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This up-to-date, fully comprehensive textbook examines in detail every aspect of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, from Paleoindian times to the European intrusion. ... Read more

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Incredible book
as i am archaeologist, this is a good book to have a ancient cultural, ecological, archaeological backgrounf about mesoamerican civilization. it is really very gooooooooooooooood ... ... Read more

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Covers the geography, history, people, customs, and the arts of Mexico. ... Read more

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The Encyclopedia of Mexico presents a processual view of Mexican history, society and culture from ancient civilizations to the present day. The primary emphasis is on broad historiographic issues, although the encyclopedia includes many supplementary entries on people and specific events. The encyclopedia provides students, academics, librarians and the general reader with convenient access to basic bibliographic and factual data on specific events and broad processes in Mexican history. It promotes scholarly dialogue across disciplinary and national borders and provides a useful component for multi-disciplinary courses on Mexico. This two-volume encyclopedia contains some 600 entries and represents a collaborative effort that has involved more than 350 leading scholars from around the world. ... Read more

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One of Mexico’s foremost social and political chroniclers and its most celebrated cultural critic, Carlos Monsiváis has read the pulse of his country over the past half century. The author of five collections of literary journalism pieces called crónicas, he is perhaps best known for his analytic and often satirical descriptions of Mexico City’s popular culture.

This comprehensive study of Monsiváis’s crónicas is the first book to offer an analysis of these works and to place Monsiváis’s work within a theoretical framework that recognizes the importance of his vision of Mexican culture. Linda Egan examines his ideology in relation to theoretical postures in Latin America, the United States, and Europe to cast Monsiváis as both a heterodox pioneer and a mainstream spokesman. She then explores the poetics of the contemporary chronicle in Mexico, reviewing the genre’s history and its relation to other narrative forms. Finally, she focuses on the canonical status of Monsiváis’s work, devoting a chapter to each of his five principal collections.

Egan argues that the five books that are the focus of her study tell a story of ever-renewing suspense: we cannot know “the end” until Monsiváis is through constructing his literary project. Despite this, she observes, his work between 1970 and 1995 documents important discoveries in his search for causes, effects, and deconstructions of historical obstacles to Mexico’s passage into modernity.

While anthropologists and historians continue to introduce new paradigms for the study of Mexico’s cultural space, Egan’s book provides a reflexive twist by examining the work of one of the thinkers who first inspired such a critical movement. More than an appraisal of Monsiváis, it offers a valuable discussion of theoretical issues surrounding the study of the chronicle as it is currently practiced in Mexico. It balances theory and criticism to lend new insight into the ties between Mexican society, social conscience, and literature.

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Reading Monsivais from the US
Carlos Monsivais is perhaps THE most important and widely read cultural critic in Mexico. This basically means that readings of his work can be either highly productive or highly mediocre. Linda Egan, fortunately, falls into the first category. its main virtue is that it is the first book length study of Monsivais' work written in English, and also it is the first study to consider all of the disperse Monsivais bibliography, which includes an overwhelming number of textspublished in newspapers, journals, magazines and some other elusive media. Egan's reading basically focuses on the role of Monsivais' work within the constitution of a Mexican culture. It serves well its purpose, since its excellent writing makes this book a great introduction for those not familiar with Monsivais. Also, its deep research, interesting insights and careful readings will definitely consolidate Egan's book as the authoritative reference to Monsivais's work. I would have given the book five stars if I haven't found both things that bothered me. First, the book does not take into consideration important essays about Monsivais written in Mexico, such as the two Evodio Escalante includes in his book "Las metaforas de la critica" or the praising essay written by Christopher Dominguez Michael in "Servidumbre y grandeza de la vida literaria". Also, in the introduction, Egan makes an enormous mistake. She claims that Monsivais's column, "Por mi madre bohemios" is named like that because it is some sort of mock inside a patriarchal society. Actually, this assertion only means that Egan ignores the actual source of the column's title, which is the most known verse of the 19th century poem "Brindis del bohemio", a poem widely known in the Mexican popular culture, which, by the way, is one of the most antifeminist poems in Mexican tradition. Monsivais includes it because the poem has been regarded as ridiculous in the Mexican elite and quoting it has a sense of mock, just as the quotes with which Monsivais constructs his column. Other than that, the book is pretty solid and a must have for anyone interested in Mexican culture. ... Read more

