Latin American Popular Culture since Independence

An Introduction

William H. Beezley, Linda A. Curcio-Nagy

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2011
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781442212565
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Social Sciences

This unique reader offers an engaging collection of essays that highlight the diversity of Latin America's cultural expressions from independence to the present. Leading historians explore funerals, dance and music, letters and literature, spectacles and monuments, and world's fairs and food. These themes and events highlight the ways in which a wide range of individuals with copious, at times contradictory, motives attempted to forge identity, turn the world upside down, mock their betters, forget their troubles through dance, express love in letters, and altogether enjoy life. The authors analyze case studies from Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Trinidad-Tobago, tracing how their examples resonate in the rest of the region. They show how people could and did find opportunities to escape, if only occasionally, their daily drudgery, making lives for themselves of greater variety than the constant quest for dominance, drive for profits, or knee-jerk resistance to the social or economic order so often described in cultural studies. Instead, this rich text introduces the complexity of motives behind and the diversity of expressions of popular culture in Latin America.

Contributions by: Sal Acosta, Thomas L. Benjamin, John Charles Chasteen, Darién J. Davis, Lauren (Robin) H. Derby, Matthew D. Esposito, Ingrid E. Fey, Stephen Jay Gould, Graham E. L. Horton, Fanni Muñoz Cabrejo, Blanca Muratorio, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Janet Sturman, and Pamela Voekel.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Revised Introduction
• Chapter 1: Piety and Public Space
• Chapter 2: Church, Humboldt, and Darwin
• Chapter 3: Black Kings, Blackface Carnival, and Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Tango
• Chapter 4: “‘Cartas y cartas, compadre. . . .’: Love and Other Letters from Río Frío”
• Chapter 5: Peddling the Pampas
• Chapter 6: Death and Disorder in Mexico City
• Chapter 7: Images of Indians in the Construction of Ecuadorian Identity at the End of the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter 8: Many Chefs in the National Kitchen
• Chapter 9: The New Order
• Chapter 10: From the Ruins of the Ancien Régime
• Chapter 11: Racial Parity and National Humor
• Chapter 12: Oil, Race, and Calypso in Trinidad and Tobago, 1909–1990
• Chapter 13: The Dictator’s Seduction
• Chapter 14: En el corazón del pueblo
• Chapter 15: Nostalgia for the Future: The New Song Movement in Nicaragua
• Notes
• Video Distributors
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors