The Story of Rufino

The Story of Rufino PDF Author: João José Reis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019022438X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Winner of the Casa de las América Prize for Brazilian Literature, The Story of Rufino reconstructs the lively biography of Rufino José Maria, set against the historical context of Brazil and Africa in the nineteenth century. The book tells the story of Rufino or Abuncare, a Yoruba Muslim from the kingdom of Oyo, in present-day Nigeria. Enslaved as an adolescent by a rival ethnic group, he was captured by Brazilian slave traders and taken to Brazil as a slave sometime in the early 1820s. In 1835, after being enslaved in Salvador and Rio Grande do Sul, Rufino bought his freedom with money he made as a hired-out slave and perhaps from making Islamic amulets. He found work in Rio de Janeiro as a cook on a slave ship bound for Luanda in Angola, despite the trans-Atlantic slave trade having been illegal in Brazil since 1831. Rufino himself became a petty slave trader. He made a few voyages before his ship was captured by the British and taken to Sierra Leone in 1841 for trial by the Anglo-Brazilian Mixed Commission to determine if it was equipped for the slave trade, since there were no slaves on board. During the three months awaiting the court's decision, Rufino lived among Yoruba Muslims, his people, and attended Quranic and Arabic classes. He later returned to Sierra Leone as a witness in a court case and attended classes with Muslim masters for almost two years. Once back in Brazil, he established himself as a diviner -- serving whites and blacks, free and slaves, Brazilians and Africans, Muslim and non-Muslims -- as well as a spiritual leader, an Alufa, in the local Afro-Muslim community. In 1853 Rufino was arrested due to rumors of an imminent African slave revolt. The police used as evidence for his arrest the large number of Arabic manuscripts in his possession, the same kind of material the police had found with Muslim rebels in Bahia thirty years earlier. During his interrogation, Rufino told his life story, which is used to reconstruct the world in which he lived under slavery and in freedom on African shores, aboard slave ships, and in Brazil. An extraordinary Atlantic history carefully pieced together from the archives, The Story of Rufino illuminates the complexities of slavery and freedom in Africa and Brazil and the resilience of ethnic and religious identities.

The Story of Rufino

The Story of Rufino PDF Author: João José Reis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019022438X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the Casa de las América Prize for Brazilian Literature, The Story of Rufino reconstructs the lively biography of Rufino José Maria, set against the historical context of Brazil and Africa in the nineteenth century. The book tells the story of Rufino or Abuncare, a Yoruba Muslim from the kingdom of Oyo, in present-day Nigeria. Enslaved as an adolescent by a rival ethnic group, he was captured by Brazilian slave traders and taken to Brazil as a slave sometime in the early 1820s. In 1835, after being enslaved in Salvador and Rio Grande do Sul, Rufino bought his freedom with money he made as a hired-out slave and perhaps from making Islamic amulets. He found work in Rio de Janeiro as a cook on a slave ship bound for Luanda in Angola, despite the trans-Atlantic slave trade having been illegal in Brazil since 1831. Rufino himself became a petty slave trader. He made a few voyages before his ship was captured by the British and taken to Sierra Leone in 1841 for trial by the Anglo-Brazilian Mixed Commission to determine if it was equipped for the slave trade, since there were no slaves on board. During the three months awaiting the court's decision, Rufino lived among Yoruba Muslims, his people, and attended Quranic and Arabic classes. He later returned to Sierra Leone as a witness in a court case and attended classes with Muslim masters for almost two years. Once back in Brazil, he established himself as a diviner -- serving whites and blacks, free and slaves, Brazilians and Africans, Muslim and non-Muslims -- as well as a spiritual leader, an Alufa, in the local Afro-Muslim community. In 1853 Rufino was arrested due to rumors of an imminent African slave revolt. The police used as evidence for his arrest the large number of Arabic manuscripts in his possession, the same kind of material the police had found with Muslim rebels in Bahia thirty years earlier. During his interrogation, Rufino told his life story, which is used to reconstruct the world in which he lived under slavery and in freedom on African shores, aboard slave ships, and in Brazil. An extraordinary Atlantic history carefully pieced together from the archives, The Story of Rufino illuminates the complexities of slavery and freedom in Africa and Brazil and the resilience of ethnic and religious identities.

Doing Business with the Dictators

Doing Business with the Dictators PDF Author: Paul J. Dosal
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780842025904
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The United Fruit Company (UFCO) developed an unprecedented relationship with Guatemala. By 1944, UFCO owned 566,000 acres, employed 20,000 people, and operated 96 per cent of Guatemala's 719 miles of railroad.

Caudillos

Caudillos PDF Author: Hugh M. Hamill
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806124285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
In this major revision of the Borzoi Book Dictatorship in Spanish America, editor Hugh Hamill has presented conflicting interpretations of caudillismo in twenty-seven essays written by an international group of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, journalists, and caudillos themselves. The selections represent revisionists, apologists, enemies, and even a victim of caudillos. The personalities discussed include the Mexican priest Miguel Hidalgo, the Argentinian gaucho Facundo Quiroga, the Guatemalan Rafael Carrera, the Colombian Rafael Núñez, Mexico’s Porfirio Díaz, the Somoza family of Nicaragua, the Dominican "Benefactor" Rafael Trujillo, the Argentinians Juan Perón and his wife Evita, Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner - called "The Tyrannosaur," Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

Silence on the Mountain

Silence on the Mountain PDF Author: Daniel Wilkinson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822333685
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Written by a young human rights worker, "Silence on the Mountain" is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's 36-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people.

