIAA-CREF Managed Allocation Mutual Fund, a cash reserve (contingency fund) in a TIAA-CREF Money Market Fund, equal to two years’ operating expenses, and a general account with Bank of America which handles CLAH income and expenses.

Lesser proposed the following changes to the management of CLAH endowment and finances:
            •Establishing a November 1 fiscal year;
            •Establishing a 3-year average for the market value of the CLAH endowment and annually drawing 4% of the endowment to pay for CLAH prizes;
            •Arrange to have dividends from the CLAH endowment transferred to the CLAH general account;
            •Designate a threshold for gifts: small gifts would go to the general account and be applied to the cost of prizes for the current year, and large gifts would be transferred to the endowment;
            •Requiring that the CLAH Secretariat begin to submit an annual budget to the General Committee.

In the discussion that followed, it was established that based on recent endowment performance, roughly $12,000 per year would be generated to pay for prizes, and that the balance of the cost for prizes, which is approximately $17,000 per year, would be drawn from the CLAH general account (dues and small gifts). Cynthia Radding asked if drawing the 4% from the endowment would cause the endowment to shrink. Fritz Schwaller responded that it would not: that 4% of a 3-year average is an extremely conservative number consistent with the management of endowments by educational institutions, and that in recent years, the market value of endowments has typically grown at twice that rate. Mark Wasserman asked how this would be different from the current management of the endowment and general account, to which Dávila and Lesser responded that it would allow for clearer planning and budgeting because it would make it easier to forecast income and expenses over time and to set CLAH goals with a clearer understanding of the organization’s financial standing. Once the endowment is structured to generate revenue for the organization (through the 4% drawdown and dividends), and once the Secretariat manages income and expenses through an annual budget, it will become possible to identify annual surpluses in the CLAH’s income and either 1) apply these to goals determined by the General Committee; or 2) put it into the CLAH endowment. The proposal was unanimously approved.

6. Approval of CLAH Prize Committees and Prize Awards
The General Committee unanimously approved the award and prize recipients for 2007 and unanimously approved the empanelling of the committees for CLAH 2008 Prizes.

Based on the earlier decision to begin establishing a General Committee-approved CLAH budget, the General Committee discussed guidance to the Cabrera Award Committee on the size of the Cabrera award(s), and unanimously approved a budget total of $5,000 for the 2008 Cabrera Award, distributed as the award committee best determines.

The General Committee also discussed a request by the 2007 and 2008 CLAH Conference Prize Committees that was circulated prior to the meeting. The committees noted the difficulty of determining eligible journal articles for a prize that is defined only by the exclusion of The Americas and the HAHR, and by the requirement that the article appear in a “journal edited in the United States.” 2007 Committee Chair Camila Townsend asked that the General Committee clarify whether electronic journals should be eligible, and if so, which ones? 2008 CLAH Prize Committee Chair Bert Barickman noted that despite US-only exclusion, articles from JLAS have previously been considered for and given the award. Barickman also identified and forwarded a list of eligible journals that appeared in a 1998 CLAH newsletter.

The General Committee discussed the difficulty of determining what constitutes a US.-based journal, particularly with regard to electronic journals, and also discussed the difficulties that the Prize’s ill-defined boundaries presented for committee members. Several possibilities for defining the prize were discussed, leading to a motion by George Reid Andrews to re-define the CLAH Prize with the following language:

“The Conference on Latin American History Prize is awarded annually for a distinguished article on any significant aspect of Latin American history by a member of the CLAH, not appearing in the Hispanic American Historical Review or The Americas. The committee will consider nominated and self-nominated articles in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. To be eligible for the prize, authors must be members of the CLAH during the year the article is published and the year that it is considered for the award.

The committee will review only those articles published in the year preceding the award. Thus articles published in 2007 will be considered for the 2008 award to be presented at the conference in January 2009. For an article to be considered, each of the three committee members must receive a copy by mail by June 1, 2008. The Secretariat should be informed of the committee's decision no later than October 15, 2008.

The revised language for the CLAH Prize was approved unanimously.

7. Report of the Secretariat
Jerry Dávila reported on the transition of the CLAH from UC Davis to UNC Charlotte and on the operation of the Secretariat over the previous year. He thanked Thomas Holloway and Delfina Redfield for the extensive work they did both preparing the Secretariat to be transferred and in training and assisting the new Secretariat in running the organization. At UNC Charlotte, the Secretariat is co-hosted by the History Department and by the Latin American Studies Program. While the initial bid to host the Secretariat included a subvention to support a course release for the Executive Secretary, this subvention was not needed in the first year. The Latin American Studies Program provides for a graduate assistant to support the organization.

Arriving at UNC Charlotte, the Secretariat carried out several changes in the method of communications with members. An electronic survey was conducted to gauge support for the move to an electronic newsletter and member directory. The move was supported by over 90% of respondents. In addition, the Secretariat moved to electronic balloting. Together, these changes represent a significant reduction in printing and mailing costs - down from approximately $5,000 per year to approximately $1,200 per year. Members wishing to still receive a paper newsletter or directory could choose to do so, and paper newsletters would still be sent to institutional members (libraries). So far, only one member has requested the paper newsletter.

Dávila reported that the bulk mailing of the conference program, luncheon order form and membership renewal material experienced some problems, and not all members received the mailing. Dávila reported that he will be working with the UNC Charlotte mail room to identify and resolve the problem prior to next fall’s mailing, or will resort to first class mail, despite the higher postage cost, in order to insure that all members receive the program and materials. The CLAH checking account was moved from River City Bank in Davis to Bank of America.

Finally, Dávila discussed the revision of the CLAH Website, noting that the drafting of the new site was taking longer than projected but should be completed in the winter. Once the switch takes place, members will no longer need a user-id and password to access the directory.

