{"title":"The Institute of Geology of Mexico and Its Precedents: History and Legacy","authors":"Lucero Morelos Rodríguez","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.656","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.656","url":null,"abstract":"In 2019, the Institute of Geology celebrated its ninetieth anniversary as part of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). The main establishment in Mexico for the teaching, research, and dissemination of the geological sciences, it is an institution with a long history and a great scientific legacy. It dates back to the 19th century, since it is the heir to the Geological Institute of Mexico (1888), the first institute in the Mexican republic to carry out research in the geological sciences and to study the country’s territory from three points of view: scientific, technical, and industrial. It was conceived by the mining engineer Antonio del Castillo (1820–1895) to meet the need to scientifically explore the country’s latent mineral wealth, for which reason its functions included: mapping regions whose lithology and resources were unknown, providing specialized services to the public—the analysis and classification of water, rocks, land, fossils, minerals, and oil—and creating a geological and paleontological museum for the nation.\u0000 From 1888 to 1917, the institution was part of the Ministry of Development, Colonization, Industry, and Commerce (Ministerio de Fomento, Colonización, Industria y Comercio). In 1917, the Venustiano Carranza administration promulgated a new constitution, reformed governmental administration, and created the Ministry of Industry, Commerce, and Labor (Secretaría de Industria, Comercio y Trabajo), which was responsible for all questions related to industries such as mining and oil. Although it lapsed somewhat between 1917 and 1929, during the armed conflict of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), the Institute of Geology of Mexico was assigned to the Department of Geological Studies and Explorations, with the task of carrying out applied science through the study of new and old mining areas and the location of aquifers.\u0000 A new scenario emerged in 1929 when the administration of President Emilio Portes Gil enacted the Organic Law of the National University, granting the latter university autonomy, which also allowed institutions of a scientific nature such as the National Astronomical Observatory, the National Library, the Department of Biological Studies, and the National Geological Institute to carry out research as one of their substantive activities. On November 16, 1929, the former Department of Geological Studies and Explorations was incorporated in the most important scholarly institution of Mexico under the name of the Institute of Geology.","PeriodicalId":190332,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132510899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Black Tribute in the Spanish Americas","authors":"Norah L. A. Gharala","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.1051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.1051","url":null,"abstract":"From the late 16th to the early 19th centuries, free individuals, families, and corporate groups whose reputations or self-descriptions defined them as Black in the Spanish Americas were subject to a specific tax. The royal tribute tax established the relationship between loyal vassals and a responsive Crown. Under Habsburg rule, tribute circumscribed the freedom of Black subjects but offered a path to privileges for those who provided services to the Crown. Attempts to levy the tax in the 16th and 17th centuries were wide-ranging but yielded comparatively small amounts of revenue. Tribute, nevertheless, affected many regions of the Spanish Americas, either by its collection or via the strategies Black people took to avoid it or contest its imposition. The responses of Black people and local officials to the tax determined how regularly it was enforced and how much revenue it would generate. Even where it failed, debates over tribute and attempts to collect it can reveal what it meant to be Black for colonial officials and ordinary people. Bourbon reforms led to an increasing emphasis on the fiscal potential of Black tribute, much of which became concentrated in the heart of New Spain. Hundreds of thousands of people not only paid tribute but were registered using new methods. The information produced within the tribute regime approximated the density, distribution, and interconnectedness of Black and Indian populations. In addition to the revenue and data its collection yielded, the imposition of Black tribute remains fundamental to understanding the colonial status, sense of identity, and experiences of Black people in the Spanish Empire.","PeriodicalId":190332,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126364646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez, G. Cole, Benjamin N. Lawrance
{"title":"The Amistad Saga: A Transatlantic Dialogue","authors":"Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez, G. Cole, Benjamin N. Lawrance","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.941","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.941","url":null,"abstract":"The story of the slave ship La Amistad is one of the most celebrated and narrated 19th-century stories of the transatlantic slave trade. To fully appreciate the significance and impact of the events and circumstances of this fateful episode, it is important to examine its legacy from multiple points of the Atlantic world—vestiges of the triangular trade bequeathed by the Columbian Exchange. For a long time, the Amistad saga has been viewed from a very US-centric perspective because the dispute over the lives of the Africans rose to the US Supreme Court in 1840–1841. New archival and oral research in West Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean is rebalancing the narrative and revising the historical drama. Today, the Amistad story is widely recognized as a quintessentially Atlantic story, a story of mobility that moves back and forth across the Atlantic in multiple directions over many decades. The deployment of the phrase “Amistad saga” provides a vehicle with which to critique the socio-legal battles about transatlantic slave trading in Caribbean, North American, and West African history. The Amistad story is often described as pre-incidental to the US Civil War. The victory of African defendants is often framed as a self-congratulatory vindication of the successful resistance of enslaved Africans. The celebrated figure of “Joseph Cinqué” or Sengbe Pieh, the self-appointed leader of the Africans, and a replica of the ship itself are part of an Amistad memory industry that attempts to narrate the slave trade and its abolition. A new framework for teaching and understanding the history of the Amistad saga and its memory and forgetting through an Atlantic lens must