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Phyllis R. Parker

“Parker has used recently declassified American materials and interviews . . . to reconstruct the steps that led to the creation of Operation Brother Sam.” —The American Historical Review
 
 When the Brazilian military overthrew President João Goulart in 1964, American diplomats characterized the coup as a “100 percent Brazilian movement.” It has since become apparent, largely through government documents declassified during the course of research for this book, that the United States had an invisible but pervasive part in the coup.
 
 Relying principally on documents from the Johnson and Kennedy presidential libraries, Phyllis Parker unravels the events of the coup in fascinating detail. The evidence she presents is corroborated by interviews with key participants.
 
 US interference in the Goulart regime began when normal diplomatic pressure failed to produce the desired enthusiasm from him for the Alliance of Progress. Political and economic manipulations also proving ineffective, the United States stood ready to back a military takeover of Brazil’s constitutional democracy.
 
 US operation “Brother Sam” involved shipments of petroleum, a naval task force, and tons of arms and ammunition in preparation for intervention during the 1964 coup. When the Brazilian military gained control without calling on the ready assistance, U.S. policy makers immediately accorded recognition to the new government and set in motion plans for economic support.

University of Texas Press

Texas Pan American Series

Brazil and the Quiet Intervention, 1964

Charles C. Cumberland

The history of a dictatorship’s demise—and the many power struggles that followed on the rocky road to democracy in early twentieth-century Mexico.
 
 The Mexican Revolution is one of the most important and ambitious sociopolitical experiments in modern times. This history by Charles C. Cumberland addresses the early years of this period, as the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz was finally overthrown and he was driven into exile due to the efforts of revolutionary reformer Francisco Madero, with the assistance of the famed Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata among others. Madero would become president—but would not last long in this role. This is the story of the events that would lead to years of bloody battles on the road to an eventual constitutional republic.
 
 “Not only a solid contribution to Mexicana...but proof that political history can be organized logically around a leading personality...Provocative, readable, and interpretative.” —The Americas

Mexican Revolution: Genesis Under Madero

Daniel Florencio O'Leary

The overthrow of Spanish rule and the birth of new republican governments in northern South America at the beginning of the nineteenth century were in large part the work of one man—Simón Bolívar. Bolívar was not only the soldier who built a patriot army from a small band of exiles and led them victoriously across Venezuela and down the spine of the Andes as far as Potosí; he was also the statesman who framed the new republics that sprang to life after the defeat of the Spanish and who called the Congress of Panama in hopes of making real his dream of uniting all the South American republics in a single confederation. He was truly the Liberator. 
 
 
 The Narración, or narrative, of the Memorias of Daniel Florencio O’Leary has long been recognized by Spanish American scholars as one of the most important historical sources for a major part of Bolívar’s life. O’Leary took an active part in the wars for independence, first as a young officer, recruited in the British Isles to aid the patriot cause, and later as Bolívar’s chief aide, often entrusted with diplomatic missions. His firsthand knowledge of the stirring events of the period, his access to relevant documents, and his close association with the major figures in the struggle, as well as his friendship with Bolívar, made O’Leary a particularly valuable chronicler and biographer. Bolívar himself, shortly before his death, requested that O’Leary write the story of his life. 
 
 
 O’Leary’s meticulous attention to military and diplomatic maneuvers and his keen, sometimes acrid, comments on both men and events give the reader not only a vivid portrait of Bolívar—the man and his achievements—but also a remarkable insight into O’Leary’s own position as an autocratic-minded participant in the wars for independence. Although O’Leary’s devotion to, and admiration for, his Chief make for an occasionally partisan view, his stark account of the hardships and disappointments that Bolívar and his armies overcame against almost impossible odds does much to balance the narrative. 
 
 
 In his abridged translation, Robert McNerney has omitted the Apéndice, documents that O’Leary, had he lived, undoubtedly would have used as the source for completing his account of Bolívar’s life. Numerous letters and documents scattered through the original text also have been omitted, leaving a highly readable narrative.