8. New Business
Jurgen Buchenau raised the idea of establishing a prize for the best book on Mexican history, along the lines of the Warren Dean Memorial Prize for Brazilian history. Jeffrey Lesser noted that the policy of the CLAH is to require a $10,000 threshold for the endowment of new prizes and proposed that Buchenau seek pledges, in paper, in that amount. Once the pledges have been received, the CLAH can proceed with approving and structuring a prize. Mary Kay Vaughan suggested Buchenau bring the idea of the prize to the Mexican Studies Committee meeting.

Barbara Tenenbaum, Chair of the 2008 Nominating Committee, asked members to contact her with suggestions for possible nominees to appear on the fall ballot for CLAH Vice President.

9. Old Business
No old business was presented.
The meeting adjourned at 7:05 pm.

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IV. PROPOSED MEXICAN HISTORY BOOK PRIZE

The Mexican Studies Committee agreed at the Washington Committee on Latin American History meeting last January to explore the possibility of establishing an annual prize for the best book in the History of Mexico published by a member of the CLAH. The CLAH currently awards a number of book awards, but the only one for which most Mexicanists are eligible is the Bolton-Johnson Prize, awarded annually to the best English-language book on any aspect of Latin American history. Given the number and quality of books on Mexican history, many of us felt that it is a good moment to find a way to acknowledge the very best contributions.

At this point, we need to raise a total of $10,000 to endow the prize. Fortunately, even before this announcement has reached you, we have received pledges of nearly $1,000, including a generous donation of $500 by an anonymous benefactor. That leaves a bit over $9,000 to go, and I am appealing to the membership of our organization to consider making a pledge to establish this award. The suggested level for assistant professors is $50, for associates, $75, and for professors , $100.
We all have multiple and sometimes urgent demands on our philanthropic dollar, yet I hope that you will agree that this initiative merits our support. It will help to maintain and extend the appeal of our field and raise its visibility within the discipline of history generally. In that sense, it should help to guarantee the long-term vigor of the field to which we have all dedicated so much energy.

If you are interested in supporting the establishment of a book prize in Mexican history, I ask that you send me an e-mail at crboyer@uic.edu, with a cc to CLAH executive secretary Jerry Dávila at clah@uncc.edu, giving your name, contact information, and amount you are willing to pledge. Please do NOT send money at this time. Once we are certain that we have reached the $10,000 mark, we will get back in touch to give you more details. Hopefully, we will have good news by the time of our next meeting in New York next year!

Chris Boyer
University of Illinois-Chicago
Chair, Mexican Studies Committee

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V. COMMITTEE REPORTS

Andean Studies Committee Meeting Report, January 4, 2008, Washington, DC

The Andean Studies Committee convened on Friday, January 4 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm to listen to presentations on new research from doctoral candidates and new PhDs. Committee chair Marc Becker, Truman State University, chaired the session, and Committee secretary Jane Mangan, Davidson College, commented and facilitated discussion. Papers represented work on both the colonial and modern eras, and ranged through Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. While the panel did not offer thematic unity, it did introduce emerging scholarship to a wide audience at the CLAH venue.

The two colonial papers looked at very different political intrigues in the seventeenth century. Dr. David Dressing, a curator at The Latin American Library of Tulane University, spoke on “Theater and Society in Early Seventeenth-Century Potosí,” work based on his dissertation. Dressing argued that theater companies as well as plays of this era provide an interesting, and heretofore untold, way to examine the social and political conflicts between the Basques and the Vicuñas during Potosí’s peak as an important Andean city. Dressing’s work reveals the behind-the-scenes action of colonial theater, disreputable performers, and adds a refreshing perspective to our understanding of colonial Potosí. Karoline Cook, Ph.D candidate at Princeton University, focused on Lima in her paper “Moriscos, Inquisitors and the Dynamics of Religious Intolerance in Colonial Peru.” Her larger dissertation addresses moriscos in the Spanish Americas. Cook’s work adds an interesting angle to discussions of the relative flexibility of religious and ethnic identity in the colonial era. She discussed cases of men accused of being moriscos to argue that when an identity stuck with someone, the consequences could be significant. Moreover, attempts to avoid being labeled as a morisco spawned a micro-enterprise in the production of lineage accounts during this era. The papers of Dressing and Cook converged on the topics of identity politics and their connection to writings (plays or lineages) and performances (plays and trials) in colonial Peru.

The papers on modern Peruvian and Ecuadorian history all challenge larger narratives, be it of national identity, local politics or the nexus between those issues. Willie Hiatt, a doctoral candidate from the University of California at Davis, gave a paper entitled “A Top-Down View of Progress: Early Aviation Travel Accounts and Peruvian Modernity, 1927 – 1940.” Hiatt’s larger dissertation focuses on the promise aviation afforded to Peru’s discourse of modernity and national identity in the early 20th century. In this paper, he offered a close reading of aviation accounts, both their discourse of wonder and their silences, to argue that “Peruvians were imagining themselves through a filter just as mediated as early nineteenth century travel accounts.” Papers by Miguel La Serna and Kenneth Kincaid dealt with national identity in its relation to local, and particularly indigenous politics. Indeed, these two papers dealt with the very populations silenced from the aerial view of Hiatt’s accounts. La Serna, a doctoral candidate from the University of California at San Diego, emphasized the variety within local politics in Ayacucho before the insurgency. In his talk, “Local Power Relations in Ayacucho Before the Shining Path, 1940 – 1983,” La Serna compares supporters of Sendero in Chuschi, and opponents of the group Huaychao. La Serna argued that oral interviews and other
sources show highly complex political, cultural, and social relationships between indigenous communities and mestizo landowners in the region. His problematizing of these pre-Sendero relations helps to rethink assumptions about initial responses to Sendero in the region. The politics of resistance was at the heart of the talk by Dr. Kenneth Kincaid, Assistant Professor at Purdue University North Central, who spoke on “Defending the Huacas: Re-examining the 1959 Indigenous Uprising and Massacre at San Pablo Lake, Ecuador.” Kincaid argued that national and regional desires to showcase Ecuador in an international context led to the sidelining of local interests, in particular indigenous cultural traditions that used the space (mountain, lake, and coasts) in ways both physical and spiritual.