combine historical and contemporary perspectives from the United States, Europe, Cuba, and Sierra Leone.","PeriodicalId":190332,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History","volume":"157 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124389299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Affection and Solidarity among 19th-Century Black Intellectuals in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo","authors":"A. Pinto","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.816","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.816","url":null,"abstract":"Brazil had the largest population of free and freed Black people on the continent, starting in the early 19th century, despite being the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. The 1872 General Census of the Empire reported that six out of every ten Black or brown people could claim a series of rights associated with citizenship by virtue of not being enslaved. These included some individuals who were literate and active in the cultural and political spaces in which plans for the country’s present and future were drawn up. Especially in the second half of the 19th century, a time of deepening crisis for the slaveholding system, individuals such as José Ferreira de Menezes, Luiz Gama, Machado de Assis, José do Patrocínio, Ignácio de Araújo Lima, Arthur Carlos, and Theophilo Dias de Castro, all of whom were born free and resided in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, invested in their individual aspirations but also joined groups that defended the citizenship rights of free, freed, and enslaved Black people. Facing daily experiences of “color prejudice,” they not only participated in debates waged in the abolitionist, Black, literary, and general press, but they also played leading roles in the creation of mechanisms and instruments of resistance, confrontation, and dialogue. Although this aspect has not received much attention in recent historical accounts that recognize their existences, these and other Black intellectuals developed bonds of affection and solidarity over the course of their careers. To reflect on the scope of this shared racial identity in the latter 19th century and the possible impact of these ties on public positions taken by Black intellectuals, the demonstrations of friendship and companionship experienced by these individuals are traced, as well as by some others. An exercise in approaching the traces of different practices surrounding the politicization of race is given, and paths for future research on the social history of ideas and antiracism in Brazil are suggested.","PeriodicalId":190332,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115100351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Strait of Magellan—a Gateway to New Worlds","authors":"Mauricio Onetto Pavez","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.995","url":null,"abstract":"The year 2020 marks the five hundredth anniversary of the “discovery” of the Strait of Magellan. The unveiling of this passage between 1519 and 1522 allowed the planet to be circumnavigated for the first time in the history of humanity. All maritime routes could now be connected, and the idea of the Earth, in its geographical, cosmographic, and philosophical dimensions, gained its definitive meaning. This discovery can be considered one of the founding events of the modern world and of the process of globalization that still continues today.\u0000 This new connectivity awoke an immediate interest in Europe that led to the emergence of a political consciousness of possession, domination, and territorial occupation generalized on a global scale, and the American continent was the starting point for this. This consciousness also inspired a desire for knowledge about this new form of inhabiting the world. Various fields of knowledge were redefined thanks to the new spaces and measurements produced by the discovery of the southern part of the Americas, which was recorded in books on cosmography, natural history, cartography, and manuscripts, circulating mainly between the Americas and Europe.\u0000 All these processes transformed the Strait of Magellan into a geopolitical space coveted by Europeans during the 16th century. As an interoceanic connector, it was used to imagine commercial routes to the Orient and political projects that could sustain these dynamics. It was also conceived as a space to speculate on the potential wealth in the extreme south of the continent. In addition, on the Spanish side, some agents of the Crown considered it a strategic place for imperial projections and the defense of the Americas.","PeriodicalId":190332,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129680275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Wars of the 1860s and the Atlantic (Americas and Europe)","authors":"Vitor Izecksohn","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.1030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.1030","url":null,"abstract":"During the 1860s, widespread warfare beset the Americas and Europe. Fighting resulted from challenges to existing political accommodations, and evolved into civil wars or interstate violence. Concurrently, economic and technological transformations through the 1860s aided long-distance communications, such as the coming of the telegraph and a much faster spread of steam power that helped to disseminate news and share experiences. All over the Atlantic, the triumph of national unification was the most visible result of the bloodbath, expanding state capacities and reinforcing the role of national symbols as common elements of a shared identity. Political and administrative centralization affected the exercise of local power in different ways, mainly in its capacity to recruit members of communities for war; appealing to national values and identities gradually became central in the demands for cooperation and sacrifice. After the end of combat, national authorities established regimes founded either on new constitutions or on amendments added to existing documents, the goal of which was reordering society according to rules capable of regulating and institutionalizing regional conflicts, simultaneously incorporating demands for representation and liberalization. These same groups demonstrated less efficiency when dealing with ethnic and social conflicts, sources of deeper divisions in societies that pretended to be consistent, progressive, and unified.","PeriodicalId":190332,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History","volume":"90 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133651387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Violeta Parra: Her Life, Work, and Legacy","authors":"E. Verba","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.789","url":null,"abstract":"Violeta Parra (1917–1967) was a multifaceted and talented musician and artist. A prolific songwriter, she composed more than two hundred songs as well as experimental pieces for guitar, documentary soundtracks, and music for ballet. Her most famous song, “Gracias a la vida,” has been performed by musicians the world over. In the realm of the visual arts, she was a ceramicist, sculptress, painter, and tapestry maker. In 1964, she became the first Latin American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Louvre Palace’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Parra was also an award-winning folklorist who collected hundreds of songs and other folklore from every region of Chile.