Sara P. Stratton (York University, Toronto) presented "The Best Intentions:

The Alliance for Progress as 'Constructive Diplomacy.'" Ms. Stratton found

something profoundly new in the struggle by serious reformers such as Chester

Bowles to infuse the new policy with human rights and strategies to

structurally redistribute wealth. The Alliance was more than a response to

the Cuban Revolution, although it continued to function in a Cold War

context.

Steven Schwartzberg (University of Nevada) presented "A Subversive

Ambassador: John Bartlow Martin and the Dominican Republic." He discussed how

Martin, an unbalanced and inept Kennedy friend, unwittingly contributed to

the overthrow of the elected Bosch administration, partly through his close

association with the top military leaders. Martin emerges as a contradictory

emotional man with poor judgment.

Dee Anna Manning (Washington University) presented "Pandora's Key: The

Alliance for Progress in Chile." She argued that the Chilean elite blamed the

US for land reform during the Frei administration and this led to their

subsequent support for nationalization of US coppers companies under Allende.

Each of the papers showed considerable primary research and presented

original theses.

William Walker (Ohio Wesleyan University) was the first commentator. He

questioned the emphasis on J. B. Martin's personality and his personal

influence and raised important historiographic questions about all the papers

which he nevertheless appreciated.

Timothy Harding was the second commentator. By emphasizing the Cold War

context within which even the "left" Kennedy Alliance advisors argued, and

the strong military emphasis of the Alliance, he questioned the importance of

the reform intent of the Alliance. He doubted that the US was interested in

significant land reform in Chile by the time Frei was elected in Chile. He

added the CIA and the Pentagon to the US influences leading to Bosch's

overthrow, and compared the Alliance in the Dominican Republic to similar

policies in other Latin American countries, thus minimizing the personal

influence of this bizarre Ambassador.

The panel consisted of three excellent papers, all of which fitted the announced theme very well. The first by Barbara Weinstein (SUNY, Stony Brook) was entitled "The Politics of Social Peace: São Paulo Industrialists and Populism in Brazil, 1943-1964." In a sophisticated and detailed study, Weinstein demonstrated that São Paulo industrialists’ views on populism shifted over time but that their reference point, their golden age, was the late 1930s and early 1940s when an authoritarian regime created what to them appeared to be social harmony. The industrialists were willing to appease the forces of labor with social programs but were unwilling to surrender any power over the shop floor. This pushed the labor sector increasingly into the political arena and therefore, and ironically, undermined the regime that the industrialists favored. Weinstein placed the study in a wider discussion of politics and populism in Brazil.

The second presentation, delivered by James P. Brennan (University of California, Riverside), was "Industrialists and ‘Bolicheros: Business and the Peronist Populist Alliance, 1946-1973." Brennan, in a skill study, examined the role of entrepreneurs in the Peronist coalition with an emphasis on small businessmen and their organization, the Confederación General Económica (CGE). Brennan shows how the CGE evolved to the point where it was a crucial part of the governing Peronist coalition in 1973 and 1974 and its long time leader José Gelbard was Economic Minister. Brennan stresses that the CGE was not just composed of industrialists but other groups of business leaders as well.

Alex Saragoza (University of California, Berkeley) presented an insightful final paper, "Business and the Politics of Essentialism: Populism and the Cultural Product of the Cardenista Regime, 1934-1940." Saragoza took a different approach than the other two papers, as he examined a particular industry. He looked at how radio station owners responded to the state’s attempt under Lázaro Cárdenas to obtain much tighter control over broadcasting. He showed how the radio station owners organized and then how they used Cárdenas’s political problems during the last years of his presidency to avoid most of the things that they did not want. Saragoza points out that one outcome were the consolidation of the position of the Azcarraga family in the media industry.

The comment by Joel Horowitz (Saint Bonaventure University) stressed that traditional discussions of populism tended to reify entrepreneurs and reduce them to one dimensional interest groups rather than complex groups of individuals who behaved in many ways. He pointed out the irony that many such accounts were done by scholars who deplored the simplification of the workers by an earlier generation of scholars. He indicated that these papers showed a much more complex picture and showed the direction in which scholarship needs to go.