Dr. Susan Ramírez of Texas Christian University provided specific comments for the panelists, and the audience offered probing questions for individual panelists during a productive question and answer session. The audience also urged consideration of commonalities across the papers, for instance the implicit role of environmental issues in many of the papers. Though raised hands indicated additional questions at 7 pm, the Andeans Studies folks exited the Omni Director’s room in order to make way for the Mexican Studies Committee meeting.

Jane Mangan
Davidson College
Secretary, Andean Studies Committee

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Report of the Caribbean Studies Committee Meeting, "Caribbean Gender Relations Across Time and Place," January 4, 2008, Washington D.C.

The Caribbean Studies Committee sponsored a panel that sought to illuminate the role gender can play as a category of analysis in the historical investigation of the Caribbean. Happily, the committee was able to include three outstanding papers that represented the Spanish, French, and English Caribbean.

Outgoing chair Matt Childs (Florida State University) convened the evening panel in front of a small but enthusiastic and participatory audience.

Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss (Texas A & M University) began the session with her paper, "Pierre Clément Laussat and the tâche de sang mélé in the nineteenth-century French Atlantic." Professor Hartkopf Schloss’s work examined the role of French administrators on policy in the French Atlantic Empire. She argued, at least in this case, that Laussat’s stereotypes about women of color and white men informed and shaped his administration of Louisiana and Martinique, and that gendered analysis of these stereotypes can aid understanding of what is in essence a political question. How much authority did colonial officials have in the colonies? How did Laussat fit into the hierarchy of colonial authorities, especially in Martinique? Gendered analysis thus provides a window into that question. This paper was particularly evocative at it struck a chord with the audience present, most of who focus in their own work on the Spanish Caribbean and were quick to complement, compare, and contrast Professor Hartkopf Schloss' presentation with the larger body of literature focusing on the Spanish Caribbean.

Lara Putnam (University of Pittsburgh) then presented her paper, "Civic Maternalism, Paternal Obligation, and Fraternal Love in the British Caribbean, 1910-1940." In essence, Professor Putnam argued that the rise of anti-imperialism and the demand for political reform was crucially tied to an inter-regional migratory system in which the return of large numbers of workers from around the Caribbean basin to their homes in the British Caribbean revealed in stark relief the intransigence of colonial society to do much, if anything, about the plight they faced, notably economic troubles. No longer could the blacks of the British Caribbean count on remittances from family members abroad. These individuals thus looked for social changes to improve their situation. And they viewed the uplift of their race as the crucial ingredient to achieve that end. The uplift of their race, taking the form of Civic Materialism, Paternal Obligation, and Fraternal Love, would serve as a crucial step in the moves towards political voice and decolonization in later years. This well-researched paper was particularly remarkable in its use of gendered analysis. Professor Putnam employed a gendered approach to explain a big question—how did the experiences of blacks in the British Caribbean in the early part of the twentieth century influence decolonization in the latter part of that century. Work such as this is crucially important to dispel the notion that gender history is women's history by another name, a notion that unfortunately continues to exist in some quarters.

Melissa Madero (Binghamton University-SUNY) presented the final paper of the evening, "La Delincuencia Femenina: The Criminalization of the Female Body during the Trujillato (Dominican Republic, 1930-61)." Ms. Madero's paper raised interesting and vital questions that will deepen our understanding of the Trujillato. Essentially, she addressed the definition and reformation of female deviant behavior, notably prostitution, infanticide, and abortion in the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo regime. She noted that the Trujillato’s norms regarding womanhood were crucial to the formation and maintenance of the state. As did the others, this paper demonstrated the importance of gendered analysis in the formation of the Dominican citizenry, both in terms of biology and culture. The ideas this paper raised about prostitution especially were particularly interesting and led to significant discussion among the audience and a call to place this notion in a larger historical context.

Following the presentations, comments were offered by Caribbean Studies Secretary Sarah Franklin (University of Southern Mississippi), and the aforementioned enthusiastic audience.

In business matters, the Committee announced the election of Lara Putnam as Secretary of the Caribbean Studies Section for 2008, and the advance of Sarah Franklin to Chair. Professors Franklin and Putnam wish to thank Matt Childs for his service to the Section and look forward to the upcoming meeting in New York City.

Sarah Franklin
University of Southern Mississippi
Chair, Caribbean Studies Section

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Report on the CLAH Colonial Studies Committee Meeting, January 5, 2008, Washington DC

This year’s Colonial Studies Committee Meeting featured a panel titled “Disrupting Colonial Histories: The African Impact on Spanish America.” Outgoing Committee Chair Rachel Sarah O’Toole (University of California, Irvine) chaired the panel, which drew together three research presentations with discussion by a commentator and the audience.

Paul Lokken (Bryant University) presented a paper titled “Irrelevant Africans? Slaves and their Free Descendants in the History and Historiography of Mid-Colonial Guatemala.” In his presentation, Lokken discussed his findings on three aspects of the African experience in Guatemala during the seventeenth century. First, he described his research in notarial records, with revelations about African migration to what is now the republic of Guatemala during and just after the major era of the Portuguese asientos (1595-1640). In a sample of 252 slaves sold (almost all in Santiago), 115 were identified as African-born, and 99 of those as Angolan. A second aspect of the paper drew on marriage records. Based on 1,233 diligencias matrimoniales from the period 1655-1711 (and building on Christopher Lutz’s analysis), Lokken presented a series of tables illustrating comparisons between the capital city of Santiago and the rest of the province (including what is now El Salvador). By extending the findings beyond Santiago, the presentation demonstrated that the demographic impact of pre-1650 African migration was greater in many rural areas east and south of the capital than in the city itself. Finally, based on wills and petitions made to the bishop to establish cofradías, Lokken suggested that the cultural impact of the pre-1650 African immigration can be seen in part in the adoption of San Benito de Palermo as the patron of at least six Guatemalan cofradías between the 1640s and 1670s. The cult of San Benito de Palermo, Lokken noted, was beginning to expand among Africans and their descendants not only in Guatemala but also in many parts of the Atlantic World, as described by John Thornton and Linda Heywood.

