Documenting Latin America, Volume 1

Documenting Latin America focuses on the central themes of race, gender, and politics.

These themes are especially important for understanding and evaluating the history of Latin America, where identities were forged out of the conflicts, negotiations, and intermixing of peoples from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Documentary sources provide readers with the tools to develop a broad understanding of the course of Latin American social, cultural, and political history. Drawing upon labor, biographical, economic, and military histories, the book offers a unique blend of perspectives of history from both above and below, from under-studied as well as often-studied regions, and from a combination of archival and classic sources that will allow readers to engage in a meaningful way with the Latin American past.

Erin E. O’Connor is an associate professor of history at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. She has over a decade of teaching experience in both private and public institutions of higher education, where she has taught a wide variety of courses on Latin American and world history. O’Connor’s research has focused on gender, ethnicity, and nation-state formation in nineteenth-century Latin America, which she explored in her first monograph, Gender, Indian, Nation: The Contradictions of Making Ecuador, 1830-1925 (Arizona, 2007). Her current research scrutinizes the multiple public implications of domesticity in Spanish America, investigating how both elite and poor individuals and families engaged with changing gender laws.

Leo J. Garofalo is an associate professor of history at Connecticut College. Since 2000, he has taught majors and non-majors in the US and South America about colonial Latin America, the African Diaspora, modern politics and revolution, and immigration and migration issues. Garofalo's research explores the making of race in colonial Andean societies and the movement of people of African descent in the early Iberian worlds embracing three continents. His most recent book explores the impact of the Diaspora on the Americas and is co-authored with Kathryn Joy McKnight, Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-American Atlantic World, 1550-1812 (Hackett, 2009). Currently he is researching the experiences of black sailors, soldiers, and popular saints and how they carved out a place of belonging and respect for themselves within the Spanish and Portuguese empires.