The comments were followed by a series of interesting questions from the audience.

Jeffrey M. Pilcher of the Citadel presented "The Pure Food Debate

and the Mexican Meat Industry, 1890-1920" in the context of contending

discourses between porfirian modernization, economic development and

public health. Foreign investment brought a Mexican version of the

Chicago meatpacking jungle described by Upton Sinclair and a public

debate that reflected the tension between traditional practices and

centers of power on one side and the rising concerns regarding public

health and new responsibilities on the other. Cristina Rivera Garza

of San Diego State University discussed "Mental Disorder, Social Order:

The Insane and their Psychiatrists Debate Gender and Class at the General

Asylum, Mexico, 1910-1930". The state, through the medical practitioners,

attempted to gain control over thoughts, defined the boundaries of acceptable

gender and class behavior, and clashed with the patients who challenged the

modernization project with divergent interpretations of religion, medicine,

and politics. Glen David Kuecker of De Pauw University extended the

political analysis of public health debates in "The Quarantine Debate of

1898: Yellow Fever, Sanitation, and the Discourse of Modernity in Porfirian

Mexico." A dichotomy developed between the central government and the

states in which the Mexican National Health Board responded to a yellow

fever epidemic in Tampico by overturning a quarantine and imposing a

vigorous sanitation policy.

The audience, consisting of 14 faculty members from three continents,

then began one of the most vigorous and engaging discussions with the

presenters that I have ever witnessed. The exploration of the ideas

continued for an hour beyond the time allotted for the session.

John Mason Hart

Chair

Participants in the panel had the novel experience of watching the sunrise in the midst of their session. In spite of the hour, the meeting was well attended. Three strong papers examined the extent to which nineteenth-century Independence movements were a watershed in Latin American history. Jeffrey Shumway of the University of Arizona delivered the first paper,"The Revolutionary Family: Continuity and Change in Buenos Aires, 1810-1830." Seeking to examine the degree to which the independence

wars weakened traditional patriarchal authority, he analyzed disenso

cases and newspapers for indications of a new post-revolutionary

mentality. Shumway found that although there were still important links

to the past, one of the results of independence was a change in the

nature of patriarchal society and the concomitant creation of more

social freedom for women and children.

The next paper by Marie Francois' (University of Arizona) was entitled

"The View from the Neighborhood Pawnshop: What's Old, What's New and

What People Are Up To, Mexico City 1800-1850". Drawing on a wealth of

documentation, she looked at the function of both the official monte de

piedad and the more informal neighborhood pawning network before and

after Independence. Francois pointed out the each pawn circuit served a

different clientele, with the only more prosperous availing themselves of

the government-sponsored montepio. Although legislation effecting

pawnshops would eventually change, the clientele, objects pawned, and

economic role of the pawnshop in the lives of the middling poor remain

constant from colony to independent nation.

Although Oswaldo Barreneche (University of Arizona) was stranded in

Buenos Aires, his paper on "Institutional Paths of State Formation:

Changes and Continuities in Argentine Penal Practices (Buenos Aires,

1810-1830" was read by Jeff Shumway. Within the larger context of the

1810 Independence, Barreneche examined the degree to which two legal

issues, the system of jail inspections and the question of military

jurisdiction, were affected by the end of Spanish rule. In spite of the

fact that the postcolonial judiciary tried to limit the power of

administrative officials to visit jails, the older practice continued.

The same was true in matters of civilian control of the military, as

military commanders’’ successfully ignored civilian judges' demands that

military and militia personnel accused of crime be turned over to them,

in effect maintaining the colonial fuero militar.

Susan Socolow (Emory University) commented on the three paper, drawing

up a hypothetical score card for each contribution to the change versus

continuity debate. She pointed out that Barreneche and Francois seem to

fall on the continuity side of the continuum, while Shumway argues for

a greater change in personal conduct resulting from independence.

Several questions on the specific papers and a lively discussion

followed.