Russell Lohse (University of Southern Indiana) presented his paper, “Looking for the Congo in Costa Rica: Identifying Cultural Continuities and Adaptations among Enslaved West Central Africans.” Drawing from archival research on Costa Rica and from recent historiography on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Africa, the paper revealed a number of cultural continuities experienced by African captives arriving in Costa Rica. To illustrate, Lohse used the example of Diego Angulo, a congo (West Central African) whose life comes to light in a remarkable series of archival finds. Lohse noted that Angulo (like other Kongolese slaves in America) probably already knew something of Christianity when he arrived as a captive child in 1700; thousands of Kongolese had been baptized by 1700 and many had learned the tenets of Catholicism. Angulo’s master owned three other congo men, who might have been able to speak with the young slave in a common language and who presumably played a role in his adjustment to slave life in Costa Rica. Angulo was eventually sent to manage a cacao hacienda in the Valley of Matina, where enslaved men (including at least two who had arrived with him on the same ship from West Central Africa) lived largely independent of white supervision. Even in the context of these African cultural continuities, though, Lohse noted that Angulo’s life illustrates acculturation and adaptation in Costa Rica. Angulo was married to a free mulata, and help from his sons (who were free) enabled him to amass enough cacao to buy his freedom; he would continue to grow cacao on his own account, gaining substantial property holdings before his death. He served in the pardo militia, and as an officer in a confraternity in Cartago’s free colored neighborhood. As if to crystallize both continuity and adaptation, one of Angulo’s sons would marry the free daughter of another African who had arrived enslaved on the same ship as Diego Angulo. Lohse concluded by observing that paradoxically, West Central Africans adapted successfully in Costa Rica in part because of their living memory of Africa. Forced to carve out new lives in the hostile New World, Africans used cultural “tools” they had brought from Africa, as well as new ones they found at hand in America.

Irene Vasquez (California State University, Dominguez Hills) presented a paper titled “From Ruins New Construction: Change and Continuity in the Historical Narratives of African Descent Peoples in the Colonial Mexico and the Early Mexican Republic.” The paper traced the development of historiography on people of African descent in Mexico in the colonial and early republican periods. In particular, Vasquez examined the ways that this literature has addressed two questions. First, what impact did the presence of people of African descent, a population artificially denoted by race, have on Mexican society and culture? Second, what impact did racial ideologies have on the status, experience, and social relations of people of African descent? The paper highlighted a number of recent studies that consider the roles of race, gender, and social rank in shaping social interactions, social hierarchies, and ideologies. Notably, Vasquez observed, the newer literature has also examined the degree to which individuals absorbed or mitigated race-based ideologies. As a result of recent historiography, scholars have come to greater understanding of the complex ways that racialized ideologies shaped individual pronouncements of identity. The paper also underscored the strides that scholars have made in clarifying the experiences of people of African descent--in terms of resistance, relations with other populations, and finally their influence on society and culture. At the same time, though, Vasquez pointed out, the very questions that have led to these clarifications may reflect the master narratives of colonial power. That is, a central question in the scholarship has asked whether and to what degree Africans succumbed to a European-ordered society. This question, Vasquez noted, mirrors the ways that indigenous peoples have been studied in Mexican colonial society, with persisting emphasis on assimilation.

Roquinaldo Ferreira (University of Virginia), a specialist on early West Africa and Brazil, served as a commentator on the panel. His discussion tied the three papers together and offered a number of insights toward a better understanding of the background of the captive people brought to Mexico, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. In effect, Ferreira argued for the need to integrate African and Latin American history to further understand the African Diaspora in the Americas. He noted that the panel’s three papers all dealt with the first half of the seventeenth century, when most of the Africans brought to the Americas were from Central Africa, Kongo, and Angola. Therefore, he suggested a number of ways in which African history -- particularly the history of Portuguese penetration into Angola – could be helpful for Latin Americanist historians as we seek to gain a better understanding of the backgrounds and identities of the Africans who arrived as captives in Latin America. After Ferreira gave his comments, there was further discussion and questions from the audience. In one question, an audience member wondered to what extent the papers’ focus on “nationally”-bounded histories was useful in studying the African experience in colonial Latin America. Among the panelists’ responses was the point that the archives that researchers use necessarily shape our work and our agendas; it was also suggested that we must deal to one extent or another with national and nationalist historiographies.

Catherine Komisaruk
University of Iowa
Colonial Studies Committee Secretary for 2007

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Report on the Mexican Studies Committee Meeting, January 4, 2008, Washington, DC

To standing-room-only attendance, roundtable participants William Beezley, José Cañizares Esguerra, Andres Rezendes, and Agith Sluis gathered for this year’s Mexican Studies Committee Meeting at the 2008 AHA. Also present were Eric Zolov, President; Christopher Boyer, Secretary; and Susie Porter, Secretary elect. Boyer introduced the topic thusly: histories – particularly regional ones – of the 1970s and 80s often paid close attention to geography and regions. Introductory chapters often went into extensive detail about the geographic coordinates, topography, and climates of the regions under investigation. It seemed to make a difference that the events and dynamics occurred in one particular space and not another. The linguistic turn and other historiographic developments have dampened such discussions of place. … perhaps we are seeing a renewed interest in a discussion of place. Recent scholarship has highlighted such topics as pyramids as sites of the tourist gaze; indigenous culture and landscape in Sonora, Mexico and Chiquitos, Bolivia; and, the borderlands as a site of social contention over water. Is place being written back into Mexican history, and if so, how might we proceed in developing histories that account for place?

