In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (American Encounters/Global Interactions) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822341212 ISBN 13: 9780822341215

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Over the last decade, studies of the Cold War have mushroomed globally. Unfortunately, work on Latin America has not been well represented in either theoretical or empirical discussions of the broader conflict. With some notable exceptions, studies have proceeded in rather conventional channels, focusing on U.S. policy objectives and high-profile leaders (Fidel Castro) and events (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and drawing largely on U.S. government sources. Moreover, only rarely have U.S. foreign relations scholars engaged productively with Latin American historians who analyze how the international conflict transformed the region's political, social, and cultural life. Representing a collaboration among eleven North American, Latin American, and European historians, anthropologists, and political scientists, this volume attempts to facilitate such a cross-fertilization. In the process, In From the Cold shifts the focus of attention away from the bipolar conflict, the preoccupation of much of the so-called "new Cold War history," in order to showcase research, discussion, and an array of new archival and oral sources centering on the grassroots, where conflicts actually brewed. The collection's contributors examine international and everyday contests over political power and cultural representation, focusing on communities and groups above and underground, on state houses and diplomatic board rooms manned by Latin American and international governing elites, on the relations among states regionally, and, less frequently, on the dynamics between the two great superpowers themselves. In addition to charting new directions for research on the Latin American Cold War, In From the Cold seeks to contribute more generally to an understanding of the conflict in the global south. Contributors. Ariel C. Armony, Steven J. Bachelor, Thomas S. Blanton, Seth Fein, Piero Gleijeses, Gilbert M. Joseph, Victoria Langland, Carlota McAllister, Stephen Pitti, Daniela Spenser, Eric Zolov

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gilbert M. Joseph is Farnam Professor of History and International Studies at Yale University. He is the editor of Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North and a coeditor of The Mexico Reader; Fragments of a Golden Age; Crime and Punishment in Latin America; Close Encounters of Empire; and Everyday Forms of State Formation, all also published by Duke University Press.

Daniela Spenser is Senior Research Professor at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en AntropologÍa Social in Mexico City. She is the author of The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s, also published by Duke University Press.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"This outstanding collection explains why Latin America was central to the Cold War and why the Cold War was central for Latin America. By providing easy access to some of the best research currently being undertaken on Cold War history, the editors have done a great favor to those who are looking for critical and innovative explorations of the recent past."--O. A. Westad, London School of Economics, author of "The Global Cold War"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

In from the Cold

LATIN AMERICA'S NEW ENCOUNTER WITH THE COLD WAR

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4121-5

Contents

Preface.............................................................................................................................................................viiWhat We Now Know and Should Know: Bringing Latin America More Meaningfully into Cold War Studies Gilbert M. Joseph.................................................3Recovering the Memory of the Cold War: Forensic History and Latin America Thomas S. Blanton.........................................................................47The Caribbean Crisis: Catalyst for Soviet Projection in Latin America Daniela Spenser..............................................................................77The View from Havana: Lessons from Cuba's African Journey, 1959-1976 Piero Gleijeses...............................................................................112Transnationalizing the Dirty War: Argentina in Central America Ariel C. Armony.....................................................................................134Producing the Cold War in Mexico: The Public Limits of Covert Communications Seth Fein.............................................................................171Cuba s, Yanquis no! The Sacking of the Instituto Cultural Mxico-Norteamericano in Morelia, Michoacn, 1961 Eric Zolov...........................................214Miracle on Ice: Industrial Workers and the Promise of Americanization in Cold War Mexico Steven J. Bachelor........................................................253Chicano Cold Warriors: Csar Chvez, Mexican American Politics, and California Farmworkers Stephen Pitti...........................................................273Birth Control Pills and Molotov Cocktails: Reading Sex and Revolution in 1968 Brazil Victoria Langland.............................................................308Rural Markets, Revolutionary Souls, and Rebellious Women in Cold War Guatemala Carlota McAllister..................................................................350Standing Conventional Cold War History on Its Head Daniela Spenser.................................................................................................381Selective Bibliography..............................................................................................................................................397Contributors........................................................................................................................................................427Index...............................................................................................................................................................429

Chapter One

GILBERT M. JOSEPH

What We Now Know and Should Know

Bringing Latin America More Meaningfully into Cold War Studies

Few periods in Latin America's history have been as violent, turbulent, and, some would argue, transformative as the half century that ran roughly from the end of World War II to the mid-1990s and constituted the Latin American Cold War. This is because, as in other regions of the global South, Latin America's Cold War experience was rarely cold. Indeed, one has to go back to the nineteenth-century wars of independence to find comparably protracted and far-flung episodes of mass mobilization, revolutionary upheaval, and counter-insurgent reprisal; yet the international linkages, organizational capacities, and technologies of death and surveillance at work in the late twentieth century render this earlier cycle of violence almost quaint by comparison. Gabriel Garca Mrquez graphically evoked this "outsized" and "unbridled reality" in his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, conjuring up the apocalyptic events of the 1970s and early 1980s that turned Central America and the Southern Cone into late-century killing fields and challenged him to develop a new literary genre-"magical realism"-to assimilate the period's mind-boggling occurrences and "render our lives believable." Since 1971, when his colleague the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda had received his Nobel Prize, Garca Mrquez reflected, "we have not had a moment's rest":

There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolical dictator [Guatemala's Efran Ros Montt] who is carrying out in God's name the first Latin American genocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one-more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children.... Because they tried to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and stubborn countries ... Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years. One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality-that is, ten percent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes.

How do we account for such cataclysmic violence? To be sure, the Latin American past is littered with alternating cycles of social reform and intense conservative reaction, in which the influence, aid, and intervention of imperial powers have figured prominently. Even so, the dynamics of the Latin American Cold War are embedded in a particularly ferocious dialectic linking reformist and revolutionary projects for social change and national development and the excessive counterrevolutionary responses they triggered in the years following World War II. This dialectic, which shaped regional life in the late twentieth century and conditioned the region's prospects for the new millennium, played out in overlapping and interdependent domestic and international fields of political and social power. At a macro level, the Cold War was a struggle between superpowers over shifting geopolitical stakes and "mass utopias," ideological visions of how society and its benefits should be organized. But what ultimately gave the Cold War in Latin America its heat-what Greg Grandin terms its "transcendental force"-was the "politicization and internationalization of everyday life." On a variety of fronts across several decades, Latin American elites and popular classes participated in local and national political contests over land, labor, and the control of markets and natural resources that rarely escaped the powerful undertow of the larger conflict. At certain junctures (most notably the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the strategy of international armed struggle that it supported in the 1960s and 1970s, or the transnationalized anti-Communist crusade of the 1970s and 1980s), these struggles and the leftist and rightist ideologies that fueled them transcended national borders and powerfully influenced the relationship between the superpowers themselves. The result was an "international civil...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822341212
• ISBN 13: 9780822341215
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 450
• Herausgeber: Joseph
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland