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The Chávez government introduced a ‘Bolivarian’ national curriculum to promote radically different understandings of Venezuelan history and identity. We place the fate of this reform initiative within the broader study of state formation and nationalism. Scholars have long identified mass schooling as the key institution for socialising citizens and cultivating national loyalties, and many states have attempted to alter the nationalist content of schooling with these ends in mind. Venezuela constitutes an ideal case for identifying the specific conditions under which transformations of official national ideologies do and do not gain broader resonance. Using evidence derived from textbook analysis and semi-structured interviews with educational officials and teachers in Caracas, we highlight a new argument, showing that intrastate tensions between the central government and teachers, heightened by a well-established cultural machinery and by teachers’ increasing exclusion from the Chavista political coalition, explain the limited success in government efforts to implement Bolivarian nationalism through the school curriculum. Research for this article was funded in part by Temple University.

The most significant weakness of the Marxist Left in early Cold War Mexico was that it subordinated itself to post-revolutionary nationalism. Both the Mexican Communist Party and followers of Vicente Lombardo Toledano supported the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), avoiding significant criticism before late 1947. Some dissident currents of Marxism did exist, but they were sparsely followed. Mexico provides an extreme case of Left subordination to popular-nationalist ideology, yet is indicative of trends visible elsewhere, e.g. among Marxist groups in post-war Cuba and the United States. Rather than promoting notions of communist political practice, the Mexican Marxist Left consistently advocated the elimination of class conflict and support for the ‘national bourgeoisie’. The Marxist Left held the Mexican government to different standards from those to which they held the governments of other countries. A near-consensus on the Mexican Left equated patriotism with progressive politics. The argument is illustrated with an important case study: the 1947 Marxist Round Table.

Revisionist historians have convincingly argued that Spanish American independence was not the result of simmering grievances that galvanised a national or Creole identity against Spain. Instead, this scholarship insists that Spanish American national identities did not exist at the time and that independence was an unforeseen process that must be understood in the context of the Napoleonic invasion of Iberia. But, if independence was undesirable before 1808 and if national identities arose at a latter period, how do we explain the early independence projects of ‘precursors’ like Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán? By contextually reconstructing the logic behind Viscardo's projects, this article offers a new perspective on the intellectual conditions of possibility for Spanish American independence. It argues that though he certainly identified as a Creole from Peru, Viscardo actually deployed an Enlightenment global science of commerce, not Creole patriotism or nationalism, to legitimate Spanish American independence.

This article examines the promotion of Mexico's national image in the Americas during the Cárdenas period, using as a starting point a scandal arising from a 1940 performance of Mexican dancers at a cabaret in Panama. Mexican diplomats found the show objectionable because it clashed with the image of women that they used in their efforts to raise the country's reputation abroad. By investigating these efforts, as well as the career of Eva Pérez Caro, the dance troupe's leader, the article contributes to our understanding of the relationship between gender, cultural performance and nationalism, and the role that they played in Mexico's foreign relations.

This article treats Tio Faustino, a little-known samba musician and Afro-Brazilian religious leader living in Rio de Janeiro, as an entry point for exploring larger questions about Brazil and the African Diaspora. The inquiry expands outward from Tio Faustino to Rio's early twentieth-century markets in ‘African’ commodities, the city's nascent music industry and the growing call to defend intellectual property rights in Brazil. In order to advance their careers, Tio Faustino and other artists accessed nationalist sentiment in ways that highlighted differences rather than commonalities with African-descended peoples elsewhere. In this way, Brazil's global standing and its colonial history and post-colonial trajectory functioned as a counterweight to transnational and diasporic connections. These findings deepen, rather than completely unseat, recent trends in diaspora and transnational studies.

This article examines the ways in which Cuba's revolution shaped the changing politics of the Left in the United States. Using critical strategies of transnationalism, it illustrates how a dialogue developed between US activists and Cuban cultural producers, and reveals how Cuba's revolutionary discourse inflected the radical shift towards Third World nationalism. As the post-Bandung global moment brought a network of new political and cultural affiliations, Cuba's state apparatus invested in the manufacture and dissemination of tricontinental politics worldwide. This alternative moral and political imaginary lent authority to Havana's status as leader of the Third World and drew global attention to Cuba's revolutionary model in new thinking on post-colonial identity and culture. This new thinking imbibed the US Left's humanistic turn which challenged standard boundaries of race, class and nation. The dialectical nature of Cuban political discourse and social activism in the United States changed Cuban exigencies while it enticed US dissidents to experience the exception in the western hemisphere that fought for the greater moral good.

Cuban scholars and women's advocates have criticised the widespread emergence of sex tourism in post-Soviet Cuba and attributed prostitution to a crisis in socialist values. In response, feminist scholars in the United States and Europe have argued that Cuban analysts promote government agendas and demonise sex workers. Drawing on nineteen months of field research in Havana, I challenge this conclusion to demonstrate how queer Cubans condemn sex tourism while denouncing an unconditional allegiance to Cuban nationalism. By introducing gay Cuban critiques into the debate, I highlight the interventionist undertones of feminist scholarship on the Cuban sex trade.

