BOOK REVIEWS

THE SEARCH FOR THE CODEX CARDONA. By Arnold J. Bauer. Durham: DukeUP, 2009, pp. 208, 8 color illustrations, $21.95.

In this book, Bauer narrates his two-decades-long-search for the CodexCardona that first surfaced in 1982 and has now disappeared. Accordingto Bauer and the other scholars who have seen it, the codex describes ingreat detail pre-Hispanic Mexico and the first stage of the colonial pe-riod with more than 300 illustrations accompanied by a sixteenth-centuryalphabetic text. The illustrations in particular stunned the scholars withtheir vivid and detailed description of Aztec daily life, agriculture, reli-gion, birds, plants, women’s dress, and colonial practices such as land andlabor distribution, tax collection, and church construction. Furthermore,the Codex Cardona contains two extraordinary maps that describe Mexico-Tenochtitlan and neighboring cities such as Tlatelolco and Culhuacan.These maps may be the most detailed and informative from among allknown surviving maps of these areas. Bauer asserts that the Codex Cardonaprovides more ethnographic information than any of the other colonialcodices such as the Codex Mendoza and the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (17).However, the unknown provenance, the elusive and secretive ownership,and the material from which the codex was made have led some lead-ing scholars of Aztec studies to question its authenticity. Bauer addressesthese concerns about the Codex Cardona through a combination of scholarlyresearch and creative imagination.

Bauer’s story begins in 1985 when Stanford University asked the CrokerLaboratory at the University of California, Davis to verify the authenticityof the Codex Cardona, which had been offered for sale. In the end, the dealdid not go through, and the codex was returned to the owner. Bauer wasdeeply impressed by the codex, but he did not begin his research on thisdocument until 2004. During his research, Bauer learned that the CodexCardona had first appeared at Sotheby’s London in 1982, then at the GettyMuseum in Los Angeles in 1985, and at Christie’s in New York in 1998.None of the negotiations were successful, and the codex subsequently dis-appeared from the public eye. According to Bauer, all of these institutionsfelt that the document’s murky provenance and the secretive nature of theowner raised too many doubts about its authenticity. The owner neverwished to reveal his identity, and the details about how he came to ownthe document were lacking in detail or not credible. Furthermore, severalleading scholars who examined the codex warned of the possibility that itwas a forgery. Gordon Brotherston, H. B. Nicholson, and Stephen Colstonall argued that if the codex were an authentic product of the sixteenth cen-tury, then it probably wouldn’t be made from indigenous paper (“amatl”)but rather European paper like other contemporary codices such as the

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Codex Mendoza and the Codex Telleriano-Remensis. Despite these objections,Bauer and other specialists seem to believe that the Codex Cardona was asixteenth-century product. Anthony Pagden, for example, enthusiasticallyendorsed the authenticity of the codex for Sotheby, and in her evaluationfor Christie’s, Stephanie Wood, although reserving definitive judgment,emphasizes the evidence in favor of authenticity. After its final public ap-pearance at Christie’s in 1998, Bauer traces the Codex Cardona to ownersin Mexico, who claim to have lost the document. Bauer concludes that thecodex may no longer exist in its original form, because the current owner,who is aware of the problems posed by its ambiguous provenance, thelegally dubious claims of ownership, and the risk of illegal trafficking incultural patrimony might have decided to sell the codex piece by piece(169-170).

The Search for the Codex Cardona is an imaginative literary text as well.In his search for the codex, Bauer frequently inserts fictional episodes in-formed by his research. Considering the possibility that the codex was aforgery, Bauer creates a short story in which the famous anthropologistRobert Barlow fabricates the codex. Searching for the owner of the codex,Bauer imagines a Spanish hotelero whose quixotic perspective makes himindifferent towards notions of ‘authenticity.’ In addition to these imag-inative stories, the author also frequently weaves his personal life andmemories of his family, friends, and colleagues into the main plot. It isunusual to find such fictional elements in scholarly texts, but the subjectmatter of this book is highly relevant to the field of Aztec studies.

The Search for the Codex Cardona is an amusing, informative, and nov-elistic scholarly book. It develops its topic rapidly with concise and shortsentences, which makes it easy to read. This book could serve undergrad-uate students and lay readers as an introduction to Mexican painted booksand graduate students and scholars as an introduction to the virtuallyunknown and now lost Codex Cardona, a possibly invaluable source of in-formation about the Aztecs. In this sense, The Search for the Codex Cardonamakes a unique contribution in that it focuses not on an available scholarlyresource but on one that has never been available and that may no longerexist.

Jongsoo LeeDepartment of Foreign Languages and Literatures

University of North Texas

HOLIDAY IN MEXICO: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON TOURISM AND TOURIST

ENCOUNTERS. Eds. Dina Berger and Andrew Grant Wood. Durham: DukeUP, 2010, pp. x+394. $24.95.

This collection of essays is a welcome addition to the burgeoning num-ber of histories of tourism. Until recently, the field has focused mostly on

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North America and Europe, as well as American and European travel-ers in the colonies. This emphasis means a conspicuous lack of studies ofmany places that were leading tourist destinations in the twentieth cen-tury and continue to be so today. Holiday in Mexico begins to remedy thisproblem.