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This book is looks at the ancient and modern culture of Mexico, including art, music, dance, and festivals. ... Read more

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For a brief time in the 1990s, the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in southern Mexico was heralded as a vital example of melding local management, forest conservation, and economic development. Haenn now describes the rise and fall of this conservation program to examine conservation at the intersection of national-international agendas and local political-economic interests, considering conservation's encounter with people's everyday lives--and how those experiences affect environmental management strategies. ... Read more

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In 1598, twenty-two years before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Don Juan de Oate led a group of Spanish explorers to the banks of the Rio Grande near what is today the town of Espaola and established a permanent settlement north of Mexico.400 years later, Richard Peck traces the great sweep of history from the Anasasi civilization to todays Land of Enchantmenta compelling and wonderful trip.

Chapters touch all aspects of a tumultuous past, from the pre-Columbian era and the Pueblo peoples to the explorers and missionaries, from the territorial days of outlaws, cowboys, and capitalists, to the nuclear scientists at Los Alamos and the high technology of Albuquerques Silicon Mesa.

But The New Mexico Experience is not a history, the author says.Its really a sampling of stories Ive heard, and read, and recall; the glimpses of landscapes and people who define in unique ways the New Mexico I call home.Its certainly not everyones New Mexico, he writes in the introduction, but it is someones New Mexico. I hope it resembles yours. ... Read more

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An Amazing Book
This is an amazing book that everyone interested in New Mexico should read.It's divided into vignettes dealing with each period in time showing the evolution and development of modern New Mexico.The research is extensive and the focus is on the culture.The photography is superb.
Perhaps this is the best book available on the cultural history of modern day New Mexico. ... Read more

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In contrast to traditional stereotypes of the prehispanic culture of the Chontals of Oaxaca, architectural sites and artifacts along the Pacific coast indicate that there were more complex societies, well integrated into southeastern Mesoamerican networks of socio-cultural, economic and political interaction. This research presents the results of surface surveys and test excavations at the Rio Huamelula, District of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca (southeastern Mexico), conducted by the author in 2001. The pottery classification aims at reconstructing the settlement chronology of the area from the Classic to the early Colonial periods, c. A.D. 300-1600. Stylistic traits of ball-game-related artifacts, sculptural art, pottery, and architecture, as well as obsidian composition analysis all point to an intensive socio-cultural and economic exchange between the prehispanic communities along the southeastern Oaxaca coast and other Mesoamerican societies. The ethno-linguistic identity of the Classic-period occupants of the Rio Huamelula valley remains enigmatic. The archaeological remains of two Postclassic Chontal villages, Huamelula and Astata, however, exhibit a socio-economic complexity contradicting the colonial characterization of Chontal culture. They further demonstrate a settlement continuity that, overall, reaches back into the Classic period and has lasted up to the present day. ... Read more

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This the first book that analyzes the impact of the EZLN on urban immigrant social movements in the United States. It provides a rare in-depth case study of a politics of _globalization from below_ that has been rare in social movement literature. ... Read more

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A fresh look at the Zapatismo movement
`This Bridge Called Zapatismo' though obviously written for the serious sociology student is a valuable read for the casual reader interested in a "deeper than soundbite" analysis of the growing culture described in "Zapatismo...".(i.e. This book will not solve the "Border Problem" but it might help to make the problem a little better understood.) This heavily detailed account is richly filled with sociological verbiage and acronymlike shorthand notation which slows down the read somewhat. The previously mentioned facts should be no more of a deterrent to reading this book than the old English descriptions encountered in reading Shakespeare are a deterrent to reading Shakespeare.

The author generally wisely avoids the temptation to draw conclusions and typically allows the data itself to be interpreted by the reader as he/she sees fit.This approach fits well with the `story' itself since the actual story is still a work in progress.