Susan Migden Socolow

Emory University

James Hijiya, Maureen Murphy Nutting and Hendrik Kraay offered a lively

discussion on teaching the history of the Americas in a session

sponsored by the AHA Teaching Division and chaired by Leslie Offut. The

three panelists offered a variety of perspectives on the problems and

satisfactions of teaching the sometimes unwieldy subject of the Americas

before an overflow audience jammed in a small-ish conference room.

Hijiya, of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, focused on maps

as a method of dealing with U.S. history with his presentation, "The

Shape of U.S. history: A Presentation Illustrated with Maps". His focus

was the "nationalist" interpretation of U.S. history, which he

maintained largely ignores the rest of the world, narrowing the

boundaries of the subject matter through exclusion. By broadening the

narrative to include the Spanish, French, British, and Amerindian

contributions to the development of North America, both the map and the

story becomes more inclusive. Professor Hijiya's suggestions for

improvement include seeking textbooks for survey courses that consider

all of the peoples of the Americas, and their contributions to its

political, cultural and economic development over the centuries.

Maureen Nutting detailed some of the frustrations that community college

teachers encounter with the presentation, "Teaching American History to

Community College Students Today". She pointed out that the numbers of

students in the nation's community college systems are increasing

rapidly and that this trend shows no sign of abating. Additionally, they

are often the most unprepared for college-level work many need

redemption in such areas as basic writing skills. There are, however,

strategies that one can use to both increase basic skill levels and

impart serious history content. Nutting detailed the use and success of

small-group discussions, short writing assignments, computer labs (as a

source of writing instruction),and primary source document discussions.

All of these, used in combination with stand-alone lectures on important

topics, can bring the unprepared and recalcitrant student more fully

into the content of the class. All of which requires (needless to say)

incredible energy and remarkable organization. Still, with community

colleges continuing to be the fastest growing segment of higher

education in the United States, those of us who teach in these systems

must find ways to follow what Professor Nutting is doing at North

Seattle Community College.

Hendrik Kraay, of the University of Calgary, offered the final

presentation, "The History of the Colonial Americas". Professor Kraay

was a concerned as James Hijiya about limiting the story of the

colonial Americas to simply a history of developing nation-states, thus

reducing the region's rich colonial past to a mere prologue for the

narrative of modern national history. Kraay surveyed some of the more

recent attempts at building an inclusive and internally coherent

analysis of the colonial era in the Americas, discussing the work of

Philip Curtin, John Thornton, James Lockhart, and Patrick Manning, among

others. He also considered the important issues of environmental

changes wrought by European entrance to the New World, as well as

Indian-European relations over time, in terms of both labor and

resistance to subjugation. He concluded by noting the lack of

comprehensive textbooks about the Americas (where is this generation's

Herbert Bolton or John Francis Bannon?) as well as the problem that all

who teach the Americas face in telling our students the story without

falling back on the time-worn (yet organizationally appealing) crutch of

nation-state development.

The session concluded with several detailed and interesting queries from

the audience, many of who obviously faced the classroom difficulties

broached by the panelists. Only the limitation imposed by the clock

curtailed the lively discussion that followed.

Craig Hendricks

Long Beach City College

Joel Horowitz, Saint Bonaventure University

An audience of twenty-two listened as Professors Judy Bieber (University of New Mexico), Roger Kittleson (Northwestern University), and Hendrik Kray (University of Calgary) discussed political parties and regional identities in nineteenth-century Brazil.

In "Partisan Loyalty and Masculine Honor: The Construction of Political Identity in the Partisan Press of Latin Imperial Minas Gerais," Professor Bieber argued that "…party identity became intensely meaningful to members of the rural elite as it became grafted onto traditional notions of individual and corporate honor." Bieber examined the regional press for examples of debates over party identity, and how party identity became increasingly associated with personal honor and identity. Her presentation included the forceful revisionist points that historians have unfairly downplayed the role and importance of party identity in the nineteenth-century, and that this failure to recognize the importance of party identity results from an excessive reliance on national level studies of parties and politics.