This article considers the cultural adjustment of immigrants to Brazil through an analysis of the role that association football (soccer) played in identity formation in twentieth-century São Paulo. It focuses on the city's large Italian population, in particular the experiences of a leading club, the Società Sportiva Palestra Itália, and of the first generation of Brazilian footballers who migrated abroad in order to play football professionally, many of whom were Paulistas of Italian descent. It demonstrates that through football Italians obtained agency in negotiating the process by which they became Brazilian and found a means by which to preserve a sense of discrete ethnicity within São Paulo's multiethnic community.

This article examines the implications of Latin America's recent wave of state-embraced multiculturalism for the region's indigenous peoples, arguing that state recognition of indigenous difference is not inevitably empowering for indigenous groups or transformative of nation-states. It utilises data from fieldwork with the Kuna Indians of eastern Panama in order to delineate more precisely the contexts and strategies of indigenous peoples which may serve to push outwards more constrained forms of institutional multiculturalism. It explores the links between Panama's historical nationalist project, contemporary state multiculturalism and ethnically specific forms of mobilisation for land rights and autonomy. It also examines the transformative potential of multiculturalism in the context of the simultaneous implementation of global economic and cultural projects of neoliberalism.

This article analyses the forgery and discovery of the purported tomb of Cuauhtémoc, the last Mexica emperor. An eclectic collection of contemporary sources outlines a subtle interplay between elites, cultural managers and peasants, who alternately collaborated and competed in manipulating the would-be invention. Groups traditionally undervalued in studies of nationalism, namely villagers and petty bureaucrats, went far beyond the mimesis of elites to significantly reshape parts of the national narrative. Their entrepreneurial success in manipulating nationalist symbols demonstrates that the instrumentalist use of the past is a cross-class activity.

This commentary aimed originally to compare the function of the principle of consent in Latin and Anglo-American history. Yet, as it developed, I could no longer ignore the reasons behind the neglect of the close links between the principle of consent and the law of nature and nations. I grew increasingly interested in a comparison between this and another equally interesting anomaly emerging from it: the limitations nationalism has imposed on historians in studying their national histories. The end result has been to use my original subject as a means to reflect on some of the presuppositions that can limit historical research.

Marked differences in mid-twentieth-century reformers' approaches to politically active working women in Belize and Puerto Rico help to explain the emergence of colonial hegemony in the latter, and the rise of mass nationalism in the former. Reformers in both colonies were concerned with working women, but whereas British and Belizean reformers treated them as sexually and politically disordered, and aimed to transform them from militant wage-earners to clients of state social services, US and Puerto Rican reformers treated them as voting citizens with legitimate roles in the economy and labour movement. Although racialised moralism was not absent in Puerto Rico, the populism of colonial reform there helped cement a renegotiated colonial compact, while the non-populist character of reform in Belize – and the wider British Caribbean – alienated working women from the colonial state.

This article traces the historiography of the romantic yet poorly understood mistress, friend and political ally of Simon Bolivar: Manuela Saenz Aizpuru de Thorne (1797–1856). It highlights two opposing schools of interpretation on Saenz: the ‘bad girl’ and ‘heroine’ schools. Nationalism and the cult of Bolivar (especially among Venezuelan and Ecuadorean authors), have combined with the later influence of revolutionary socialist and feminist ideas to ensure the predominance of the latter and, thus, of an heroic-mythic view of Saenz. Yet scholars' efforts to recover the historical woman have challenged this view and, above all, paved the way for a more nuanced, gender-conscious understanding of Saenz's role and significance.

With the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement); the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), and political crisis/reform all posing questions both old and new about Mexican nationalism, this article reconsiders the dimensions of the subject, the issues, and the empirical evidence. After setting out an analytical and theoretical framework for the study of nationalism, it concentrates on the many components of Mexican nationalism, the historic and on-going nationalist debates over the Indian, the American and the state, and the nature of nationalist policies over the years. It then reviews research related to such theoretical issues as the linkages between nationalist sentiments, ideas and policies, the social bases of nationalist ideas and perceptions, and the changes in nationalism. The article aims to place longstanding discussions of Mexican nationalism in a theoretical context and to derive conclusions which indicate appropriate directions for future research.