Among the book’s strengths are the wide range of what gets called“tourism” and the connections drawn between pleasure travel and otherrealms. Andrea Boardman’s essay on US soldiers in Mexico in 1847-48and Lisa Pinley Covert’s chapter on artists teaching and studying in post-World War II San Miguel de Allende demonstrate the overlap betweenpleasure travel and other activities. Dina Berger notes the importance oftourism in diplomatic efforts to improve the strained relationship betweenMexico and the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.

The contributors also demonstrate that tourism is intimately tied toother forms of mobility and to the viability of local communities. BianetCastellanos examines the regional economy in which Maya migrate fromrural Yucatan to work in service jobs in Cancun while Mexicans fromother states take higher-level positions, all to serve foreign visitors. An-drew Sackett, writing about Acapulco in the 1940s and 1950s, details hownational elites’ appropriation of land and resources to serve tourists leftresidents homeless and lacking basic municipal services. Through inter-views with locals in Acapulco, Oaxaca, and Amecameca, Barbara Kasel-stein shows that the relative success of the tourism industry, local involve-ment in its organization, and whether visitors are Mexican or foreign makea big difference to residents’ attitudes toward it.

The recasting of ancient sites and practices as “heritage” has been crit-ical to Mexico’s ability to attract tourists and was a pervasive feature oftwentieth-century tourism. The politics of this process is a central theme inChristina Bueno’s analysis of the reconstruction of Teotihuacan in prepa-ration for the 1910 Centenario, Andrew Grant Wood’s essay on the revivalof Veracruz’s carnival in the 1930s, and Pinley Covert’s tale of the transfor-mation of San Miguel de Allende into a “typical” town. The latter two alsodemonstrate that local and state leaders played a critical role in buildingMexico’s tourist industry.

However, the role of heritage seems to have become less important bythe late twentieth century, thanks to the rise of neoliberalism. Mary K. Cof-fey analyzes changes in the presentation of Mexican folk art to Americansand their effect on artisans’ ability to make a living. The Escalera Nauticaprogram, Alex M. Saragoza’s subject, implies a placelessness at odds withthe earlier emphasis on Mexican distinctiveness. This project, like Aca-pulco before it, has faltered because of poor planning and corruption.

Mexican food, like folk art, circulates widely outside of Mexico andhelps to form foreign impressions of Mexico, as Jeffrey M. Pilcher demon-strates in examining changes in the way that Americans have consumedMexican drinks and dishes. Addressing other forms of consumption, EricSchantz outlines the success of state and national leaders in milking

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Americans’ desire to gamble, drink, and buy sex to fill both Tijuana’scoffers and personal bank accounts.

These essays address a broad range of issues and raise as many ques-tions as they settle, the mark of good research in a relatively untilled field.Neither Coffey nor Pilcher consider how the consumption of Mexican folkart or food or their changing modes of production might affect consumers.Nearly all of the essays assume that “tourism” means “foreign tourism,”just as the Mexican government has, but Kaselstein and, to a lesser degree,Sackett and Wood note that domestic tourism is also important.

I would have liked the authors to place their work in relationship totourism history more consistently, for the study of Mexican tourism shouldloom as large among scholars of the industry as Mexico does among theworld’s tourists. The local and national contexts are critical, as is the UnitedStates as the main source of Mexico’s tourists, but the market for tourism—and histories of tourism—is global. For example, Veracruz’s carnival wasonly one of many to be revived for the sake of tourism during the twentiethcentury. Acapulco, Cancun, and the Escalera Nautica are three importantmoments in the gradual rise of seaside resorts from English peculiarityto global commonplace. The uses and abuses of indigenous histories andpeoples are widespread in settler society tourism. But these absences willsurely be addressed if, as should happen, both historians of Mexico andhistorians of tourism read this book.

Catherine CocksHistorian, Writer, and Editor

AFTERSHOCKS: EARTHQUAKES AND POPULAR POLITICS IN LATIN AMERICA. Eds.Jurgen Buchenau and Lyman L. Johnson. Albuquerque: U New MexicoP, 2009, pp. x+236, $29.95.

As the aftermath of the 2010 catastrophes in Haiti (January 12) andChile (February 27) has shown, earthquakes represent much more thanthe shifting of tectonic plates. They have the ability to turn society on itshead and to crack the power-laden and hierarchical crust of the social,cultural, and political structures that have dominated Latin American so-ciety, laying bare these structures to be reshaped by those who normallywould not have the ability to affect them. Editors Jurgen Buchenau andLyman Johnson have compiled seven essays on the history of earthquakesin Latin America. Based on the concept that earthquakes have a “spe-cial place in the region’s consciousness” (4), the essays demonstrate howearthquakes’ aftermath, beyond physical destruction, includes the popu-lar and state responses to disaster, effects on politics, and on the region’sreligious identity, both in the interpretation of the reasons for the earth-quakes and the response of the religious communities. Taken as a whole,this book provides the reader with an array of views on the effects of

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earthquakes on Latin American society as well as many new perspectiveson its history.

