History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
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Item ME SABE A PERÚ: A HISTORY OF SALSA IN THE MANY LIMAS(2020) Arellano, Alan Bryan; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis analyses the history of salsa music’s reception and mediation in Lima, Peru from the 1960s to the 1990s. Considering local political, social, and economic changes, the multivalent understandings in its reception throughout the decades, adds nuance to notions of transnational cultural flows, Latin American identity, and the shift of mass media consumption from the public to the private sphere. Even in its most globally appealing form of the 1970s, salsa’s reception by a Limeño public was still informed by the national political situation and local class-based affinities. Amidst an ongoing intense urbanization in the late 1960s, salsa became a voice and the local musical identity of the working class yet cosmopolitan port of Callao in Lima. After its political turn in the late seventies, salsa gained the middle and upper classes' attention and was increasingly present in the national mass media. Finally, in the mid-eighties, this attention reached its peak during salsa’s most depoliticized form, a romantic iteration enjoyed across classes and groups in neo-liberal Lima.Item Development Begins at Home: Women and the Domestic Economy in Brazil, 1945-1975(2016) Moura, Shawn; Williams, Daryle; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A number of historians of twentieth-century Latin America have identified ways that national labor laws, civil codes, social welfare programs, and business practices contributed to a gendered division of society that subordinated women to men in national economic development, household management, and familial relations. Few scholars, however, have critically explored women's roles as consumers and housewives in these intertwined realms. This work examines the Brazilian case after the Second World War, arguing that economic policies and business practices associated with “developmentalism” [Portuguese: desenvolvimentismo] created openings for women to engage in debates about national progress and transnational standards of modernity. While acknowledging that an asymmetry of gender relations persisted, the study demonstrates that urban women expanded their agency in this period, especially over areas of economic and family life deemed "domestic." This dissertation examines periodicals, consumer research statistics, public opinion surveys, personal interviews, corporate archives, the archives of key women’s organizations, and government officials’ records to identify the role that women and household economies played in Brazilian developmentalism between 1945 and 1975. Its principal argument is that business and political elites attempted to define gender roles for adult urban women as housewives and mothers, linking their management of the household to familial well-being and national modernization. In turn, Brazilian women deployed these idealized roles in public to advance their own economic interests, especially in the management of household finances and consumption, as well as to expand legal rights for married women, and increase women’s participation in the workforce. As the market for women's labor expanded with continued industrialization, these efforts defined a more active role for women in the economy and in debates about the trajectory of national development policies.Item The Democratic Self: Gender, Memory, and Human Rights under the Augusto Pinochet Dictatorship and Transition to Democracy in Chile, 1973-2010(2015) Townsend, Brandi Ann; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Democratic Self asks how ideas about gender shaped the ways that Chileans reconstructed the affective, social, and political bonds the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) sought to destroy. It intervenes in debates about the degree to which right-wing military regimes in Latin America eroded social ties during the Cold War. Torture targeted gendered and sexual identities and compelled victims to re-assess their roles as men, women, militants, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers. This dissertation argues that to reconnect the individual to collective struggles for democracy, survivors and their allies drew on longstanding, heteronormative gender ideologies within the left. Those ideologies gradually changed over the course of the dictatorship, and in turn, influenced memories during the subsequent transition to democracy (1990-2010). The dissertation draws on government and non-governmental documents and oral interviews with survivors, their families, and human rights workers. Between 1978 and 1990, mental health professionals working within human rights organizations provided psychological therapy to approximately 32,000-42,000 Chileans to help them work through their traumatic experiences as part of a collective project to repair the social connections that state violence ripped apart. These professionals translated psychoanalytic concepts of “the self” into the language of pre-1973 frameworks of citizenship grounded in the heterosexual, male-headed nuclear family. By the mid-1980s, Chile’s feminist movement changed the terms of the debate by showing how gendered forms of everyday violence that pre-dated the dictatorship shaped political violence under the dictatorship, as well as the opposition’s response. Slowly, mental health professionals began to change how they deployed ideas about gender when helping survivors and their families talk about state violence. However, the narratives of violence that emerged with the end of the dictatorship in 1990 and that were enshrined in three separate truth commissions (1990, 2004, and 2010) only partially reflected that transformation. The democratic governments’ attempts to heal Chile’s painful past and move forward did not always recognize, much less dislodge, entrenched ideas that privileged men’s experiences of political militancy. This dissertation shows how Chileans grappled with their memories of state violence, which were refracted through gendered discourses in the human rights movement.Item In Black and Brown: Intellectuals, Blackness, and Inter-Americanism in Mexico after 1910(2013) Cohen, Theodore; Vaughan, Mary Kay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"In Black and Brown" examines how blackness and Africanness became constituent elements of Mexican culture after the Revolution of 1910. In refuting the common claim that black cultures and identities were erased or ignored in the post-revolutionary era, it argues that anthropologists, historians, (ethno)musicologists, and local intellectuals integrated black and, after 1940, African-descended peoples and cultures into a democratic concept of national identity. Although multiple historical actors contributed to this nationalist project, three intellectuals--composer and ethnomusicologist Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster (1898-1967), anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1908-1996), and city of Veracruz poet Francisco Rivera (1908-1994)--most coherently identified Africanness in Mexican history and culture. As these state and local intellectuals read ethnographic texts about African cultural retentions throughout the Western Hemisphere, they situated these cultural practices in specific Mexican communities and regional spaces. By tracing the inter-American networks that shaped these identities, "In Black and Brown" asserts that the classification of blackness and Africanness as Mexican was in conversation with the refashioning of blackness, Africanness, and indigeneity across the Americas and was part of the construction of the Western Hemisphere as a historical, cultural, and racial entity. More broadly, it questions the commonplace assumption that certain nations of the Americas are part of the African Diaspora while others are defined as indigenous.Item Alegria: The Rise of Brazil's "Carnival of Popular Participation," Salvador da Bahia, 1950-2000s(2012) Metz, Jerry Dennis; Williams, Daryle; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the second half of the twentieth century, the annual carnival in the economically depressed northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia underwent a series of transformations that brought it from relative anonymity in Brazil--where festivities in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Recife had long been given pride of place--to the status of (inter)national showpiece in terms of cultural and entrepreneurial innovation and touristic appeal. It became a dominant factor in year-round local music production. In an era of political constraint, it appeared to embody the collective performance of multiple democracies including race and free-market consumerism. New forms of popular participation were linked to innovations in carnival that, in other national carnival sites, would have been precluded by regulation and tradition. This dissertation draws from debates and analysis in Brazil's intellectual, policy, and media spheres regarding carnival, folklore, tourism, Bahian culture, mass culture, and national identity to argue that 1) the traits of creative spontaneity and popular participation in Salvador's carnival gained prominence as both national ambivalence over "folklore" increased, and dictatorial regimes constrained political democracy; 2) the state, rather than discursively and economically controlling Salvador's carnival, has more often reacted to artistic production and market forces, its hegemony configured through strategies of support and appropriation linked to tourism and an internally amplified social ethic of alegria; and 3) media and cultural commentators have made Salvador's modern carnival a new locus for longstanding national conversations over Brazilian identity, regionalism, race, and cultural imperialism, casting its innovation as simultaneously a promising engine of renovation and a threat to both local and national traditions. Salvador carnival's progressive implications of participation and inclusion have been blunted by a process of political redemocratization that was associated with neoliberal policies at the national and local levels; its internal contradictions and commercialism have challenged both its national and local symbolic power.