Latin America Archives - Page 2 of 10

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

By Nathan Stone Preso en su lecho mi rio pasa, pero se acerca su libertad. Sus aguas dulces ya son saladas; ya no eres rio, eres el mar. A prisoner within its banks, my river rolls on, soon to find freedom. Your sweet waters now have grown salty; you’re no river, now, you are […]

In Defense of the Crime Story

By Diego A. Godoy Judicial records usually provide the empirical grist underpinning historical studies of crime, but journalism is the lifeblood of the field. The efforts of reporters, editors, photographers and illustrators have allowed researchers to resurrect bygone crimes, often in forensic detail. In the more recent Latin American past, for instance, the intrepid sleuthing […]

Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (2014)

By Marcus Oliver Golding Archives, especially state archives, have political agendas. Whether private or public, holdings of individual, institutional, and government documents can serve to invade and control the lives of citizens and societies. Their organizations shape historical knowledge and national narratives about the past. Kirsten Weld addresses these political issues of government intrusion, historical […]

Civil War and Daily Life: Snapshots of the Early War in Guatemala

by Vasken Markarian (All photos here are published with the permission of the photographer.) Two young Guatemalan soldiers abruptly pose for the camera. They rush to stand upright with rifles at their sides. On a dirt road overlooking an ominous Guatemala City, they stand on guard duty. This snapshot formed the title page of an exhibit […]

Precarious Paths to Freedom: The United States, Venezuela, and the Latin American Cold War (2016)

By Marcus Oliver Golding The role of the United States during the Cold War is one often marked by tragedy, repression and the support for authoritarian regimes throughout the western hemisphere. That perception is shared throughout Latin America, which makes one wonder if there are cases in which U.S. foreign policy actually helped Latin Americans […]

The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies (2014)

by Paula O’Donnell On March 24, 1976, a junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla overthrew the president of Argentina in order to install a military dictatorship that they believed would counter the threat of communism . In the seven years that followed, this new government launched a “national reorganization process” or proceso, designed to eradicate Marxist […]

The Public Archive: The Gálvez Visita of 1765

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT […]

The Public Archive: María Luisa Puga and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake

Nanban Art: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 2)

This series features five online museum exhibits created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for a class titled “Colonial Latin America Through Objects.” The class assumes that Latin America was never a continent onto itself. The course also insists that objects document the nature of historical change in ways […]

The Archaeology and History of Colonial Mexico by Enrique Rodríguez Alegría (2016)

by Brittany Erwin In this study of the social significance of material culture in Mexico City and Xaltocan in the early colonial period, Rodriguez Alegría uses a variety of sources, including archaeological evidence relating to food consumption, catalogues of ceramic sherds from several dig sites in these cities, and wills, stock lists, and auction records. […]

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