A Beauty That Hurts

A Beauty That Hurts PDF Author: W. George Lovell
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 029279293X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Though a 1996 peace accord brought a formal end to a conflict that had lasted for thirty-six years, Guatemala's violent past continues to scar its troubled present and seems destined to haunt its uncertain future. George Lovell brings to this revised and expanded edition of A Beauty That Hurts decades of fieldwork throughout Guatemala, as well as archival research. He locates the roots of conflict in geographies of inequality that arose during colonial times and were exacerbated by the drive to develop Guatemala's resources in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The lines of confrontation were entrenched after a decade of socioeconomic reform between 1944 and 1954 saw modernizing initiatives undone by a military coup backed by U.S. interests and the CIA. A United Nations Truth Commission has established that civil war in Guatemala claimed the lives of more that 200,000 people, the vast majority of them indigenous Mayas. Lovell weaves documentation about what happened to Mayas in particular during the war years with accounts of their difficult personal situations. Meanwhile, an intransigent elite and a powerful military continue to benefit from the inequalities that triggered armed insurrection in the first place. Weak and corrupt civilian governments fail to impose the rule of law, thus ensuring that Guatemala remains an embattled country where postwar violence and drug-related crime undermine any semblance of orderly, peaceful life.

Protestantism in Guatemala

Protestantism in Guatemala PDF Author: Virginia Garrard-Burnett
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292728172
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Guatemala has undergone an unprecedented conversion to Protestantism since the 1970s, so that thirty percent of its people now belong to Protestant churches, more than in any other Latin American nation. To illuminate some of the causes of this phenomenon, Virginia Garrard-Burnett here offers the first history of Protestantism in a Latin American country, focusing specifically on the rise of Protestantism within the ethnic and political history of Guatemala. Garrard-Burnett finds that while Protestant missionaries were early valued for their medical clinics, schools, translation projects, and especially for the counterbalance they provided against Roman Catholicism, Protestantism itself attracted few converts in Guatemala until the 1960s. Since then, however, the militarization of the state, increasing public violence, and the "globalization" of Guatemalan national politics have undermined the traditional ties of kinship, custom, and belief that gave Guatemalans a sense of identity, and many are turning to Protestantism to recreate a sense of order, identity, and belonging.

Our Elders Teach Us

Our Elders Teach Us PDF Author: David Carey
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 081731119X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
By casting a wide net for his interviews - from tiny hamlets to bustling Guatemala City - Carey gained insight into more than a single community or a single group of Maya."--BOOK JACKET.

Armies Without Nations

Armies Without Nations PDF Author: Robert H. Holden
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195310209
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Public violence, a persistent feature of Latin American life since the collapse of Iberian rule in the 1820s, has been especially prominent in Central America. Robert H. Holden shows how public violence shaped the states that have governed Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Linking public violence and patrimonial political cultures, he shows how the early states improvised their authority by bargaining with armed bands or montoneras. Improvisation continued into the twentieth century as the bands were gradually superseded by semi-autonomous national armies, and as new agents of public violence emerged in the form of armed insurgencies and death squads. World War II, Holden argues, set into motion the globalization of public violence. Its most dramatic manifestation in Central America was the surge in U.S. military and police collaboration with the governments of the region, beginning with the Lend-Lease program of the 1940s and continuing through the Cold War. Although the scope of public violence had already been established by the people of the Central American countries, globalization intensified the violence and inhibited attempts to shrink its scope. Drawing on archival research in all five countries as well as in the United States, Holden elaborates the connections among the national, regional, and international dimensions of public violence. Armies Without Nations crosses the borders of Central American, Latin American, and North American history, providing a model for the study of global history and politics. Armies without Nations was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2005.

Catalog

Catalog PDF Author: University of Texas. Library. Latin American Collection
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Latin America
Languages : en
Pages : 810

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Book Description


Piety, Power, and Politics

Piety, Power, and Politics PDF Author: Douglas Sullivan-González
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822970503
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Douglass Sullivan Gonzalez examines the influence of religion on the development of nationalism in Guatemala during the period 1821-1871, focusing on the relationship between Rafael Carrera amd the Guatemalan Catholic Church. He illustrates the peculiar and fascinating blend of religious fervor, popular power, and caudillo politics that inspired a multiethnic and multiclass alliance to defend the Guatemalan nation in the mid-nineteenth century.Led by the military strongman Rafael Carrera, an unlikely coalition of mestizos, Indians, and creoles (whites born in the Americas) overcame a devastating civil war in the late 1840s and withstood two threats (1851 and 1863) from neighboring Honduras and El Salvador that aimed at reintegrating conservative Guatemala into a liberal federation of Central American nations.Sullivan-Gonzalez shows that religious discourse and ritual were crucial to the successful construction and defense of independent Guatemala. Sermons commemorating independence from Spain developed a covenantal theology that affirmed divine protection if the Guatemalan people embraced Catholicism. Sullivan-Gonzalez examines the extent to which this religious and nationalist discourse was popularly appropriated.Recently opened archives of the Guatemalan Catholic Church revealed that the largely mestizo population of the central and eastern highlands responded favorably to the church's message. Records indicate that Carrera depended upon the clerics' ability to pacify the rebellious inhabitants during Guatemala's civil war (1847-1851) and to rally them to Guatemala's defense against foreign invaders. Though hostile to whites and mestizos, the majority indigenous population of the western highlands identified with Carrera as their liberator. Their admiration for and loyalty to Carrera allowed them a territory that far exceeded their own social space.Though populist and antidemocratic, the historic legacy of the Carrera years is the Guatemalan nation. Sullivan-Gonzalez details how theological discourse, popular claims emerging from mestizo and Indian communities, and the caudillo's ability to finesse his enemies enabled Carrera to bring together divergent and contradictory interests to bind many nations into one.