\u0000 Born in southern Chile, she moved to Santiago at age fifteen, where she spent two decades performing a mixture of popular songs from Latin America that is often referred to as música criolla. At age thirty-five she turned to the authentic, first as a folklorist and then as an artist. She was a leader of the Chilean folk revival of the 1950s and inspired the generation of Chilean musicians who formed the protest song movement known as nueva canción in the 1960s. A communist sympathizer, she traveled to Europe as a member of the Chilean delegation to the Soviet-sponsored World Festival of Youth and Students in 1955 (Warsaw) and 1962 (Helsinki). Each time she toured the Soviet Bloc, then made her way to Paris for an extended sojourn.\u0000 Parra contributed a significant voice to the national debate over chilenidad (Chilean identity) during a critical juncture in Chile’s economic, social, and cultural development. Her biography sheds light on transnational cultural movements and competing notions of authenticity at the height of the Cold War. It is also the deeply human story of Parra’s tenacious struggle to be seen and heard as an artist on her own terms.","PeriodicalId":190332,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132482929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Indigenous Politics and Education in Early to Mid-20th Century Chile: Foregrounding Mapuche Women and Transnational Conversations","authors":"J. Crow, Allison Ramay","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.990","url":null,"abstract":"Mapuche intellectuals and political activists in early- to mid-20th-century Chile both worked within and subverted dominant modernizing and “civilizing” educational discourses. Mapuche women played an important role in the movement to democratize schooling in early-20th-century Chile by publishing articles in little-known Mapuche-run newspapers and advocating for Mapuche education broadly as well as specifically for women. There was also an important transnational dimension of Mapuche political organizing around education rights during this period. These two underexplored but important aspects of indigenous activism in Chile open interesting questions about the intersections between race, gender, and nation in the sphere of education.","PeriodicalId":190332,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129123523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stature, Poverty, and Inequality in 19th- and 20th-Century Mexico","authors":"Moramay López-Alonso","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.826","url":null,"abstract":"Anthropometric studies have shown that the evolution of human stature can be helpful to examine human welfare. Adult stature is an indicator of health status and living standards for periods in which there has not been a systematic collection of data of other indicators, such as the price of goods and wages, as is the case in Mexico prior to 1950. Mexican anthropometric history studies have revealed that stature is a good measure to examine the evolution of living standards in the long run and that it has been effective for assessing poverty and inequality. These studies have shown that, for the period 1850–1950, the evolution of living standards was heterogeneous. There were different trajectories depending on the socioeconomic status. People from working-class backgrounds experienced a deterioration and/or stagnation, while people from upper-class backgrounds experienced a sustained increase in average stature. These trends challenged the official history of the post-revolutionary period, which argued that the living standards of the Mexican population deteriorated during the Porfirio Díaz administration (1876–1911) and improved afterwards with the promulgation of social legislation in the post-revolutionary era (post-1910). Additional studies show that, during the post-1950 period, there was a generalized improvement in stature, but it was limited by the challenges of economic downturns and persistent structural inequality.","PeriodicalId":190332,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132137557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Liberation Theology in Latin America","authors":"Douglass Sullivan-González","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.955","url":null,"abstract":"Liberation theology is a critical reflection on the workings of God in the history of humankind that emphasizes the active, divine redemption (liberation) of humans from the sinful bonds of political and economic oppression. The biblical Exodus narrative became the core metaphor for the theological understanding of liberation and freedom. The Latin American bishops, during their second meeting at Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, coined a signature tenet of liberation theology: “the preferential option for the poor.”\u0000 Liberation theology emerged formally among theologians in South America in response to rising expectations produced by two key external factors: the successful Cuban revolution (1959) and the ecumenical zeitgeist associated with Vatican II (1962–1965). The movement spread quickly while increased literacy among the faithful inspired lay leaders, trained by sparse clergy and women religious, to organize Christian base communities (CEBs), to “read” their own reality in light of the Exodus story, and to campaign for social justice in alliance with secular political actors. The swift repression and assassination of clergy, nuns, and lay activists by security forces hostile to democratization of the political economy in the 1970s and early 1980s fueled international awareness of liberation theology. Heightened internal opposition within the Vatican in the 1980s to some of liberation theology’s fundamental tenets culminated with the ten-month silencing in 1985 of the Brazilian theologian and Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff. Liberation theology has since inspired other marginalized social actors to explore what liberation means for those forced to live on the periphery due to racial, ethnic, and/or gender-based discrimination; homophobia; and a rapidly deteriorating environment threatened by unsustainable development models.","PeriodicalId":190332,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122494433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}