Florencia E. Mallon

When a Flower Is Reborn: The Life and Times of a Mapuche Feminist

A pathbreaking contribution to Latin American testimonial literature, When a Flower Is Reborn is activist Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef’s chronicle of her leadership within the Mapuche indigenous rights movement in Chile. Part personal reflection and part political autobiography, it is also the story of Reuque’s rediscovery of her own Mapuche identity through her political and human rights activism over the past quarter century. The questions posed to Reuque by her editor and translator, the distinguished historian Florencia Mallon, are included in the text, revealing both a lively exchange between two feminist intellectuals and much about the crafting of the testimonial itself. In addition, several conversations involving Reuque’s family members provide a counterpoint to her story, illustrating the variety of ways identity is created and understood. A leading activist during the Pinochet dictatorship, Reuque—a woman, a Catholic, and a Christian Democrat—often felt like an outsider within the male-dominated, leftist Mapuche movement. This sense of herself as both participant and observer allows for Reuque’s trenchant, yet empathetic, critique of the Mapuche ethnic movement and of the policies regarding indigenous people implemented by Chile’s post-authoritarian government. After the 1990 transition to democratic rule, Reuque collaborated with the government in the creation of the Indigenous Development Corporation (CONADI) and the passage of the Indigenous Law of 1993. At the same time, her deepening critiques of sexism in Chilean society in general, and the Mapuche movement in particular, inspired her to found the first Mapuche feminist organization and participate in the 1996 International Women’s Conference in Beijing. Critical of the democratic government’s inability to effectively address indigenous demands, Reuque reflects on the history of Mapuche activism, including its disarray in the early 1990s and resurgence toward the end of the decade, and relates her hopes for the future. An important reinvention of the testimonial genre for Latin America’s post-authoritarian, post-revolutionary era, When a Flower Is Reborn will appeal to those interested in Latin America, race and ethnicity, indigenous people’s movements, women and gender, and oral history and ethnography.

Decolonizing Native Histories: Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas

Decolonizing Native Histories is an interdisciplinary collection that grapples with the racial and ethnic politics of knowledge production and indigenous activism in the Americas. It analyzes the relationship of language to power and empowerment, and advocates for collaborations between community members, scholars, and activists that prioritize the right of Native people to decide how their knowledge is used. The contributors - academics and activists, indigenous and non-indigenous, from disciplines including history, anthropology, linguistics, and political science - explore the challenges of decolonization. These wide-ranging case studies consider how language, the law, and the archive have historically served as instruments of colonialism and how they can be creatively transformed in constructing autonomy. The collection highlights points of commonality and solidarity across geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and also reflects deep distinctions between North and South. Decolonizing Native Histories looks at Native histories and narratives in an internationally comparative context, with the hope that international collaboration and understanding of local histories will foster new possibilities for indigenous mobilization and an increasingly decolonized future.

Peasants and Rural Laborers in Pernambuco,1955-1964

In November of 1963, a general strike paralyzed the entire sugar industry in the state of Pernambuco. An estimated 200,000 rural workers took part in the strike movement which encompassed forty municfpios (municipalities) in the sugar zone and lasted three days. Planning was centralized in Palmares (about one hundred miles southwest of Recife) at the rural union, which claimed to be an umbrella organization for unions in twenty-one municipios. When the strike was over, the sugar workers had won an 80 percent wage increase. Despite its unique scope and success, the general strike was but one manifestation of a wider rural movement that had developed in Pernambuco in the early to mid-1950s. After 1950, landowners had responded to increased demand on the internal market and higher prices for sugar and other foodstuffs by expanding and concentrating production in certain commercial products. They evicted tenants who had cultivated their land for decades and, in an effort to compete with the more capital-intensive agriculture in the South, cut costs by firing high percentages of their permanent wage-labor force. This process had an especially damaging effect on the densely populated sugar region where, in spite of the continuing stream of migrants toward Recife and the southern states, the size of the dislocated rural population grew dramatically. Many of the rural dwellers, particularly the tenants, fought eviction. Some simply refused to leave, fighting unequal battles with landowner-controlled police. Others travelled to Recife to seek legal counsel. A large portion of them, however, were forced to leave and seek out marginal lands they could clear and plant with subsistence crops, only to be evicted once again. But whatever their particular situation, both peasants and rural workers took part in a movement that radically challenged the regions social and economic structure. Writers interested in peasants and peasant movements have devoted substantial attention to this movement, engaging in a series of controversies over interpretation. Among these, the most important disagreement has been over how to analyze the different participation and importance of the rural small producer and rural proletarian sectors. Some scholars (Forman, 1971; Huizer, 1972; Moraes, 1970) have argued that the peasant small producers were the most radical because they demanded land and participated in militant land invasions. The rural laborers, on the other hand, pressed for wage increases and

Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru.