Earthquakes create crises that demand political reactions, in whateverform they come. Several articles scrutinize the response (or lack of re-sponse) that the state made in the areas of reconstruction, distribution ofrelief supplies, and attention to the injured and dead. Stuart McCook’sessay on the 1812 Caracas earthquake shows how the nascent republic’sinability to respond to the demands of the citizenry following the quakeled to a decline in support for the patriot government, contributing to itscollapse. Paul Dosal recounts the bungled response and nefarious actionsof the Somoza regime following the 1972 earthquake in Managua: Tachito’skleptocratic mishandling of the relief effort delegitimized his dictatorialregime, providing fuel for the opposition which, when lit by the Chamorroassassination in 1978, led to his ouster by the Sandinistas.

The state was not the only entity to respond to the effects of earthquakes;civil society also reacted to their challenges. Mark Healey chronicles therelief efforts led by Juan Peron and his government in Argentina afteran earthquake leveled the city of San Juan in 1944. Healey shows howcivil society—in this case the powerful wine growers, the conservativepolitical and economic elite, and the Catholic Church—banded togetherto challenge the state’s plans of rebuilding San Juan in a more seismologi-cally stable location and to agitate for a rigorous building code. After the1985 Mexico City earthquake, according to Louise E. Walker, the middleclass of the Tlatelolco neighborhood drew upon its extensive experienceof protest and organization emerging from 1968 to deal with the effectsof the earthquake, to supplement the relief effort, and to assure that theirdemands, including rebuilding fallen buildings, would be met. SamuelMartland also scrutinizes the role of class in the rebuilding of Valparaıso,Chile. The elite neighborhood of El Almendral was the hardest-hit sectionof the booming port, as the “solid” buildings of the elite neighborhoodsdid not hold up to the force of the earthquake. The port’s poor neighbor-hoods built on the stable hills saw less damage; the earthquake thus turnedsociety’s assumptions about class on their head (86). Earthquakes, theseauthors show, have the ability to affect politics like little else.

Another key theme in Aftershocks is religion. Earthquakes have tra-ditionally been interpreted as God’s wrath for society straying from Hiscommandments. In his essay on the 1746 Lima earthquake, Charles Walkershows how the event was just one of several (along with popular revoltsand epidemics) that were interpreted as ‘divine wrath.’ Walker makes ef-fective use of the voices of nuns and other religious figures to demonstratehow earthquakes and other evidence of divine wrath speak to the declineof Lima after 1650 and the general despair of the late colonial period.Likewise, many in Venezuela interpreted the Caracas earthquake of HolyThursday, 1812 as divine wrath. The interpretation of its origin, however,differed: royalists thought it was God’s way of expressing displeasure withVenezuela’s “religious and political apostasy” and as a call for Venezuela

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to return to the crown and the church (48-9), while among the citizenry, theearthquake was interpreted as a condemnation of their individual sins. Pa-triots rejected the idea of divine punishment, interpreting the earthquakeinstead as a natural catastrophe with no theological meaning. The Caracasquake occurred at a crucial point in history, with the emergence of the En-lightenment and the dawning of independence throughout Latin America;McCook demonstrates how different parties interpreted the event in suchdiverse ways. Virginia Garrard-Burnett’s essay on the effects of the 1976Guatemala “class-quake” argues that the role of churches during the re-lief effort led to a decline in popularity of the Catholic Church and a risein Protestantism (from 4 percent to 25 percent by 1980). The growth inProtestantism was due to many factors, but the efforts of the Protestantsin the relief effort drew many into their Church. These essays demonstratethat natural disasters and religion go hand-in-hand.

The articles range from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, cover-ing every region of Latin America. The volume can serve as an excitingaddition to a class on natural disasters or Latin American history. In short,this is a compilation replete with new ideas about history that often chal-lenges what we know about the interplay between politics and nature.This book shows us how Latin America really works by scrutinizing theregion when the political, social, and economic structure has been throwninto extreme disarray.

Nathan ClarkeDepartment of History

Minnesota State University Moorhead

THE ECUADOR READER. Eds. Carlos de la Torre and Steve Striffler. Durham:Duke UP, 2008, pp 480, 41 illus., $24.95.

Carlos de la Torre and Steve Striffler contribute a much needed vol-ume to the Duke University Press Latin American Reader Series since thesmall Andean nation of Ecuador is a country often overlooked by scholars.The perception is somewhat dispelled by this anthology of histories, es-says, stories, poems, travel accounts and even recipes. The editors’ statedpurpose is to provide a “deeper understanding of Ecuador” through a sam-pling of perspectives from a wide variety of Ecuadorian voices from alllevels of society. The reader is exposed to the views of politicians, artists,musicians, and intellectuals as well as ordinary and even anonymousEcuadorians. In addition to Ecuadorian voices, the anthology includes themusings of several outside observers. This refreshing approach will appealto the multidisciplinary reader but could prove frustrating to one seekingmore depth in a particular topic.

De la Torre and Striffler acknowledge that several themes emergethroughout the work. The most important, in their view, is the

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historical battle by marginal groups, especially indigenous peoples andAfro-Ecuadorians, for justice and acceptance by Ecuador’s majority white-mestizo population. Therefore each of the six major sections of the collec-tion that range from the Conquest to the present contain writings thatpresent the plight of the oppressed and concomitantly criticize the oppres-sors: the Spanish, Creoles, the mestizo elite, missionaries both Catholic andProtestant, multinational corporations and, not as convincingly, tourists.

