Fall 2014

History 103 Seminar

University of California, Berkeley

The Question of Progress in Latin American History
or, What Have Latin Americans Been Fighting About for Two Centuries?

Professor: Pablo Palomino

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Seminar Meetings:
Fridays 10-12, 2303 Dwinelle

Office Hours:
Tu 9-10 & F 12:30 and by appointment, 3323 Dwinelle
pablomin@berkeley.edu


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Progress has always been a puzzle in Latin Americas history: a challenge for
intellectual and political elites, an elusive dream for ordinary Latin Americans, and the
cause of new challenges and problems wherever it did take place. For historians, progress
used to represent the very sense of universal history, a narrative that sneaked into current
visions of Western modernity and globalization. What has progress meant
particularly for Latin Americans? What is, for instance, the meaning of progress in the
Brazilian flag? In political terms, what ideas of progress animated oligarchic, liberal,
populist, military, revolutionary, and democratic projects? Because progress involves
planning and envisioning the outcome of present actions, the history of progress is, in
certain way, a history of the future.
The goal of the seminar is to help students situate a problem of their choice
from public policy to political ideologies, from religion to economics, from the arts to the
sciencesand trace its history in terms of the political debates that pursued the goal of
progress (or to stop it) in that specific realm. Students in history and humanities, as well
as both the hard and social sciences, will be able to intervene in todays debates about the
futureeconomic regimes, environmental policies, institutions, technology, and
cultureinformed by an explicit idea of progress instead of an implicit or ideological
one.

The course:

This course aims to foster a deeper knowledge of Latin American societies among
students already familiarized with the region, and to introduce those who are discovering
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it into one of the most relevant problems of modern and contemporary history, faced by
virtually all societies: progress. What is progress? How has this keyword been
reformulated in the political, legal, economic, social, and cultural struggles that shaped
modern Latin America? How did it shape the imagining of the future? Does progress
mean extractive capitalism, or is it also the path to diminish socio-economic inequalities?
How did progress impact the physical environment? Is itself a consequence of external
imposition, state planning, or social cooperation? Is it just a utopia? Who defined it, and
which paths to achieve it have been elaborated in Latin America? Is it inevitable? Is it,
after all, desirable?
Organized chronologically, the course presents, on the one hand, ideas and
political debates around the problem of progress, and on the other, the social history
behind them. The lectures will bring together the two poles, and section meetings will
focus on articles and books dedicated to specific contexts and histories. In both section
meetings and office hours students will get feedback on a short paper, in which they will
elaborate an original definition of progress, grounded on a short set of documents and
readings on a historical event, place, or period of their interest. The readings will provide
empirical analysis of key cases and serve as models of particular forms of history:
environmental, intellectual, of gender, race, and so forth.
The course begins with the attempts at reforming the socio-economic structure of
the Iberian empires and the debates of post-Independence thinkers and leaders of the
young Latin American republics regarding different ways to progress. Then it moves to
the turn of the twentieth century, when positivist thinkers and state modernizers debated
the meaning of progress with spiritualist, millenarian, and grassroots projects around
cooperative, local, national and transnational forms of social organization. The third stage
of the journey focuses on the mid-twentieth-century populist alliances around social
progress with its extended citizenship, nationalist projects of industrialization, welfare
state and union-based popular organization. The fourth module deals with the structural
crises that broke the populist alliances in the 1960s and 1970s, and with two radical
understandings of progress that emerged in those years: the revolutionary and the neo-
liberal. The fifth and final module introduces the current debates on progress among neo-
liberal, neo-developmental, environmental, center-left, and post-colonial ideas and
policies across the region.

Assignments:

Paper: in 10 double-space pages, students will choose in Week 4 a historical
problem of their choicefor instance: gender equality, electoral law, private property,
use of forests, ethnic relations, school, political violence, scientific knowledge,
migrationsin a country, region, or city (or a comparative approach to two of them) and
elaborate either an original definition of progress or an argument about its meaning,
based on the close reading of primary documents and scholarly texts to be determined on
an individual basis in office hours.

Grading:
Class attendance and participation: 60%
Paper: 40%
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Schedule


Week 1 (8/29): Introduction: Progress and Latin America.
Description of the seminar, readings, assignments, grades, and office hours


Part 1: The Origins of Latin Americas Quest for Progress

Week 2 (9/5): Colonial Progress
Readings:
- David Weber, Brbaros: Spaniards and their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment
(Intro, Chapters 1 - 2 - 3 - 6, and Epilogue)

Week 3 (9/12): Progress vs. Millenarianism
Reading:
- Alberto Flores Galindo: In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes (1986)
(Selection)


Part 2: Progress Utopia in the Nineteenth Century

Week 4 (9/19): Positivist Progress
Reading:
- Rebecca Earle, The Return of the Native (2007) (Selection)
- Roberto Gargarella, Latin American Constitutionalism, 1810-2010, Chapter 5
Positivism and Revolution at the Beginning of the New Century (2013) (p. 107-134)

Week 5 (9/26): Eugenic Progress
Readings:
- Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands (1902) (Selection)
- Alejandra Bronfman, Measures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in
Cuba, 1903-1940 (2004), Chapter 5, Social Science, State-Making, and the Politics of
Time


Part 3: Peoples Progress in the 20
th
Century

Week 6 (10/3): Living Standards: Socio-Biological Progress
Reading:
- Moramay Lpez-Alonso, Measuring Up. A History of Living Standards in Mexico,
1850-1950 (2012)

Week 7 (10/10): Students Presentations

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Week 8 (10/17): Popular Consumerism as Social Progress
Reading:
- Eduardo Elena, Dignifying Argentina. Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption
(2011)

Suggested reading:
- Joel Wolfe, Populism and Developmentalism, in Thomas Holloway, A
Companion to Latin American History, Blackwell, 2011. (p. 347-364)

Week 9 (10/24): Popular Housing and Urbanism as Social Progress
Reading:
- Sarah Selvidge, Housing and Urban Modernism in Mexico, 1920-1960 (2014)


Part 4: Anti-Imperialist Progress

Week 10 (10/31): Socio-Economic Structural Obstacles to Progress
Reading:
- Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and development in Latin
America (1971)

Week 11 (11/7): Progress as Popular (and Revolutionary) Education
Readings:
- John Hammond, Popular Education in the Midst of Guerrilla War: An Interview with
Julio Portillo, in Journal of Education 173:1, 1991 (p. 91-106)
- Clark Taylor, Seeds of Freedom: Liberating Education in Guatemala (2013)


Part 5: Present and Future of Progress

Week 12 (11/14): Current Roadmaps to Progress: Neo-liberalism, Neo-
developmentalism, and Environmentalism
Reading:
- Elizabeth Fitting, The Struggle for Maize: Campesinos, Workers, and Transgenic Corn
in the Mexican Countryside (2011), Chapters 2 and 3.

Week 13 (11/21): The World Bank Perspective
Reading:
- World Bank Report (VVAA), Economic Mobility and the Rise of the Latin American
Middle Class (2013)

Week 14 (12/5): Students Presentations

[Week 15 (12/12): Recitation Week (no meeting)]

Week 16 (Monday, Dec. 15) Paper is due.