Professor Kittleson spoke on "A New Regime of Ideas in Porto Alegre, Or, What Was at Stake in the Federalista Revolt of 1893-1895." He began with the assertion that historians have unfairly ignored the role of ideology in the rise of Positivists in Rio Grande do Sul, and in the Federalista Rebellion. The transfer of power from Liberals to Positists represented a hegemonic shift from seigniorial Liberalism to Positivist ideology and political culture, but according to Kittleson, this shift can be recognized only when analyzed in the context of shifting relations and projects between the ruling elite and "the povo." Finally, when examining elite hegemonic projects we see that "the povo" constructed their own counter-hegemonic response and discourse.

In "Between Brazil and Bahia" Celebrating Dois de Julho in Nineteenth-Century Salvador," Professor Kray adroitly identified the tension produced by the Dois de Julho holiday: the fact that it celebrated popular mobilization during Independence, while national holidays emphasized the actions of the royal family and the centrality of the monarchy. Furthermore, the celebration of the holiday in Salvador highlighted a regional identity not in keeping with the monarchy’s national vision and emphasis. Based on impressive research, Kray then explained that the Dois de Julho always involved extensive popular celebrations that at times challenged social hierarchies in Salvador.

The discussant was Professor John Charles Chasteen of the University of North Carolina. He congratulated the presenters of the quality of their papers, and for producing a collective work that followed closely the theme of the panel. He observed the benefits to be drawn from studies of political culture, but noted that the term "political culture" gains meaning only when we examine its component parts such as party ritual, the press, holidays, and the like. Questions from the audience followed the formal presentations.

Todd A. Diacon

University of Tennessee

The session on "Diasporic Dislocations: Jewish Migrants in Latin America," met on Friday morning, January 9, with some 20 persons in attendance. Organized by Judith Laikin Elkin, an associate of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, the panel offered a variety of perspectives on the subject. Leo Spitzer, professor of history at Dartmouth College, spoke on "Refugeehood, Memory, and the Anguish of Transmission: The Bolivia Experience." Himself a product of the worldwide migration he described, Prof. Spitzer is well known for his work in comparative history. In his presentation of it, and that memory’s contours change over time with changes in the position of the one who remembers.

Ronald C. Newton, professor of Latin American History at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, who chaired the CLAH prize committee for best article in 1995, spoke on "Italian-Jewish Refugees in Argentina, 1938-1945." Prof. Newton’s books, German Buenos Aires, and The Nazi Menace in Argentina, have set a standard in the field. Rather than comparing the German with the Italian refugee stream, Newton reminded his listeners of the very different historical circumstances from which the latter emerged, and which explains the re-emigration of the Italians back to Italy after the war. The postwar repatriation of intellectuals emphasizes the disparity in standards maintained at European and Argentine universities.

José Moya, associate professor of history at UCLA, analyzed the meaning of some commonly-used terms in his paper, "Immigration History or Diasporic Studies?" Prof. Moya maintains that a certain competition for victimhood exists among historians and sociologists of migratory movements. While immigration history links the migratory process with questions of identity and economic-social realities, diasporic studies, he claims, are restricted to post-structuralist text analysis. Its findings are therefore determined by a prior ideological assumptions, leading to such outcomes as the linkage of race issues in the US with third world colonialism.

Comment was by Sandra McGee Deutsch, professor of history at UT-El Paso and author of Counter Revolution in Argentina. All panelists are members of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association, and have been pre-eminent in bridging the intellectual gulf between these two cognate fields of study.

Judith Laikin Elkin

James Hijiya, Maureen Murphy Nutting and Hendrick Kraay offered a lively discussion on teaching the history of the Americas in a session sponsored by the AHA Teaching Division, and chaired by Leslie Offutt. The three panelists offered a variety of perspectives on the problems and satisfactions of teaching the sometimes unwieldy subject of the Americas before an overflow audience jammed into a small-ish conference room. Hijiya, of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, focused on maps as a method of dealing with U.S. history with his presentation. "The Shape of U.S. History: A Presentation Illustrated by Maps". His focus was the "nationalist" interpretation of U.S. history, which he maintained, largely ignores the rest of the world, narrowing the boundaries of the subject matter through exclusion. By broadening the narrative to include the Spanish, French, British and American contributions to the development of North American, both the map and the story became more inclusive. Professor Hijiya’s suggestions for improvement include seeking textbooks for survey courses that consider all of the Americas and their contributions to its cultural, political and economic development over the centuries.