This study examines Emperor Maximilian's efforts in using public rituals, patriotic symbolism, and the emblems of nationalism to devise an appropriate past for his Mexican empire. The 'republican' celebration of independence and its heroes formed the cornerstone of an effort to reconcile feuding political factions, build social cohesion, and ultimately legitimate his regime. The article concentrates on the independence ceremonies, speeches, and statuary employed by the empire. Ultimately, the political dissension existing in Mexico could not be surmounted by symbols alone. Nevertheless, the attempt reveals the creative use and limits of public rituals in the political realm. As Mexico's Emperor Maximilian delivered his oration from the house where, over a half century before, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla had issued his famous grito for independence, the 3 2-year-old former Archduke not surprisingly experienced some trepidation. 'You can imagine how embarassed I was', he wrote to his brother, 'before a tightly packed, silent mass of people. It went off well, thank God, and the enthusiasm was indescribable.'1 Maximilian clearly appreciated the situation. For a member of Austria's reigning Habsburg dynasty to pay homage to Mexican independence did appear ironic. Only months earlier, Maximilian had been at his castle in Trieste anxiously awaiting news of whether the Mexican people would call him to the throne. Now, in September I864, not only had he and his Belgium-born wife Carlota been summoned, they had begun the delicate task of rebuilding the state and converting Mexico from a republic into an empire. Key to this success would be the extent to which Maximilian could shape a new imperial political culture. Eric Hobsbawn writes that 'all invented traditions, so far as possible, use history as a legitimator of action and cement of group cohesion'.2 Robert H. Duncan is a Doctoral candidate, University of California, Irvine. * The author wishes to thank Steven C. Topik and Jaime E. Rodriguez 0. for their comments and suggestions. 1Maximilian to Karl Ludwig, n.p., 21 Sept. 1864, quoted in Egon Caesar Count Corti, Maximilian and Charlotte of Mexico, trans. by Catherine Alison Phillips (New York, I968), P. 434. 2 Eric Hobsbawn, 'Introduction: Inventing Traditions', in Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, i983), pp. I, I2. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Tue, 27 Sep 2016 04:10:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 250 Robert H. Duncan Even emergent nations commonly refer to some time immemorial of which they make themselves a part.3 A suitable past offers a regime legitimacy, continuity, and precedence. The dilemma is finding an appropriate history that serves not only to unify and instruct, but to express both hegemony and power relationships. Civic rituals and the celebrations of historic events can symbolically construct this link between politics and history. As a foreign-born monarch introduced by force of arms, Maximilian had to establish his authority while minimising the sometimes wide cultural gap between sovereign and subject. His decision to select, embrace, and manipulate the ritual of independence represented an important step in consolidating and legitimising the political position of the emperor and empire. It would become the symbolic cornerstone in building a new nation. More than a simple holiday, observing independence represented a way of looking at Mexico's past, present, and future. It embodied both the glory and potential of the nation. Over the years, it had carved a lasting niche in the country's contentious political culture. This analysis shows how Maximilian sought to employ this ritual to bring together feuding factions, build social cohesion, and impart appropriate virtues through a heterogeneous population. The heroes and symbols of independence would help the empire craft a new imperial genealogy in the effort to win (and shape) the hearts and minds of the Mexico people. Gauging the ultimate success of these imperial attempts, however, remains elusive. At a time when partisanship greatly colored perceptions, descriptions of the celebration were seldom neutral. Moreover, since independence day was an established fiesta and not newly invented, simple participation cannot confirm or deny support for the empire. Audience response, as a result, must be weighed accordingly. Nonetheless, the Second Empire does offer an important glimpse into the political use (and limits) of symbols and rituals. Celebrations during the early republic In i866, the editor of the San Antonio Herald (Texas) declared that independence day in Mexico was 'just like the Fourth of July in the United States, only it did not happen on the same day'.4 He was mistaken. In little more than four decades, the choice of what or even when to celebrate developed into an important political question. The dispute over the true meaning of independence resulted, in part, from the circuitous path taken by the eleven-year struggle. Those who had started the process 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn. (New York, 199i), pp. 11-12. 4 Article reprinted in the New York Times, I8 Nov. I866. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Tue, 27 Sep 2016 04:10:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Embracing a suitable past 25 I did not finish it. Even the word independenciapresented its own difficulties, having originally expressed only the desire for autonomy, not total separation from Spain. By tradition, the destructive and bloody conflict began in 181o when Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the parish priest in the town of Dolores, conspired with members of the local elite to replace the royalist government with an American (i.e., creole) junta in the name of the Spanish King Ferdinand VII. Officials, however, learned of the plot and seized most of its leaders. At 2:00 a.m. on 6 September, word reached Hidalgo about his imminent arrest. Facing certain imprisonment, Hidalgo opted to launch the uprising that same morning. Soon, upwards of eighty thousand followers, mostly poor peasants and workers, flocked to the call. Despite capturing some key cities, the movement lasted only a few months. In the decade after Hidalgo's execution, other rebel leaders like Father Jose Maria Morelos and Vicente Guerrero raised the banner of revolt. The process culminated in I82I when autonomist leaders successfully convinced a royalist creole colonel, Agustin de Iturbide, to switch allegiance. On 27 September 1821 Iturbide led his triumphant 'Army of Three Guarantees' into Mexico City virtually unopposed. The entrance was accompanied by military parades, discourses, triumphant arches, floats, and banquets. The celebration signalled 'the first collective and popular festival in the life of the nation'.5 From this time forward, Mexico could single out two clearly defined points in the independence

This article examines political ideology, cultural nationalism and the contesting of identity in early twentieth-century Chile. It does so by tracing the emergence of a unique cultural construct – the huaso cowboy – in the literary sphere and by exploring a ‘rural idealist’ discourse employed by middle-class, reformist intellectuals who hoped for the mitigation of the ‘social question’ and the displacement of traditional oligarchs from cultural and political centrality. It also seeks to explain how the fiction genre known as criollismo challenged elitist conceptions of ‘nation’ and ‘culture’ in the context of dramatic socio-political, economic and demographic change.