William Beezley began the conversation arguing that, indeed, a sense of place had been lost, and he spoke in support of the return of the relevance of place. To this end he used the metaphor of terroir to argue in favor of history that invokes distinctiveness of place. Andres Resendez pondered the institutional limitations that have contributed to the demise of histories like those of Carl O. Sauer, who traveled for years through the Sierra Madre Occidental, reporting every detail. What research university or other institution would, these days, support such fieldwork? Not many. At the same time, Resendez pointed to the persistent importance of place in, for example, border studies, where the place is still important, though now in a less triumphalist guise. Eric Zolov acknowledged the narrative tradition, and pleasures, of history as a discipline.
Ageeth Sluis characterized history as a discipline less open than it might be to ideas from outside of the discipline. Sluis pointed out that postmodern theory has privileged place over space in a Cartesian return to space. She argued that as we return to a reconceptualization of space, we need to redefine what it is; this would require a similar sort of intellectual questioning as that which occurred to overcome dichotomous conceptions of sex and gender. Sluis offered Raymond Craib’s work as a productive example. Elliot Young highlighted how historians think about migrant communities not in one space, but as existing in connected spaces. He also argued that overwrought description has often served to legitimate scholarly study, as if descriptions of place allowed one to get at its essence; rather, historians need to critically analyze space. Victor Macías reminded us to think of interior spaces; Robert Alegre of urban spaces and the power of class relations and spaces of work. Several people, with different examples, noted the importance of historical context and the categories of understanding of those same historical actors. One might chart change over time in how people construed space, or how they have analyzed it.

Susie Porter
University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Secretary-elect Mexican Studies Committee

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Teaching and Teaching Materials Committee Report: “Teaching Indigenous Histories”: A Roundtable, Washington, D.C., January 5, 2008

The Teaching and Teaching Materials Committee sponsored a roundtable discussion at the CLAH meeting in Washington, D.C. in order to discuss the various ways that we are bringing indigenous histories into our classrooms.

Erin O’Connor, incoming Chair of the Teaching Committee, opened the roundtable by identifying the questions around which the roundtable was developed. Scholarship on indigenous histories has grown tremendously in recent decades, and historians now have a much more nuanced understanding of the topic than they once did. How do we bring these discoveries into our courses and classrooms? What approaches and tools seem to work best? What challenges have we faced in trying to help our students develop a deeper and more refined understanding of indigenous histories?

Joanna Crow of the University of Bristol spoke first, discussing a ten-week course on indigenous history focused mainly on the twentieth century and indigenous involvement in national politics. Her talk opened up issues of great importance for teaching indigenous history, given the increasing, and increasingly varied, indigenous engagements in politics in Latin America since the middle of the twentieth century. To get students to think critically about indigenous politics, she emphasizes the multiplicity of historical narratives—in particular, she notes that there are a diversity of “indigenous” positions in national conflicts. She also engages students the problem of finding and analyzing “authentic” indigenous sources. She is careful to try to help students overcome the idea that indigenous peoples are victims, instead offering them ways to see indigenous peoples as agents in history. Two of the main challenges she has encountered include having students take anything scholars say as absolute “fact,” and the paucity of sources by (rather than about) indigenous peoples.

René Harder Horst of Appalachian State University took center stage next, and offered an inspiring collection of ideas about how to teach a course on Modern Indigenous Resistance Movements—a course that he has taught several different ways over the years. He opens by using a combination of geography and theory to get students to begin to think about the diversity of indigenous identities and help them avoid the pitfall of essentialism. The strategies he described ran an impressive gamut, from having students dress up as different actors in the conquest period and role-play events that took place, to getting students to watch and critique how films depict indigenous peoples and resistance movements.

Brooke Larson of the State University of New York at Stony Brook identified several different approaches that one might take in order to make indigenous histories come alive for students, especially given that so many college students in the United States lack the context into which they can place what they learn about indigenous peoples of Latin America. She discussed that one could focus on comparative perspectives to introduce how different regional factors shaped indigenous experiences and resistance. She also suggested that it could be useful to focus on “big issues” rather than try to “cover time” in order to give students a sense of real lived histories rather than seeing indigenous peoples simply as oppressed and dehumanized victims. Finally, she emphasized the importance of uncovering as many indigenous voices in history as we can for our students. The question or problem she posed was: how does one find a way to package all of these important approaches and lessons into a single semester?

Brian Owensby of the University of Virginia titled his talk “Do Indians Have Ideas?” He opened by observing that students carry several stereotypes or preconceptions about indigenous peoples with them into the classroom. There is, for example, the idea of the “Indian savage” or the “Indian victim.” More recently, they have thought of Indians as stubborn survivalists who appropriate imposed values. Owensby noted that this last preconception traps indigenous peoples as prisoners of ritual and culture—as opposed to how students think of themselves as free. In this context, “indigenous agency” is only the ability to resist or to resign to their fate. How, then, can one teach the colonial survey without Indians coming off as victims whose lives remain forever elusive? One way to do this is to call our own “freedom” into question, instead emphasizing for our students that all human beings are constrained in some ways. Another strategy is to introduce ways that indigenous peoples had and have ideas of their own—about religion, law, and politics.
Florence Mae Waldron of Lebanon Valley College wrapped up the roundtable presentations with her informative and thought-provoking discussion of how one can use testimonios, oral histories, and other stories to teach indigenous histories. She noted that, first and foremost, first-hand accounts make history come alive for students, providing the “hook” to keep them interested in the topic. Further, these stories challenge students’ preconceptions and help to teach them to analyze history from multiple perspectives. Personal stories also make the past relevant and recognizable to students, introducing indigenous peoples as individuals who made/make choices. She closed by noting that there are potential pitfalls to watch out for: stories like these must be used in conjunction with other sources, and one must keep students grounded in the larger historical context of the individual stories they explore.

