Passion, Memory, and Identity: Twentieth-Century Latin American Jewish Writers

Throughout tropical urban Latin America, yellow fever wreaked havoc. Located at sea level, Guayaquil (Ecuador) and Puerto Barrios (Guatemala) were particularly susceptible to yellow fever; yet, Ecuadorians and Guatemalans enjoyed significant success in early twentieth-century campaigns against yellow fever. Reflecting international efforts that informed, collaborated with, and at times underwrote Latin American public health campaigns, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) sent representatives to Guatemala and Ecuador in the mid-1910s to eradicate yellow fever. While those interventions enjoyed immediate success, the long-term effects were more ambiguous. By collaborating with RF, Ecuador had all but eradicated yellow fever by 1919. In Guatemala, however, a few months after RF declared Guatemala free of yellow fever, influenza struck, likely originating from US military camps in Guatemala that RF sought to shield from yellow fever. Analysis of early twentieth-century yellow fever epidemics and campaigns to arrest them sheds light on COVID-19 pandemic challenges. Even as knowledge of disease etiology was evolving in Ecuador and Guatemala, most leaders accepted or at least did not publicly reject scientific medicine. In contrast, beginning with the most powerful politicians and filtering down throughout federal, state, and municipal authorities, many US leaders rejected science crucial to the campaigns against COVID-19. Similarly, in a pattern that resonates with US residents rejecting precautionary measures against COVID-19 such as wearing masks and maintaining social distance, compliance with anti-yellow fever campaigns was not always forthcoming.

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The Argentine Allusion: On the Significance of the Southern Cone in Early Twentieth-Century São Paulo

The Americas A Quarterly Review of Latin American History ◽

10.1017/tam.2020.37 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 78 (1) ◽

pp. 61-87

Author(s):

James P. Woodard

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Latin American ◽

Southern Cone ◽

Sao Paulo ◽

Spanish America ◽

São Paulo ◽

Periodical Press ◽

Home State ◽

American Intellectual ◽

The Difference

AbstractThis article examines a much cited but little understood aspect of the Latin American intellectual and cultural ferment of the 1910s and 1920s: the frequency with which intellectuals from the southeastern Brazilian state of São Paulo referred to developments in post Sáenz Peña Argentina, and to a lesser extent in Uruguay and Chile. In books, pamphlets, speeches, and the pages of a vibrant periodical press—all key sources for this article—São Paulo intellectuals extolled developments in the Southern Cone, holding them out for imitation, especially in their home state. News of such developments reached São Paulo through varied sources, including the writings of foreign travelers, which reached intellectuals and their publics through different means. Turning from circuits and sources to motives and meanings, the Argentine allusion conveyed aspects of how these intellectuals were thinking about their own society. The sense that São Paulo, in particular, might be “ready” for reform tending toward democratization, as had taken place in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, was accompanied by a belief in the difference of their southeastern state from other Brazilian states and its affinities with climactically temperate and racially “white” Spanish America. While these imagined affinities were soon forgotten, that sense of difference—among other legacies of this crucial period—would remain.

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LATIN-AMERICAN STUDIES: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The Year s Work in Modern Language Studies ◽

10.1163/22224297-90003560 ◽

1971 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 359-375

Author(s):

D. L. SHAW

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Latin American ◽

American Studies ◽

Latin American Studies

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Elites, Elite Settlements, and Revolutionary Movements in Latin America, 1950–1980: Introduction

Social Science History ◽

10.1017/s0145553200017156 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 18 (4) ◽

pp. 543-574

Author(s):

Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Latin America ◽

Latin American ◽

American Politics ◽

Social Revolution ◽

Latin American Politics ◽

Revolutionary Movements

Social revolutions as well as revolutionary movements have recently held great interest for both sociopolitical theorists and scholars of Latin American politics. Before we can proceed with any useful analysis, however, we must distinguish between these two related but not identical phenomena. Adapting Theda Skocpol’s approach, we can define social revolutions as “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by” mass-based revolts from below, sometimes in cross-class coalitions (Skocpol 1979: 4; Wickham-Crowley 1991:152). In the absence of such basic sociopolitical transformations, I will not speak of (social) revolution or of a revolutionary outcome, only about revolutionary movements, exertions, projects, and so forth. Studies of the failures and successes of twentieth-century Latin American revolutions have now joined the ongoing theoretical debate as to whether such outcomes occur due to society- or movement-centered processes or instead due to state- or regime-centered events (Wickham-Crowley 1992).

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