Each section starts with an introductory essay followed by the selec-tions (which are often abridged). The first section examines Ecuador’s pre-Columbian and colonial period and is the strongest part of the entire work.The essays ably document Ecuador’s resistance to outside domination, itsmarginal status within the Spanish Empire, and its unique creativity in thearts.

Subsequent sections, however, do not match this initial success. For ex-ample, Part II, The New Nation, opens with a very brief essay that does notadequately address the problems of nascent nationhood including conflictsbetween Liberals and Conservatives, regional differences, or accusationsthat the new nation’s first president, Juan Jose Flores, was Venezuelan.While these problems are mentioned briefly, the articles in the section dolittle to provide an understanding of the immense internal conflicts thatEcuador faced between 1830 and 1925. The article, “Mountaineering on theEquator: A Historical Perspective” by Rob Rachowieki seems particularlirrelevant. The following part, The Rise of the Popular, also has some curi-ous choices. While the editors include a speech and letter from Ecuador’smost famous populist caudillo, Jose Marıa Velasco Ibarra, they also in-clude two travel accounts by foreigners and a tourist promotional pieceby Raphael V. Lasso, the founder of the Ecuadorian Chamber of Com-merce. How these pieces relate to Ecuadorian populism is not adequatelyexplained.

The most glaring omission from the Reader is a section on Ecuador’sinternational relations. For example, Ecuador’s long-standing territorialdispute with Peru over a vast area in the upper reaches of the Amazon,known as the Oriente, is hardly mentioned. This dispute was historicallyEcuador’s most vexing international problem and the subject of intensedebate and popular demonstrations from 1941 until its resolution in 1998.The definition of Ecuador as an “Amazonian Nation” resonates with mostEcuadorians to the present day. An excerpt from David Zook’s Zarumilla-Maranon: The Ecuador-Peru Dispute or Bryce Wood’s Aggression and History:The Case of Ecuador and Peru would have been welcome additions to theGlobal Currents chapter.

The fifth chapter of the Reader provides a couple of bright spots. It ex-amines the emergence of the indigenous political involvement, women’sissues, environmental concerns about the Galapagos Islands and theAfro-Ecuadorian population in Esmeraldas Province. Sarah A. Radcliffe’s“Women’s Movements in Twentieth-Century Ecuador” is particularly in-structive as it brings to light an often neglected aspect of Ecuador’s social

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and political history. Norman E. Whitten’s article on Afro-Ecuadorian cul-ture is also fascinating and expertly presented.

The final section, Culture and Identities Redefined, evaluates recent trendsthat have caused a reassessment of “commonly held beliefs about themeaning of nationhood- What it means to be Ecuadorian.” The impacts ofmigration, dollarization, globalization, and ethnic identity are presented inthe introductory essay and succeeding selections. The effects of migrationto the United States and Spain are outlined in two articles, “Ecuadorian In-ternational Migration” and “Cities of Women,” by far the most interestingaspect of this section.

While the Reader has its shortcomings, it is nevertheless a welcomesource of information and insight into the enigma that is Ecuador. Its great-est contribution is the inclusion of works by or about Ecuador’s marginal-ized groups. The Reader should be considered for adoption as a case studyin a course on Latin American Civilization or as a supplemental text in aspecialty course on the Andean nations.

George M. LauderbaughDepartment of History

Jacksonville State University

RIVER OF TEARS: COUNTRY MUSIC, MEMORY AND MODERNITY IN BRAZIL. ByAlexander Sebastian Dent. Durham: Duke UP, 2009, pp. 297, $23.95.

Can the tension between two relatively unknown forms of Braziliancountry music be used to explore how musical genres are sustained, cul-tural values performed, neoliberalism supported, and modernity inter-preted? Yes, when someone as insightful as anthropologist Alexander Se-bastian Dent seeks to understand the grief over the 1998 death of Leandro,of the popular Brazilian country music dupla (duo) Leandro and Leonardo.

When Dent began his ethnographic work in Campinas (in Sao Paulostate), he was surprised by the intense public mourning over Leandro’sdeath. This showed him the centrality of two rural Brazilian musical genreshe had barely heard of. Musica sertaneja (cowboy music) was defined as dif-ferent from (but originating in) the more traditional musica caipira (hillbillymusic), and his growing interest in both of these two rural Brazilian cul-tural forms was “nervously trivialized” by his hosts. This only deepenedDent’s interest, and in River of Tears he uses performances and interpreta-tions of these country music styles to understand performativity, genericboundaries, and the neoliberal period in post-authoritarian Brazil.

At the heart of his analysis (and the music he analyzes) is a se-ries of tensions: rural-urban; tradition-progress; past-present; heart-head;male-female; reason-emotion; local-cosmopolitan; national-international.He shows that these are not the simple dichotomies they are often taken tobe. Dent gently skewers the nostalgia (in scholars, performers, and fans)

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that locates authenticity in rural life and purity in the past. But he alsoteases out the interpretive work these dichotomies actually do—in songlyrics, interviews, performance spaces, and conversations. In his analy-sis, these discursive dichotomies become rich, evocative ways to exploreambivalences about progress and modernity.