Bolívar and the War of Independence: Memorias del General Daniel Florencio O'Leary Narración

Robert F. McNerney

Martín Luis Guzmán

“A frequently fascinating and probably fairly accurate insight into the most controversial character of the Mexican Revolution.” —Time
 
 Martín Luis Guzmán, eminent historian of Mexico, knew and traveled with Pancho Villa at various times during the Revolution. When many years later some of Villa’s private papers, records, and what was apparently the beginning of an autobiography came into Guzmán’s hands, he was ideally suited to blend all these into an authentic account of the Revolution as Pancho Villa saw it, and of the General’s life as known only to Villa himself.
 
 This is Villa’s story, his account of how it all began when as a peasant boy of sixteen he shot a rich landowner threatening the honor of his sister. This lone, starved refugee hiding out in the mountains became the scourge of the Mexican Revolution, the leader of thousands of men, and the hero of the masses of the poor.
 
 The assault on Ciudad Juárez in 1911, the battles of Tierra Blanca, of Torreón, of Zacatecas, of Celaya, all are here, told with a feeling of great immediacy. This volume ends as Villa and Obregón prepare to engage each other in the war between victorious generals into which the Revolution degenerated before it finally ended.
 
 The Memoirs were first published in Mexico in 1951, where they were extremely popular. This volume—translated by Virginia H. Taylor—was the first English publication.
 
“This biographical history presents as revealing a historical portrait of the Revolution as the author’s earlier historical novel, The Eagle and the Serpent.” —The Hispanic American Historical Review

Memoirs of Pancho Villa

Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz presents his sustained reflections on the poetic phenomenon and on the place of poetry in history and in our personal lives.

The Bow and the Lyre: The Poem, The Poetic Revelation, Poetry and History

Ruth L. C. Simms

Octavio Paz has long been known for his brilliant essays as well as for his poetry. Through the essays, he has sought to confront the tensions inherent in the conflict between art and society and to achieve a unity of their polarities. The Siren and the Seashell is a collection of Paz’s essays, focusing on individual poets and on poetry in general. The first five poets he treats are Latin American: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Rubén Darío, José Juan Tablada, Ramón López Velarde, and Alfonso Reyes. 

Then there are essays on Robert Frost, e. e. cummings, Saint-John Perse, Antonio Machado, and Jorge Guillén. Finally, there are Paz’s reflections on the poetry of solitude and communion and the literature of Latin America. Each essay is more than Paz’s impressions of one person or issue; each is the occasion for a wider discussion of cultural, historical, psychological, and philosophical themes. The essays were selected from Paz’s writing between 1942 and 1965 and provide an overview of the development of his thinking and an exploration of the ideas central in his works.

The Siren and the Seashell: And Other Essays on Poets and Poetry

Margaret Sayers Peden

Lysander Kemp

Richard H. Immerman

A history and analysis of the United States’ involvement in the deposition of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and the consequences.

Using documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, recently opened archival collections, and interviews with the actual participants, Immerman provides us with a definitive, powerfully written, and tension-packed account of the United States’ clandestine operations in Guatemala and their consequences in Latin America today.

“A valuable study of what Immerman correctly portrays as a seminal event, not just in the annals of the Cold War, but in U.S.–Latin American relations.” —Washington Monthly

“A damning indictment of American interference abroad.” —Pittsburgh Press

“A masterpiece of analysis.” —Reviews in American History

The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention

“The seven years with which this book concerns itself . . . must be thoroughly examined if one is to have a grasp of modern Mexican history.” —Military History of Texas and the Southwest
 
 The years 1913-1920 were the most critical years of the Mexican Revolution. This study of the period, a sequel to the author’s Mexican Revolution: Genesis under Madero, traces Mexico’s course through the anguish of civil war to the establishment of a tenuous new government, the codification of revolutionary aspirations in a remarkable constitution, and the emergence of an activist leadership determined to propel Mexico into the select company of developed nations.
 