These presentations led into a lively, fruitful, and thoroughly enjoyable discussion between the panelists and the attendees. We began by identifying a few main themes raised in the presentations. One was the challenge and necessity of presenting the humanity of indigenous peoples, breaking down barriers between modern and primitive, us and them, free versus imprisoned, dynamic versus ahistorical. In order to do this, we discussed how crucial it is to find ways to establish the diversity of indigenous experiences and indigenous agency—without losing sight of the fact that indigenous peoples were and are deeply exploited. We also discussed the challenges of presenting a “messy” rather than “neat” historical narrative, particularly when so many students lack context for indigenous histories. Another common theme was the scarcity of sources and accessible scholarship to bring the importance and complexity of indigenous histories to our students in meaningful—and manageable—ways. Examination of these various themes led us into a discussion of how we might share more teaching ideas, strategies, syllabi, and sources with each other. Erin O’Connor said she would work to develop more materials for the TC website this year, and Marc Becker graciously agreed to handle the technical end of this project. Those present concluded that indigenous histories would be an excellent theme on which to begin to develop the website into a great resource for teaching Latin American history. Members adjourned—just in time for the CLAH cocktail party—having learned a lot from each other and generated many useful ideas to integrate scholarship and teaching on the theme of indigenous history.

Erin O’Connor
Bridgewater State College of Massachusetts
Chair of the Teaching and Teaching Materials Committee

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VI. CLAH 2007 PRIZES AND AWARDS

Bolton-Johnson Prize

The winner of the Bolton-Johnson Prize for the best book in English on any significant aspect of Latin American history is Steve J. Stern for Battling for Hearts and Minds in Pinochet’s Chile (Duke University Press, 2006).

Lydia Cabrera Award for Cuban Historical Studies

The Lydia Cabrera Prize for the best project proposal for the study of Cuba between 1492 and 1868 was awarded to Amanda Warnock and Alejandro de la Fuente. Amanda Warnock’s project is entitled “Partner and Rivals: New England, Cuba and the Atlantic World.” Alejandro de la Fuente’s project is entitled “Slaves and the Law in Colonial Cuba.”

Conference on Latin American History Prize

Awarded annually for a distinguished article on any significant aspect of Latin American history appearing in journals edited or published in the United States, other than in HAHR or The Americas. The winners for 2007 are Lyman Johnson and Zephyr Frank for “Cities and Wealth in the South Atlantic: Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro before 1860, appearing in Comparative Studies in Society and History Volume 48, Number 3, July 2006: 634-668.

Honorable Mention went to Barbara Weinstein for “Inventing the ‘Mulher Paulista’: Politics, Rebellion and the Gendering of Brazilian Regional Identities, appearing in The Journal of Women’s History, Volume 18, Number 1, 2006: 22-49.

Lewis Hanke Prize

Given annually to a recent Ph.D. recipient in order to conduct field research that will allow transformation of the dissertation into a book, the Lewis Hanke Prize was awarded to Ian Read for his project entitled “Unequally Bound: The Conditions of Slave Life and treatment in Santos County, Brazil, 1822-1888.”

James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize

For the best article in the Hispanic American Historical Review, The James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize was awarded to Matthew O’Hara for “Stone, Mortar and Memory: Church Construction and Communities in Late Colonial Mexico City,” in the Hispanic American Historical Review (84)6, 2006: 647-680.

Tibesar Prize

The Tibesar Prize, for the most distinguished article published by The Americas went to Leo Garafolo for “Conjuring with Coca and the Inca: the Andeanization of Lima’s Afro-Peruvian Ritual Specialists, 1580-1690,” in The Americas 63:1, (July 2006): 53-80.

Honorable Mention went to Willie Hiatt for “Flying ‘Cholo’: Incas, Airplanes, and the Construction of Andean Modernity in 1920s Cuzco, Peru Guadalupe: the Cloth, the Artist, and Sources in Sixteenth-Century New Spain,” in The Americas 63:3, (January 2007): 327-358.

Warren Dean Memorial Prize

Awarded for the best work on the history of Brazil published in 2005 and 2006, presented to Jeffrey Needell for The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831-1871 (Stanford University Press, 2006).

Honorable Mention went to Hal Langfur for Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750-1830 (Stanford University Press, 2006).

Howard Cline Prize

For the best work on Indians in Latin American history in 2005 and 2006, the prize went to Cecilia Méndez for The Plebeian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State, 1820-1850 (Duke University Press, 2005).

James R. Scobie Memorial Award for Preliminary Dissertation Research

The purpose of the James R. Scobie Memorial Award is to permit a short, exploratory research trip abroad to determine the feasibility of a Ph.D. dissertation topic dealing with some facet of Latin American History. Brigitte Cairus of York University was awarded the prize for “Outside Racial Democracy: Identity and Conversion among Roms in Brazil.” Sarah Jaffe of Tulane University at received the prize for “Identifying Missionaries of Nationalism in Revolutionary Mexico (1920-1940).” Brad Lange of Emory University received the prize for “La República de la Boca: Ethnicity, Politics, and Culture in a Buenos Aires Barrio, 1850-1930.” Andrea Vicente of Michigan State University received the prize for “Singleness and the State: The Daily Lives of Widowed and Single Women in 19th century Guadalajara, Mexico.”

Elinor Melville Prize for Environmental History

The Elinor Melville Prize, which carries a stipend of $500, is awarded for the best book in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese on Latin American Environmental History that is published anywhere during the imprint year previous to the year of the award. This year’s recipient was Myrna Santiago for The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor and the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1938 (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Distinguished Service Award

The Conference on Latin American History Award for Distinguished Service to the profession is conferred upon a person whose career in scholarship, teaching, publishing, librarianship, institutional development or other fields demonstrates significant contributions to the advancement of the study of Latin American history in the United States. This year’s Distinguished Service Award was given to William Taylor.

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VII. CLAH 2008 PRIZES AND AWARDS

PRIZES FOR WHICH NOMINATIONS ARE REQUIRED:

DISTINGUISHED SERVICE AWARD
The Conference on Latin American History Award for Distinguished Service to the profession is conferred upon a person whose career in scholarship, teaching, publishing, librarianship, institutional development or other fields demonstrates significant contributions to the advancement of the study of Latin American history in the United States.
Distinguished Service Award Committee for 2008:
Chair: Ida Altman, (University of Florida), 1301 NW 17th Street, Gainesville, FL 62605. Maurício Tenorio, University of Chicago, Department of History, 5801 South Ellis, Chicago, IL 69637. Margaret Chowning, (University of California, Berkeley), 6447 Hillegass Ave, Oakland, CA 94618
Deadline for receipt of nominations: June 1, 2008

BOLTON-JOHNSON PRIZE
The Bolton-Johnson Prize, which carries a stipend of $1,000, is awarded for the best book in English on any significant aspect of Latin American History that is published anywhere during the imprint year previous to the year of the award.
Bolton-Johnson Prize Committee for 2008:
Chair, Peter Guardino, Department of History, Indiana University, Ballantine 742, 1020 E. Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405.
Elizabeth Kuznesof, (University of Kansas), 721 Ohio Street, Lawrence, KS 66044.
Florencia Mallon, Department of History, University of Wisconsin, 455 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706-1483.
Deadline for receipt of nominations: June 1, 2008.