Maureen Nutting detailed some of the frustrations that community college history teachers encounter with a presentation, "Teaching American History to Community College Students Today." She pointed out that the numbers of students in the nation’s community college systems are increasing rapidly from New York to Washington. Additionally, they are often the most unprepared for college-level work and often need redemption in such areas as basic writing skills. There are, however, strategies that one can use and success of small-group discussions, computer labs (as a writing source), primary source document discussants, and short writing assignments keyed to class topics or readings. All of these, used in combination with stand alone lectures on important topics can bring the unprepared and recalcitrant student more fully into the content of the class. All of which requires (needless to say) incredible energy and remarkable organization. Still, with community colleges continuing to be the fastest growing segment of higher education in the United States, those of us who teach in these systems must find ways to follow what Professor Nutting is doing at North Seattle Community College.

Hendrik Kraay, of the University of Calgary, offered the final presentation on "the History of the Colonial Americas." Professor Kraay was as concerned as James Hijiya about limiting the story of the colonial Americas to simply a history of developing nation-states, thus reducing the region’s colonial past to a mere prologue for the narrative of modern national history. Kraay surveyed some of the more recent attempts at building an inclusive and internally coherent analysis of the colonial era in the Americas, discussing the important issues of environmental changes wrought by European entrance to the New World, as well as Indian-European relations over time, in terms of both labor and resistance to subjugation. He concluded by noting the lack of comprehensive textbooks about the problem all who teach the Americas as a course face in telling our students the story without falling back on the time-worn (yet organizationally appealing) crutch of nation-state development.

The session concluded with several detailed and interesting queries from the audience, many of who obviously faced the classroom difficulties broached by the panelists. Only the limitation imposed by the clock curtailed the lively discussion that followed.

Craig Hendricks

Long Beach City College

This session was designed as a remedy to some previously held as the AHA in which economic and social historians of Latin America in separate panels disparaged each other’s work. After a brief introduction by Barbara Tenenbaum, Hispanic Division, Library of Congress, the session continued as follows – A social historian, in this case Professor Nancy Van Deusen, Western Washington University, presented a summary of her paper "Transculturation in the Early Modern Hispanic World: The Example of the Recogimiento: A Mystical Praxis, A Virtue and a Practice on Enclosure Among Women." In the paper, professor Van Deusen explained how the "recogimiento," a separation of women from society for their protection, was used in Mexico and Peru in the first centuries after the conquest. Then Professor Alan Dye, Department of Economics, Barnard College, explained how the use of techniques and theories from economic history could improve her paper. He was particularly thoughtful about the use of statistics and the kinds of questions they generate.

Professor Dye then delivered a summary of his paper "The Colono Contract and the Latifundium: Organizational Learning in Cuban Sugar, 1890-1929." He argued that the contracts negotiated in the sugar industry in that period were not exploitative and reflected the best possible deal between mills and their growers. Professor Van Deusen pointed out that it would be well to take into account the growers’ other non-economic concerns when they negotiated with the large foreign-owned mills.

Finally Professor John Coatsworth (Harvard University) stressed the revisionist nature of Professor Dye’s work and how the tools of economic history can help scholars evaluate the validity of social complaints. Professor Asunción Lavrin (Arizona State University) praised Van Deusen’s innovative analysis and emphasized the difficulties of finding precise information when colonial sources tend to be scarce. She also asked that the work of Ramón Guerra y Sanchez on the Cuban sugar industry, written in the 1940s, should be understood in context.

The session was highly successful. The speakers, by eschewing jargon and sarcasm, managed to convey to the 35 members of the audience the endless possibilities created through combing several different kinds of analyses. A suggestion was made to continue these dialogues and publish the results in the hopes of bringing the practitioners of Latin American history together so we can better understand the common past we all study.

Barbara A. Tenenbaum

Hispanic Division

Library of Congress