It is striking how much these two genres of Brazilian country musicmirror the tensions between modern and supposedly traditional US coun-try music. In both cases, the traditional form is acoustic, nasal, live, andlocal; the contemporary is electronic, smooth, broadcast, and cosmopoli-tan. Scholars, fans and performers of both US and Brazilian traditionalcountry music tell their history as one of lost authenticity; defenders ofnewer forms talk about innovation and pleasing the public.

Overall, Dent seeks to correct the nostalgic strain in popular musicscholarship. He successfully shows how much richer and more interestingit is to explore musical generic differences as discursive practices, ratherthan as a fall from grace, or as a consequence of “more real” social, eco-nomic, or political conditions.

This means that his analysis all but ignores the economic and institu-tional elements of Brazilian country music in favor of performative ele-ments. The focus of his book is how people talk, think about, and performthe two forms of Brazilian country music. Dent even learned to play thequintessential musica caipira instrument—the ten-string guitar called theviola. This enacted his commitment to understanding popular music asmusic, rather than as “really” about something else, like migration, class,or gender.

In all kinds of cultural forms, fans protect and defend generic bound-aries. Traditionalists want to keep their form free from the “taint” ofthe contemporary and commercial. Dent contrasts the traditionalists withwhat he calls “genre mutationists” (102) who take pride in continual, inno-vative generic mixture. In the case of both Brazilian and US country music,the mutationists eagerly incorporate new elements, staying rural in orien-tation but using musical styles associated with the present, not the past.This drives traditionalists crazy, but mutationists believe they are makingthe music “interesting” or “contemporary” while still remaining true to itsessence or heart. That this blurring of generic division usually appeals toa wider audience is why traditionalists can claim that mutationists have“sold out.”

Dent’s work inevitably begins with what people actually do and say,rather than with theories, to explain cultural phenomena. In a subtle chap-ter that shows how scholars and journalists construct the rural as a zoneof disempowerment, Dent refutes “the insistence that rural migrants arethe music’s sole fans, the notion that the music hails from an entirelyseparate economic segment traceable through material means, and thetheory that the music involves an unwanted commercialization of a oncepure space” (160). In Dent’s account, materialist, literalist, and formalistapproaches to cultural production are (to my mind rightly) discarded in

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favor of interpretive methods that treat music as meaningful, participatorypractice.

Toward the end of the book Dent quotes his undergraduate teacherJames A. Boon about the “refractory” nature of ethnography (211). Boththe strength and weakness of River of Tears is its kaleidoscope quality. Itconstantly shifts from specific to general, from practice to theory, fromdiscipline to discipline, from exposition to critique, and from detail tosummary. And even though Dent works hard to explain his terms, locatehis arguments, and directly engage the reader, this fragmentary qualitycan make for a dense and sometimes disorienting read. But for scholars ofpopular music, or Brazil, or Latin American public culture, it offers a troveof insights and evidence. And for any scholar interested in how popularculture can and should be studied, River of Tears is an impressive exampleof the power and delights of theoretically informed ethnography.

Joli JensenDepartment of Communication

University of Tulsa

THE DICTATOR’S SEDUCTION: POLITICS AND THE POPULAR IMAGINATION IN THE

ERA OF TRUJILLO. By Lauren Derby. Durham: Duke UP, 2009, pp. 432,$25.95.

Over the past several years there has been an increase in the publica-tion of books about the Dominican Republic and Dominicans in the UnitedStates. This can be partly attributed to the increase of Dominican commu-nities in cities such as New York, D.C., Miami, and Boston. Moreover,Dominican and Dominican-American writers who underscore the trialsand tribulations of the immigrant experience are becoming more visible inthe mainstream print. For scholars and the general public trying to under-stand the Dominican Republic at the beginning of the twenty-first century,certain recurring themes within Dominican historiography—from makingsense of the Rafael L. Trujillo dictatorship (1930-1961) and his legacy tothe evasive and historical role of democracy in the Dominican Republic—continue to pose challenging questions. The existing historiography onTrujillo and his long-lived regime has, for the most part, focused on therepressive nature and “sultanistic” excesses of the cruel dictatorship. Tru-jillo’s fucu or curse has lingered over hi nation for over forty years. It iswith Trujillo’s regime that this fucu is questioned and challenged in LaurenDerby’s The Dictator’s Seduction.

Trujillo’s dictatorship was one of the longest and most brutal regimesin Latin American and Caribbean history. His ability was to apparentlyenact the impossible. As Derby illustrates, he survived three major coupattempts by invasions led by exiles, one with support from former Cubanleader Fidel Castro and the Venezuelan president Romulo Betancourt.

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Furthermore, Trujillo managed to kill his opponents in cities as far away asNew York and Caracas; it was known among various circles that Trujillohad the young Spanish scholar Jesus de Galındez murdered because ofhis Columbia University thesis on the harshness of the regime. Trujillo’slarger-than-life persona was also a product of the multitude of titles, ranks,decorations, medals, and prizes granted by servile cronies and more thantwenty foreign governments and organizations. He even earned the ill-deserved Great Collar of Democracy and Great Medal of ExtraordinaryMerit. In addition, all public works were framed as personal gifts fromTrujillo, so that the presidential personal came to be seamlessly identifiedwith the modernization and development of the country.

