Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North (review)

This collection is mainly an homenaje to Emilia Viotti da Costa. Aside from an essay by her, all but one of its pieces are by her students in Latin American history at Yale between 1979 and 1999; the exception is by an old junior colleague at Yale. Moreover, all their specific questions lie in the last two hundred years, HAHR's "national period."

Otherwise, like most homenajes, this is a mixed bag. The honoree's own essay, "New Publics, New Politics, New Histories," a slight revision of her address to the 1991 Southern Labor Studies Conference, is most interesting for her ideas on the deep intellectual history of the now old "new social history." Most teacherly (though now trite) are her historiographic criticisms both of "economic reductionism" (typical of "the 1960s," she thinks, despite E. P. Thompson and E. D. Genovese) and of "cultural reductionism" (which she seems to date from the 1980s). She has some ripping words on "postmodern" provinciality. But in calling (then and still) for a new "synthesis," particularly on labor history, she gets wrong what historiographic synthesis can do—and misses labor history's mechanics.

The best articles are by three young scholars. Mary Ann Mahony vividly explains the "collective [and selective, self-serving] memory" of twentieth-century Bahian cacao elite concerning its own origin and development. Diana Paton does a brilliant analysis of "gender ideologies and women's labor after slavery in Jamaica," to explain ex-slave women's "consciously political strategy" (p. 178) of "flight from the fields." Most impressively, Heidi Tinsman demonstrates the gendered premises of Chile's agrarian reform and the consequent turbulence in "sexual negotiation and labor struggle," 1964-73. Here are excellent lessons for the social historian of modern Latin American reforms.

Other articles have faults as considerable as their merits. Barbara Weinstein's misconception of 1960s structuralism at São Paulo University as "Marxist" (or "Marxist-inflected" or "Marxist-influenced," pp. 81-82) puts an irrelevant puzzle in front of her otherwise clear and richly significant thesis on the embarrassment of Brazilian slavocracy over slavery. Greg Grandin, without acknowledgment, has copied 70 percent of his article on cholera, racism, and nationalism in Guatemala verbatim from his Blood of Guatemala (pp. 82-98); the new parts (for example, the comparison of Mexican and Guatemalan racism) are not as good as the old. Jeffrey Gould mistakes the (failed) Salvadoran Revolution of 1932 for "revolutionary nationalism" (along the lines of Sandinismo), ignores the Comintern's positions then on "the national question" and revolution in "colonies and semi-colonies," and confuses cultural, ideological, and strategic reasons for Salvadoran Communists' public emphasis not on "Indians" or class, but on "the masses"; here, poor history wastes valuable "local memories." Thomas Klubock garbles three or four arguments about the causes of nationalist racism in the Chilean working class, does not understand the Popular Front (in general or in Chile), and also confuses culture, ideology, and strategy, but is good on the origins of "corporate welfare" at El Teniente.

Three pieces by Costa's oldest students here could be funny parodies of the wrong turn in North American historiography of Latin America over the last 15 years. Actually, they are sad examples of the turn. Gilbert Joseph's introductory essay attempts to explain the book's title but never does. Presumptuous, careless, erroneous, and obscure—it does not even explain who is the "we" that forgot "politics" ("We who?" asked Tonto) and is now "reclaiming" it, or what "the political" here is.

Steve Stern's essay on "the politics of writing Latin American history" is an amazingly and candidly solipsistic explanation—not of this problem, but of its author's presumption and prejudices, or "sensibility," about the problem. Stern...