 The narrative begins with Huerta’s overthrow of Madero in 1913 and the rise of Carranza’s Constitutionalist counterchallenge. It concludes with a summary of Carranza’s stormy term as constitutional president climaxed by his ouster and overthrow in a revolt spearheaded by Alvaro Obregón. Basing his study on a wide range of Mexican and US primary sources as well as pertinent secondary studies, Cumberland brings a mature and sophisticated analysis to his material; the result is a major contribution to the understanding of one of the twentieth century’s most significant revolutionary movements.

Mexican Revolution: The Constitutionalist Years

Gertrudis Avellaneda

“The first English translation of the major work of a privileged, unconventional, and somewhat neglected Cuban author.” —Choice
 
 Eleven years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin fanned the fires of abolition in North America, an aristocratic Cuban woman told an impassioned story of the fatal love of a mulatto slave for his white owner's daughter. So controversial was Sab’s theme of miscegenation and its parallel between the powerlessness and enslavement of blacks and the economic and matrimonial subservience of women that the book was not published in Cuba until 1914, seventy-three years after its original 1841 publication in Spain.
 Also included in the volume is Avellaneda’s Autobiography (1839), whose portrait of an intelligent, flamboyant woman struggling against the restrictions of her era amplifies the novel's exploration of the patriarchal oppression of minorities and women.
 
 “A worthy addition to scholarship in Latin American studies, useful in comparative literature and social history courses covering such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jorge Isaacs, Alejo Carpentier, or Ramon del Valle-Inclán.” —Choice

Sab and Autobiography

Nina M. Scott

Anita Brenner

“100 pages of text and 184 historical news photographs . . . This is the Mexican Revolution in its drama, its complexity, its incompleteness.” —Bertram D. Wolfe

The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 with the overthrow of dictator Porfirio Díaz. The Wind That Swept Mexico, originally published in 1943, was the first book to present a broad account of that revolution in its several different phases. In concise but moving words and in memorable photographs, this classic sweeps the reader along from the false peace and plenty of the Díaz era through the doomed administration of Madero, the chaotic years of Villa and Zapata, Carranza and Obregón, to the peaceful social revolution of Cárdenas and Mexico’s entry into World War II.

The photographs were assembled from many sources by George R. Leighton with the assistance of Anita Brenner and others. Many of the prints were cleaned and rephotographed by the distinguished photographer Walker Evans.

“Here is the history of the revolution in 184 of the best photographs of the time. The whole disintegration and painful reintegration of a society is marvelously set before the eyes.” —Times Literary Supplement

“A classic and sympathetic statement of the first of the great twentieth century revolutions—its words and pictures command our attention and our respect.” —Military History
“One could not have seen it more closely and fully had one taken part in it.” —Bertram D. Wolfe

The Wind that Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1942

Gene H. Bell-Villada

The acclaimed author of García Márquez delivers “a compulsively readable account of the life and works of our greatest . . . writer of fantasy” (New York Daily News).
 
 Since its first publication in 1981, Borges and His Fiction has introduced the life and works of this Argentinian master-writer to an entire generation of students, high school and college teachers, and general readers. Responding to a steady demand for an updated edition, Gene H. Bell-Villada has significantly revised and expanded the book to incorporate new information that has become available since Borges’ death in 1986. In particular, he offers a more complete look at Borges and Peronism and Borges’ personal experiences of love and mysticism, as well as revised interpretations of some of Borges’ stories. As before, the book is divided into three sections that examine Borges’ life, his stories in Ficciones and El Aleph, and his place in world literature.
 
“Of the scores of Borges studies by now published in English, Bell-Villada’s excellent book stands out as one of the freshest and most generally helpful . . . Lay readers and specialists alike will find his book a valuable and highly readable companion to Ficciones and El Aleph.” —Choice

Texas Pan American Series - The book series

Texas Pan American Series - The book series

Texas Pan American Series books in order

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