The Dictator’s Seduction is a cultural history of the regime as it was ex-perienced by Dominicans in Santo Domingo. By centering on everydayforms of political domination, Derby describes how the regime infiltratedcivil society based on popular idioms of masculinity and fantasies of race,ethnicity, and class mobility. Derby argues that the most intriguing as-pect of the dictatorship was how it appropriated practices such as gossipand gift exchange. She points out that Trujillo not only controlled the Do-minican Republic but also became the political machine; he establishedand directed every aspect of the island from the courts to bureaucrats.The nation’s economy was run as the dictator’s own personal corporationand political progress was completely dominated by his own Partido Do-minicano (Dominican Party). In chapter two, Derby discusses in detail howTrujillo changed the physical appearance of the country, and especially thecapital city of Santo Domingo, by developing housing projects, museums,libraries, parks, and hotels. He even changed the name of Santo Domingoto Ciudad Trujillo, which represented the center of state power. BecauseTrujillo controlled the press, radio, and television networks he had thesemedia outlets centering on the good words of the regime.

What is fascinating about Derby’s study is her ability to pull from avariety of primary sources to support her methodology and topics ad-dressed throughout text. Her study draws on several important and un-tapped archival documents from international and domestic repositoriesin addition to oral histories that reveal the voices of the popular masses.At the Archivo General de la Nacion (AGN) in the Dominican Repub-lic, the author uncovered numerous photographs and rarely used letters,correspondences, and maps that unveiled the many stories surroundingTrujillo’s life, his policies, and those individuals that were heavily involvedin the regime. This is best illustrated in chapter three, where the authordiscusses the 1955 Free World’s Fair of Peace and Confraternity, and thedepiction of Porfirio Rubirosa as the ultimate Dominican playboy of the1950s. With these two chapters Derby captures the essence of the regimeand the state fetishism that surround it (205).

The regime tremendously influenced and altered Dominican popularculture. Derby’s concluding chapters discuss the aftermath of Trujillo’sassassination and the popular healing of Dios Olivorio Mateo Ledesma

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(Papa Liborio) better known as Olivorismo, which emerged along thesouthwest region of San Juan de Maguana along the Dominican-Haitianfrontier. Here Derby analyzes how Trujillo’s power trickled down andinfluenced the masses. Trujillo and his regime hoped to create the imageof a modern nation through various activities and certain individuals.Derby reminds readers how the state went out of its way to display thosewho came to be associated with power and prestige.

Christina Violeta JonesNational Archives and Records Administration

College Park, Maryland

BRAZIL, LYRIC, AND THE AMERICAS. By Charles A. Perrone. Gainesville: UPof Florida, 2010, pp. 251, $69.95.

Is Brazil a poetic island? That seems to be the big question that motivatesthe book reviewed here. And if the answer seems to be yes, at least if weconsider, as the author does, that Brazil is “Latin America’s largest andyet only Portuguese-speaking nation” (xiii), then one must also ask whatis the position of Brazilian poetry in relation to the poetry of other nationsin the same hemisphere. Better yet, one needs to ponder what are thepoetic challenges faced by its poets due to that isolation and the strategiesused by them in order to deal with issues such as linguistic differences, thetraditional perception of place or even nation, and the use of nontraditionalvehicles of dissemination, as well as the possibilities of mass-media andelectronic technologies when considering a poetry produced in a countrythat does not share the “hegemonic cultural behaviors of North Americaand the linguistically unified spheres of Spanish America” (12).

Confronted with these dilemmas and the demands of an increasinglyglobalized world, Brazilian lyric production engages in highly experimen-tal and innovative ways of artistic creation, as this book demonstrates,in which America often is a metaphor for experimentation, invention,and freedom. Although that has been the case historically, such reality hasnever been more evident and necessary than now when “present-day poetsin nations such as Brazil carry on textual, practical, and diplomatic conver-sations with foreign interlocutors as never before, most notably within thehemisphere” (5). It is not surprising, then, that this highly original volumefocuses on how Brazilian poetry and lyrics establish a dialogue with theircounterparts throughout the continent, while discussing poetry, film, mu-sic, and other cultural articulations of the English- and Spanish-speakingsocieties.

Divided in seven chapters, one of which is a conclusion, and precededby a very brief introduction, the volume covers a wide range of aspects re-lated to poetry, culture, mass media and new technologies. The first chap-ter, a de facto introduction, is an excellent example of the rigorous work

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Book Reviews

of the volume, and it traces the uses of the terms America, Latin America,isolation, globalization, and even Brazil, using Deleuze’s and Guattari’sconcept of deterritorialization as a guide. The second and the third chap-ters deal with the relationship between Brazilian poetry and the culture,poetry, and language of the Unites States. The chapters acknowledge andleave somehow unresolved Brazilian intellectuals’ and artists’ use of En-glish, which depending on one’s position can be seen as “an indication ofAnglo-American imperialism and cultural penetration, as a manifestationof mental colonization, as an act of negotiation for symbolic capital andprestige, as a demonstration of erudition or fashion consciousness” (35),amongst many other possibilities, including international pragmatism, orartistic admiration as well.

