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Book Reviews of that empire” (116). He concludes his work by stating that both Cortés’s letters and Gómara’s Historia de la conquista de México work “the truth” on an Aristotelian model, which believed that falsehoods often prevail. Carman believes that both of these works reshape the truth to match the best needs of Cortés in a given moment. This book’s major strength is that is puts the different pieces of the conquest of Mexico together. It continually works to compare and contrast the different accounts of that conquest from its origin with Cortés, with Martyr, Oviedo, among others, and principally with Gómara. The text concludes with passages concerning two similar topics (Montezuma’s welcoming speech to the Spanish and Cortés’s speech on idolatry) from different chroniclers (Cortés, Martyr, Pérez de Oliva, Gómara, Sepúlveda, and Cervantes de Salazar). The reader is thus able to further study the nuances and different discursive strategies used over the centuries regarding Spanish America’s arguably most controversial event, Cortés’s conquest of Mexico. Charles B. Moore Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Gardner-Webb University MYTHS OF MODERNITY: PEONAGE AND PATRIARCHY IN NICARAGUA. By Elizabeth Dore. Durham: Duke UP, 2006, p. 252, $21.95. In this book Elizabeth Dore asks whether the major shift from communal to private land from 1870 to 1930 in Nicaragua in fact produced the modern capitalism claimed by the Sandinistas who came to power in 1979. Dore focuses only on Diriomo, a small community near Granada, on the basis that local findings might have broader meaning not only in Nicaragua but in all of Latin America. During these years, “liberals” throughout the region not only eliminated communal land that often belonged to indigenous communities, but also lowered tariffs, boosted foreign investment, and passed laws “equalizing” labor—male and female—in order to make workers more amenable to concentrated, export-driven agriculture. Between 1830 and 1925, Nicaraguan governments representing the planter class enacted about sixty land laws and over fifty labor laws. In Diriomo, these dissolved the Indian community and its group-held property , and planters grabbed much of the land to export coffee. However, Dore argues, while privatization did force most in Diriomo into debt servitude , it did not bring about a smoothly running liberalization. Borrowing from Karl Polanyi, she calls what emerged a “society with markets” rather than a full-blown “market society.” Dore’s most original and prominent argument is about the role of gender in this semi-transformation. In colonial and early independence days, 87 The Latin Americanist, June 2008 the state already behaved as a father toward Nicaraguans and men behaved as if kings in their homes. The weakness of the central state made towns such as Granada and Diriomo largely self-regulating, and that regulation was patriarchal. Nineteenth-century laws, for instance, allowed indigenous women to own land but also made inheritance more difficult for women. Women also could now marry outside the Church but secular marriage reinforced the husband’s power. When privatization came, Dore claims, “patriarchal class relations impeded capitalist development” (2). The bond between planters and peons changed only partly because it continued to be regulated by patriarchal forms. The author separates these forms into “patriarchy from above”— the planter-peon relationship in which the former coerces and punishes but also protects and pays the latter—from “patriarchy from below”—in which senior household males treat wives, daughters and younger males with absolute authority, even signing them into peonage to free themselves for subsistence agriculture. In other words, these relationships responded to patriarchal notions, not market mechanisms. In fact, argues Dore, liberalism “fortified” patriarchy, which in turn never permitted the full bloom of capitalism in Nicaragua (3). The arguments about gender alone make this book unique and worthy of a diverse audience. But its findings present additional divergences from other Nicaraguan studies. Unlike Jeffrey Gould’s work on northern Nicaragua, for instance, Myths of Modernity finds relatively little resistance to privatization among Indians, and virtually no Indian self-awareness. There were no common struggles against expropriation. Instead, Indians— who were once the majority in Diriomo...

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