ELINOR MELVILLE PRIZE FOR LATIN AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
The Melville prize, which carries a stipend of $500, is awarded for the best book in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese on Latin American Environmental History that is published anywhere during the imprint year previous to the year of the award.
Melville Prize Committee Members for 2008:
Chair: Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Department of History, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada; Stuart McCook, Department of History, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada; Susan Deeds, Northern Arizona University, Department of History, Box 6023, Flagstaff, AZ 86011.
Deadline for receipt of nominations: June 1, 2008.

CONFERENCE ON LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY PRIZE
(These revised prize guidelines were approved by the General Committee in January, 2008)
This prize was established in 1961. It carries a stipend of $500.
The Conference on Latin American History Prize is awarded annually for a distinguished article on any significant aspect of Latin American history by a member of the CLAH, not appearing in the Hispanic American Historical Review or The Americas. The committee will consider nominated and self-nominated articles in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. To be eligible for the prize, authors must be members of the CLAH during the year the article is published and the year that it is considered for the award.
The committee will review only those articles published in the year preceding the award. Thus articles published in 2007 will be considered for the 2008 award to be presented at the conference in January 2009. For an article to be considered, each of the three committee members must receive a copy by mail by June 1, 2008. The Secretariat should be informed of the committee's decision no later than October 15, 2008.
Conference Prize Committee for 2008:
Chair: B.J. Barickman, Department of History, Social Sciences Bldg. 215, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. Andrew Kirkendall (Texas A&M University), 4013 Meadowood Drive, Bryan, TX 77802. Maria-Elena Martinez, Department of History, SOS 153, University of Southern California 3520 Trousdale Pkwy., Los Angeles, CA 90089-0034.

PRIZES AND AWARDS FOR WHICH APPLICATIONS ARE REQUIRED:
JAMES R. SCOBIE MEMORIAL AWARD FOR PRELIMINARY PH.D. RESEARCH
The purpose of the award is to permit a short, exploratory research trip abroad (normally four to twelve weeks) to determine the feasibility of a Ph. D. dissertation topic dealing with some facet of Latin American history. The funds are to be used only for international travel expenses and may not exceed $1,500.
Scobie Award Committee for 2008:
Chair: Jamie Sanders, Department of History, Utah State University, 0710 Old Main Hill, Logan, UT 84322-0710.
Karin Rosemblatt, (Syracuse University), 12 Niles Street, Brighton, MA 02135. Karen Graubart, University of Notre Dame, History Department, O’Shaughnessy Hall, Notre Dame, IN, 46556.
Deadline to apply: April 3, 2008

LYDIA CABRERA AWARDS FOR CUBAN HISTORICAL STUDIES
Lydia Cabrera Awards are available to support the study of Cuba between 1492 and 1868. Awards are designed specifically to support: 1) original research on Cuban history in Spanish, Mexican, and U. S. archives; 2) the publication of meritorious books on Cuba currently out of print; and 3) the publication of historical statistics, historical documents, and guides to Spanish archives relating to Cuban history between 1492 and 1868.
Cabrera Prize Committee for 2008:
Chair: Robin Derby, Department of History, UCLA, 6265 Bunche Hall, Box 951473, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473. David Sartorius, University of Maryland, Department of History, 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, College Park, MD, 20742. Sherry Johnson, Florida International University, History Dept/DM397, University Park, Miami, FL 33199
Deadline to apply: June 1, 2008

LEWIS HANKE PRIZE
The Lewis Hanke Award, which carries a stipend of up to $1,000, is given annually to a recent Ph.D. recipient in order to conduct field research that will allow transformation of the dissertation into a book.
Hanke Prize Committee for 2008:
Chair: Charles Walker, Department of History, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616. Alida Metcalf, Trinity University, One Trinity Place, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200. Christine Ehrick, Department of History, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292
Deadline to apply: June 1, 2008

PRIZES FOR WHICH NO NOMINATIONS ARE NECESSARY:
JAMES ALEXANDER ROBERTSON MEMORIAL PRIZE
The James Alexander Robertson Prize is awarded annually for an article appearing (during the year preceding the award) in one of the four consecutive issues of the Hispanic American Historical Review, and carries a stipend of $500.
Robertson Prize Committee for 2008:
Chair: Vincent Peloso, Howard University; Matthew Restall, Penn State University; Brodwyn Fischer, Northwestern University.
TIBESAR PRIZE
The Tibesar Prize is awarded annually for an article appearing during the preceding volume year (July-April) which ends in the year before the award is announced) in The Americas, and carries a stipend of $500.
Tibesar Prize Committee for 2008:
Chair, Jeremy Baskes, Ohio Wesleyan University; Lillian Guerra, Yale University; Tiffany Thomas-Woodard, University of New Mexico.

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VIII. NEWS FROM MEMBERS

Adorno, Rolena
Yale University
Publications:
De Guancane a Macondo: Estudios de literatura hispanoamericana. Seville, Spain: Renacimiento, 2007.

The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007

Honors:
Awarded an honorary professorship (“profesora honoraria”) by La Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Peru, on October 26, 2007.

Becker, Marjorie
University of Southern California
Publications:
Body Bach. Tebot Bach. 2005

“As Though They Meant Her No Harm, María Enríquez Remade the Friends Who Abandoned Her-- Their Intentions, Their Possibilities, Their Worlds-- Inviting Them, (Perhaps, It is True,) To Dance.” Rethinking History. March, 2008.