Chapter four centers on the ways America (the Americas) has beeninterpreted and recreated by Brazilian poets, primarily the epic poems ofSousandrade (O Guesa), Ronald de Carvalho (Toda a America), and MarcusAccioly (Latinoamerica). These epic works carry the voice of the peoples ofthe continent, while offering a continental spirit, and “provide a historicalbreadth from the pre-Columbian era to the postmodern days” (103) in anattempt to summarize centuries of struggles, domination, and conquest.Chapter 5 (“Banda Hispanica”), as its title reveals, centers solely on therelationship, not always happy, between Brazil and Spanish America, par-ticularly in the last two decades. As Perrone points out, Brazil has beenappreciated and known in Spanish America largely because of its popu-lar culture, particularly its music, but its literature remains unknown andabove all understudied, despite the attempts of critics like Horacio Costa orJose Guilherme Merquior, both of whom lived in Mexico—as a professorand as an ambassador, respectively.

Chapter six reviews the phenomenon of popular music and its implica-tions for a transamerican consciousness from the tropicalismo of the 1960s tothe more modern rhythms of the 1990s, in particular of the “mangue beat.”Of special interest in this chapter is the discussion of the importance ofJorge Mautner, a lesser-known figure of the movement, who has long beendue for a vindication. The last chapter, cleverly called “(In)Conclusion,”rather than closing the volume, opens it to other possibilities. As the au-thor writes, this book is not a study of a poet, a generation, or a period ofnational poetry, but “an appreciation of text-makers and sets of texts thatsing and speak to shared interests in hemispheric awareness” (187).

Highly inventive, complex, and diverse, like Brazil, this book engagesin a conversation with other genres and other traditions; and like Brazil,it rises like an island in the academic publishing field of Latin Ameri-can studies where by far the themes favored are those related to SpanishAmerica.

R. Hernandez RodrıguezWorld Languages and Literatures Department

Southern Connecticut State University

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HITLER’S MAN IN HAVANA: HEINZ LUNING AND NAZI ESPIONAGE IN LATIN

AMERICA. By Thomas Schnoonover. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2008,pp. 256, $29.95.

The continued popularity of Ian Fleming’s fictional character JamesBond in the post-Cold War world epitomizes man’s fascination with es-pionage. Unlike the suave Bond, who always overcame apparently in-surmountable obstacles and was successful in all of his missions, manyspies were inept amateurs who provided scant information of value. Alltoo frequently, however, many governments have conducted high pro-file espionage trials that exaggerate the effectiveness of captured spies inan effort to boost national morale during wartime. Recent scholarship onMata Hari, the infamous World War I spy, posits that the Dutch performerwas neither a competent dancer nor a spy. In Femme Fatale: Love, Lies, andthe Unknown Life of Mata Hari (2008), Pat Shipman argues that Mata Hariwas a naive scapegoat for a demoralized French military that suffered nu-merous humiliations during World War I. In Hitler’s Man in Havana: HeinzLuning and Nazi Espionage in Latin America, Thomas Schoonover providesthe reader with a similar story. Schoonover, a professor emeritus of historyat the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, reveals the fascinating storyof Heinz Luning, the only German spy executed in Latin America duringWorld War II.

Schoonover’s interest in Luning was kindled during a dinner party withLouis A. Perez, Jr., a professor of history at the University of North Car-olina, Chapel Hill, in 2001. Excited by a topic that has received virtually nocoverage from historians, Schoonover began an intensive four-year searchin American, British, German, and Cuban archives to unravel the mysterysurrounding Luning. The author’s investigation included a Freedom ofInformation Act request for Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) mate-rials on Luning, which uncovered a file containing 4000 pages. Much toSchoonover’s chagrin, many of the pages in the file were heavily censoredor denied to the author. The FBI files made available, however, convincedSchoonover that “Luning’s story was subject to spin, manipulation, anddistortion” (xvii). The Allied claim that Luning was the mastermind be-hind a spy ring in the Caribbean responsible for the sinking of hundredsof Allied merchant ships “had less to do with his actions and more todo with the real and perceived success of German and other Axis landand sea campaigns in 1942” (xvii). Clearly, the Allies, in an attempt toboost morale at home, were seeking a scapegoat for Allied setbacks in theCaribbean during the early months of American participation in WorldWar II.

Schoonover details that Luning was a bungling and reluctant spy whojoined the Abwehr (the German military intelligence organization) in July1941 only to avoid military service. Luning never mastered the skillsneeded to be a successful spy at the Abwehr spy school in Hamburg. Ac-cording to Schoonover, “The only ‘James Bond’ characteristics he learned

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well were how to find girls and drinks” (54). Significantly, Schoonoverposits that the Abwehr realized that Luning was incompetent and usedhim as a decoy to misdirect Allied efforts at unveiling other, more sig-nificant, German espionage activities in Latin America. Luning, who wasnever able to assemble his radio, sent a series of forty-four secret ink mes-sages to Germany that were virtually useless. In addition to the fact that hiscommunications took weeks to arrive at German military headquarters,Luning “misnumbered the messages and mixed the inks improperly” (56).On 31 August 1942, Luning was captured by Allied agents. At his trial,“the unsubstantiated and erroneous charge that Luning’s contact with U-Boats took Cuban lives” led to his execution on 10 November 1942 (110).Schoonover asserts that executing Luning “contributed nothing to reduc-ing German U-Boat activity or success. It did, however, greatly increase thepublic perception that Cuba and the United States were turning aroundan important part of the war against the Axis” (120).

