Thomas Benjamin

Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask (review)

Traslosheros has produced a solid study of the functions of the audiencia of the Archdiocese of Mexico that will interest Church and legal historians. But in the attempt to assert the importance of episcopal courts in the reform of customs, he overstates his case. Certainly, ecclesiastical audiencias performed a central function in the administration of the sacrament of marriage, for all couples seeking to marry had to file a petition with the court. As Traslosheros admits, however, little documentation relating to the audiencias other functions exists. He argues that the courts proclivity to avoid scandal probably accounts for this lacuna. But when compared to the hundreds of volumes produced by the Inquisition in its pursuit of the reform of customs, the paucity of documentation generated by the audiencia suggests that episcopal courts played a distinctly secondary role in this project.

Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico: Stephen, Lynn: Berkeley: University of California Press, 400 pp., Publication Date: January 2002

This is one ofthe most original books about Getlilio Vargas’s government to appear in many years. Scholars have long known that his centralizing administration laid the groundwork for modern Brazil’s political economy, labor law, political practice (populism), and social welfare policies. Daryle Williams, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, adds new dimensions to our understanding of that period by examining the regime’s complex cultural politics as it greatly increased federal government power in cultural management, engaging a broad spectrum of artists and intellectuals, from conservatives to modernists, in a project to renew Brazilian culture and to definc hrasilidude (Brazilianness). The core of Culture Wars in Brazil consists of three chapters that focus on the registry (tomhamento) of historical sites and artifacts, fcdcral museums, and the portrayal of Brazil at two international expositions (the 1939 Ncw York World’s Fair and the 1940 Exposition ofthe Portuguese World in Lisbon). Registry of historical sites considerably broadened the scope of what was considered worthy of historical preservation to include entire colonial towns like Ouro Preto, leading inevitably to conflicts with some property owners but offering others an opportunity to link themselves to the state. Museums, notably the lmperial Museum (in the old palace in Petr6polis), came to present a “pristine national past’’ (136), free from conflict and uncomfortable realities such as slavery. Indeed, the 1940 exhibition of Jean-Baptiste Debret’s early-nineteenth-century watercolors, with their graphic portrayals of slavery, fell tlat, according to Williams, because the images were too harsh. Brazil’s contributions to the fairs offered contrasting portrayals of thc country: New Yorkers saw a society that embraced modernism, notably in the pavilion designed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer; visitors to the Lisbon fair saw a Brazil that revcled in its Portuguese origins. Although Williams effectively analyzes the complex high politics of government and cultural elites, it is less clear how ordinary Brazilians viewed the resulting portrayals of their country. Only a handful of people visited the federal museums discussed in the book; several of them were difficult to reach I’rom major population centers, and dress codes kept out the poor and the working class.

Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (review)

intractable problem Yucatan posed for Mexico City. It would have been helpful to learn how anomalous the state was. Comparisons with the other four regions that underwent significant agrarian reform under Cardenismo are fleeting. Still, Fallaw has written a model monograph that exposes the limits of Cardenista reform and the difficulties that traditional political cultures pose for revolutionary regimes.