Peasant and Nation offers a major new statement on the making of national politics. Comparing the popular political cultures and discourses of postcolonial Mexico and Peru, Florencia Mallon provides a groundbreaking analysis of their effect on the evolution of these nation states. As political history from a variety of subaltern perspectives, the book takes seriously the history of peasant thought and action and the complexity of community politics. It reveals the hierarchy and the heroism, the solidarity and the surveillance, the exploitation and the reciprocity, that coexist in popular political struggle. With this book Mallon not only forges a new path for Latin American history but challenges the very concept of nationalism. Placing it squarely within the struggles for power between colonized and colonizing peoples, she argues that nationalism must be seen not as an integrated ideology that puts the interest of the nation above all other loyalties, but as a project for collective identity over which many political groups and coalitions have struggled. Ambitious and bold, Peasant and Nation both draws on monumental archival research in two countries and enters into spirited dialogue with the literatures of post-colonial studies, gender studies, and peasant studies.

Studying Women's Work in Latin America

Sellers and Servants: Working Women in Lima, Peru. Ximena Bunster and Elsa M. Chaney. Photography by Ellan Young (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1985). Womens Work: Development and the Division of Labor by Gender. Eleanor Leacock and Helen I. Safa (eds.) (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1986). Women and Change in Latin America. June Nash and Helen Safa (eds.) (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1986).

A Note to Readers

The McNair Scholars Program began at the University of WisconsinSuperior in the fall of 1999. The McNair Program was originally established in 1986 by the U.S. Department of Education to prepare low income, first generation college students and students from groups underrepresented in graduate education for study at the doctoral level. There are a total of 179 programs nationwide with six programs housed within the UW System.

The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation

Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the Guatemalan state slaughtered more than two hundred thousand of its citizens. In the wake of this violence, a vibrant pan-Mayan movement has emerged, one that is challenging Ladino (non-indigenous) notions of citizenship and national identity. In The Blood of Guatemala Greg Grandin locates the origins of this ethnic resurgence within the social processes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century state formation rather than in the ruins of the national project of recent decades. Focusing on Mayan elites in the community of Quetzaltenango, Grandin shows how their efforts to maintain authority over the indigenous population and secure political power in relation to non-Indians played a crucial role in the formation of the Guatemalan nation. To explore the close connection between nationalism, state power, ethnic identity, and political violence, Grandin draws on sources as diverse as photographs, public rituals, oral testimony, literature, and a collection of previously untapped documents written during the nineteenth century. He explains how the cultural anxiety brought about by Guatemala’s transition to coffee capitalism during this period led Mayan patriarchs to develop understandings of race and nation that were contrary to Ladino notions of assimilation and progress. This alternative national vision, however, could not take hold in a country plagued by class and ethnic divisions. In the years prior to the 1954 coup, class conflict became impossible to contain as the elites violently opposed land claims made by indigenous peasants. This “history of power” reconsiders the way scholars understand the history of Guatemala and will be relevant to those studying nation building and indigenous communities across Latin America.

Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World Systems in Africa and Latin America

Now welcome, the most inspiring book today from a very professional writer in the world, confronting historical paradigms peasants labor and the capitalist world system in africa and latin america. This is the book that many people in the world waiting for to publish. After the announced of this book, the book lovers are really curious to see how this book is actually. Are you one of them? Thats very proper. You may not be regret now to seek for this book to read.

The Defense of Community in Peru's Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860-1940

Florencia E. Mallon examines the development of capitalism in Perus central highlands, depicting its impact on peasant village economy and society. She shows that the regions peasantry divided into an agrarian bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat during the period under discussion, although the surviving peasant ideology, village kinship networks, and the communality inspired by economic insecurity have sometimes obscured this division.Originally published in 1983.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.