Grants, Fellowships, Honors, Awards:
Body Bach was nominated for the National Book Award in poetry.

Research:
Continuing research fusing together dance politics, ongoing, as revealed in my collection of articles in History and Theory and Rethinking History

Other Professional Activities:
Chaired to TIBESAR Prize Committee 2006, wrote statement, read it at CLAH Luncheon.

Ching, Erik
Furman University
Publications:
Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton and the Politics of the Historical Memory. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Coauthored with Héctor Líndo and Rafael Lava.

Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Co-authored with Christina Buckley and Angélica Lozano-Alonso.

Graubart, Karen
University of Notre Dame
Publications:
With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society, Peru 1550-1700. Stanford, 2007
Promotions, Appointments, Transfers, and Visiting Professorships:
Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame

Kirkland, Robert
Claremont McKenna College
Appointments, Promotions, Changes in Employment:
Elected President of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies

Klaren, Peter
George Washington University
Publications:
"Time of Fear (1980-2000), Modern Violence and the long Sweep of Peruvian History," in Historizar El Pasado Vivo en America Latina/Historicizing the Living Past in Latin America. Edited by Anne Perotin-Dumon. (Bilingual e-publication, 2007). http://etica.uahurtado.cl/historizarelpasadovivo. Sponsored by the Ford Foundation

Promotions, Appointments, Transfers, and Visiting Professorships:
Visiting Professor of History, University of California, Irvine, 2007-08

Institutional:
The new director of the Latin American and Hemispheric Studies Program, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University is Professor Cynthia McClintock, Political Science, 2007-2010.

Lavrin, Asunción
Arizona State University
Publications:
“La construcción de la niñez en la vida religiosa. El caso Novohispano.” In Pablo Rodríguez and María Emma Manarelli, coords. História de la infancia en América Latina Bogotá: Universidad Externado de Colombia. 2007, 121-144.

“Female Visionaries and Spirituality.” In Religion in New Spain, edited by Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007: 160-178.

Other Professional Activities:
Keynote Speech: South Central Renaissance Conference at Our Lady of the Lake University, San Antonio, Texas, March 2007: “Masculine and Feminine: The Construction of Gender Roles in the Regular Orders in Early Modern Mexico.”

Keynote Speech, Western Association of Women’s Historians, University of San Diego, California, May 3-6. “Femininity and Masculinity Through the Prism of Religion: Mexico, 1550-1800. Franklin Pease Prize Committee 2007. Sponsored by the Colonial Latin American Review.

“Masculinity and Femininity as Religious Constructions in Colonial Mexico.” Paper given at the Thirteenth Annual ACMRS Conference. Tempe, Arizona, February 15-17, 2007.

Pike, Ruth
Hunter College, Cuny Emerita
Publications:
“Black Rebels: The Cimarrons of Sixteenth-Century Panama.” The Americas 64:2 October, 2007, 243-266

Richmond, Douglas W.
University of Texas at Arlington
Professional Activities:
Presented “The Socioeconomic Dimensions of Yucatecan Political Conflict, 1855-1876” at the 26th annual meeting of the Gulf South History and Humanities Conference in Mobile on October 12, 2007

Saeger, James
Lehigh University
Publications:
Francisco Solano López and the Ruination of Paraguay: Honor and Egocentrism. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers

Wasserman, Mark
Rutgers University
Publications:
Latin American and Its People. Longman; 2nd edition. Co-authored with Cheryl E. Martin

Webre, Stephen
Louisiana Tech University
Publications:
“Defense, Economy and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Nicaragua: Don Fernando Francisco de Escobedo and the Fortification of the San Juan River, 1672-1673.”
Jahrbuch für Geschichte Latienamerikas, XLIV (2007), 93-110.

Research:
“Conclusion: Change and Continuity in Bourbon Central America.” In: Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759-1821, ed. By Jordana Dym and Christophe Belaubre, pp. 265-273, Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007.

Other Professional Activities:

“Spanish Failure on the Guatemala Frontier: Don Martín Alfonso de la Tovilla and the Relación de Verapaz y Manché, 1631-1635,” Latin American Studies Association, Montreal, Sept. 5-8, 2007.

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IX. IN APPRECIATION:
CLAH ENDOWMENT AND FUND CONTRIBUTORS

CLAH PRIZES AND AWARDS
Edith Couterier
Ralph Della Cava
Iñigo García-Bryce
Erick Langer
Jeffrey Lesser
Derek Lipman
James Saeger
John Schwaller
John Watson Foster Dulles
Justin Wolfe

WARREN DEAN AWARDS
Ralph Della Cava
Todd Diacon
Jeff Mosher
Robert Wilcox
Justin Wolfe
Deborah Truhan

LEWIS B. HANKE AWARDS
Ralph Della Cava
Margaret Crahan

LYDIA CABRERA AWARD
Sarah Franklin

HOWARD F. CLINE PRIZE
Sarah Cline

NEW LIFETIME MEMBERS
Bianca Premo

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ABOUT THE CLAH NEWSLETTER

The Newsletter (ISSN 0069-8466) of the Conference on Latin American History is published semi-annually (Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter) in the offices of the Secretariat, located at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Deadlines for submission of material for the Newsletter are March and September. Receipt of the newsletter is contingent upon membership in CLAH. For more information regarding dues and other activities of the Conference, please write to:

CLAH Secretariat
Department of History and Program in Latin American Studies
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
9201 University City Blvd.
Charlotte, NC 28223

Tel: (704) 687-2027
Fax: (704) 687-3218
Email: clah@uncc.edu
Web: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~clah/index.php

CONFERENCE ON LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY PUBLICATIONS

LOMBARDI, CATHERYN L., and John V. Lombardi, with K. Lynn Stoner. Latin American History: A Teaching Atlas. 162 pages, 136 maps. 1984. ISBN 0-299-097145 (paperback only), $17.95.

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