Revolution and Counter-revolution in Modern Latin America

Catalog description

Latin American colonial history was defined by exploitation for profit; the efficiency of state control over Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations established economic profit or loss. In the face of independence, abolition, and widespread immigration, racial hierarchy and exploitation continued to shape modern Latin America, but often under a fictive constitutional promise of equality, citizenship, and democracy. In the nineteenth century much of Latin America experienced the rise of caudillos, military strong men, and dictators who often rule through a limited or truncated form of democracy but come to represent the interests of the political, industrial, and landed elite who consolidate their control over much of Latin America in the early twentieth century. In response to this control, we see a rise of popular revolution throughout twentieth century Latin America. Some succeed while others fail; they include national and regional movements, they are shaped by labor, agriculture, populism, democracy, nationalism, socialism, communism, and military uprising. We later see-often but not always in direct response-a conservative backlash in the form of military dictatorships, neo-colonial and neo-liberal economies, torture, disappearance, murder, and anti-communist fervor driven by Cold-War ideology. We will examine these events through various lenses: that of participants, through analysis of regional and national outcomes, and through the intervention of global powers. We will ask what social, political, and/or racial conditions led to revolutionary situations? How successful were revolutionary leaders at shaping policies, administrations, and nations? What did revolutionaries seek to accomplish and what were the outcomes of their reforms? Conversely, what did counterrevolutionaries seek to accomplish and what were the outcomes of their reforms? We cannot address every "revolution" or every conservative backlash that occurred in modern Latin America. By addressing these themes in Cuba, Mexico, Central America, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, we will emphasize forms of revolution, nationalism, "bureaucratic-authoritarian." state formation, imperialism, agrarian reform, immigration, industrialization, labor movements, and citizenship.