Schoonover’s study is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the roleof Latin America in World War II. Hitler’s Man in Havana is also an excitingtale that should be of interest to fans of espionage novels. Schoonoverargues that novelist Graham Greene, who had first-hand knowledge ofthe Luning case, based the protagonist of his novel Our Man in Havana(1958) on Luning. Schoonover’s portrayal of Luning is just as engaging (ifnot more so) as Greene’s portrayal of James Wormold.

Michael R. HallDepartment of History

Armstrong Atlantic State University

UNEVEN ENCOUNTERS: MAKING RACE AND NATION IN BRAZIL AND THE UNITED

STATES. By Micol Seigel. Durham: Duke UP, 2009, pp. 408, $24.95.

Micol Seigel’s book reads like an anthology of transnational encounters.She showcases some obscure and other better known cultural exchanges toshow how these early twentieth-century episodes shaped notions of raceand nation in Brazil and the United States. Uneven Encounters, through aneclectic cast of historical actors and ideas, posits that constructions of raceand nation are not separable but rather mutually constructed in dialogue.This dialogue, Seigel argues, consists of transnational encounters that peerinto a distant other to define race and nation in one’s own backyard.

Chapter 1 opens with an extensive textual analysis of advertisementsfor Brazilian coffee in the United States. She sees advertising as represent-ing the transition from a producer to a consumer-centered North Americansociety, arguing that “consumerism is a racially discriminatory national-ism” (16). She reads coffee advertisements as trying to create domesticand racial understandings in the United States, looking at magazines andposters that portrayed a black servant serving coffee as a form of work folk

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wisdom, to others that portrayed romanticized Latin figures as produc-ers of coffee, to others showing barebacked blacks bearing coffee sacks asfetish of imperial consumption. Seigel notes that after the mostly Brazilian-funded advertising committee was extinguished, Brazil vanished fromcoffee ads; she sees this as a backlash towards Brazil’s coffee valoriza-tion policy, making the point that Brazilian agency shaped consumeristnationalism in the United States. Yet others could also jump to anotherconclusion: that the new advertising simply was not financed by Braziliancoffee planters and thus did not feature them. Considering the innova-tive transnational methodology employed by Seigel, it seems odd thatthis chapter does not consider the effects of coffee’s power in constructingPaulista or Brazilian nationalism.

Seigel then shifts her analysis to the music and dance of Brazilian maxixeand its short-lived fad in the United States. She correctly finds that the earlytwentieth century rather than the bossa nova era was the first instance oftransnational collaboration on music between Brazilians and Americans.However, arguing that “metropolitan subjects joyously, ravenously soughtto consume the colonial world in popular cultural form” (70) seems toreify metropolitan-periphery relations as culturally unequal rather thancomplicate them. One could argue that contrasting this fascination by“exotic” dances with the vogue of jazz in Brazil could have been a muchmore powerful analytical tool, positing a question that more scholars seemunwilling to ask: how does the periphery consume and “exoticize” thecultural production of the metropolis?

Chapter 3 skillfully traces the transnational travels and artistic influ-ences of Pixinguinha and other Brazilian artists. Here, Seigel makes aconvincing case for unevenness in metropolis-periphery relationships,since American sheet music companies had subsidiaries in Brazil sell-ing their melodies, but rarely bringing music back north. The influence ofBrazilian on American musicians was instead made in transnational andAfro-diasporic sites of interaction, such as 1920s Paris where artists oftenperformed and met. It was with the acceptance of Brazilian music abroadthat elites embraced Brazil as a racially mixed nation, sending the mod-ernistas towards their folkloric roots. It took Paris to accept Brazilianness.Chapter 4 focuses on two artists and their superb skills at “drag” and “pass-ing,” phenomena the author understands as the usage of foreign identitiesto negotiate a liminal space between two racial schemas (black/white ver-sus multiple gradations). In this fascinating case study that applies to muchmore than cultural performance, Seigel asserts that the widespread use ofsuch tactics and their effectiveness depended on either the audience’s ig-norance, or willingness to go along.

The final two chapters concentrate on the black press in Sao Paulo andits dialogue with its American counterpart, and make the book’s most in-cisive contribution to an understanding of the interrelationship betweenracial schema. Focusing on Sao Paulo’s various small print black news-papers, Seigel points out that their editors were embracing the notion of

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racial democracy for a decade before the publication of Gilberto Freyre’sMasters and Slaves. She shows how they simultaneously praised Americanmodernity, as participants in Sao Paulo’s fast-paced modernization, butalso deplored the racism of Americans, thus embracing Brazilian national-ism and fraternity rather than radical race militancy. Seigel thus displacesscholars who have argued that the myth of racial democracy was possi-ble in Brazil due to an ignorant lack of black identity, showing insteadhow blacks helped create and shape racial democracy. Here their un-evenness becomes clear: when a famous black American journalist visitedBrazil and spoke of his colonization plan to bring American blacks south,Brazilian blacks took the banner of nationalism and critiqued his ethno-centric purview whereby he thought Brazilians needed help. The debatesof these cosmopolitan black writers both north and south effectively showhow these transnational linkages helped shape race and nation in bothcountries.

Felipe CruzDepartment of History, graduate student

University of Texas-Austin

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