To assist the reader of this review in his/her due diligence and as a matter of disclosure, the author is my daughter. I have tried to not let our loving relationship color this review.If you decide to read the book, you can draw your own conclusions as to the degree of success I've had with that endeavor.


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This study introduces a novel, cultural interpretation to the overallimpact of the Catholic Reformation in Europe on the changing facets of thereligious life in the indigenous communities of southern Mexico, during thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries.It examines the modes by which Spanish mendicant priests translated norms,standards and mores enforced by the Tridentine dogma into the far-removedcontexts of the New World. Using a rich variety of both Spanish and Mayacolonial sources it closely examines Dominican preaching, local cosmology, andthe state of faith in the area, as well as the changing ritual practices thatemerged within the Indian parish during this era. Moreover, it vividlyillustrates how the Indians adopted, transformed, or rebuffed the Catholicnotions impressed upon them in the process of religious conversion.The study is characterized by a profound sympathy with and respect for thelocal Maya and their resourcefulness in negotiating the cultural politics ofcolonial domination. Rather than seeing Christian evangelization as a whollyone-sided process, Megged emphasizes the active role of the Indian populationsin reformulating alien doctrines and rituals within native frameworks.The study also draws on a substantial body of secondary works on contemporarydevelopments in Europe, and among its innovative tenets is that New Worldevangelization was not a wholly separate but an integral aspect of theCatholic Reformation that proceeded in an interactive fashion on both sides ofthe Atlantic. ... Read more

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The Spanish conquest of Mexico is examined from the entirely new perspective of human animal behavior, or human ethology. Aspects of material culture like food, clothing, and shelter are explored as they relate to species-specific tendencies, including benevolence, brutality, xenophobia, curiosity, hierarchy, reciprocity, and territoriality. ... Read more

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An unusual point of view about the conquest of Mexico
I found this book by a mere hazard, when I was net surfing in the Amazon.com site: his content called instantaneously my attention and seeming so interesting, despite the absurd price, I immediately ordered it. I didn't repent of that.

"Brutality and Benevolence" is a fine historical work, analising the spanish conquest of Mexico in a fair and well-balanced way, with rigour, objectiveness and seriousness, far away from the redutionist and distorted vision imposed about such theme by the political correctness movement, especially during and after the commemorations of the fifth centenary of Columbus arrival on America.

More than a conquest that brought opression to the indigenousness, this evenment was a truly liberation of those same peoples from the despotic domination of the Aztec Empire, a leviathan that demanded from his neighbouring and subjugated subjects of other native nations, permanently and abusively, high tributes, not only in the strict economic sense, but also and essentially in human lifes destined to be sacrificed in the blood thirsty rituals of the aztec religion.

The defeat of the Aztecs by the Spaniards, with the consequent fall of capital city Tenochtitlan, was only possible with the decisive contribution of the other non-aztec indigenous (Tlaxcalans, Huexotzicans, Atlaxcans and Totonacs), that allied spanish forces in order to overthrow the aztec domination they suffered.

It is also important to note, although the subsequent conqueror rule was not free of atrocities and abuses (mainly, derived from the system of "encomienda" that vigorated in the first years after the conquest; it was later forbidden, in the end of 16th century), contrarily to a common spread view, that same conqueror showed a real concern with the indians rights, especially through the justice system of "Audiencias" (frequently deciding in favour of the natives), but also with the creation of a net of hospitals destined to render health cares to those same natives.

The author analises all these evenments from an ethological point of view, in my opinion, with credibility: man, being a part of the nature, obviously shows common features with other living beings (principally, primates like chimpanzees or gorillas, considering their almost complete genetic similarity with humans); however, some assertions of Abel Alves seem quite exaggerated. For example, the benevolence showed by the conqueror, more than a reminiscence of an innate feature, was not a direct consequence of his catholic religion? I think it was... Concluding, the book is very interesting and I recommend it (despite the price...) to persons searching an unusual relate of the conquest of Mexico. ... Read more