Florencia E. Mallon examines the development of capitalism in Peru's central highlands, depicting its impact on peasant village economy and society. She shows that the region's peasantry divided into an agrarian bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat during the period under discussion, although the surviving peasant ideology, village kinship networks, and the communality inspired by economic insecurity have sometimes obscured this division.

Originally published in 1983.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Peasant and Nation offers a major new statement on the making of national politics. Comparing the popular political cultures and discourses of postcolonial Mexico and Peru, Florencia Mallon provides a groundbreaking analysis of their effect on the evolution of these nation states. As political history from a variety of subaltern perspectives, the book takes seriously the history of peasant thought and action and the complexity of community politics. It reveals the hierarchy and the heroism, the solidarity and the surveillance, the exploitation and the reciprocity, that coexist in popular political struggle. With this book Mallon not only forges a new path for Latin American history but challenges the very concept of nationalism. Placing it squarely within the struggles for power between colonized and colonizing peoples, she argues that nationalism must be seen not as an integrated ideology that puts the interest of the nation above all other loyalties, but as a project for collective identity over which many political groups and coalitions have struggled. Ambitious and bold, Peasant and Nation both draws on monumental archival research in two countries and enters into spirited dialogue with the literatures of post-colonial studies, gender studies, and peasant studies.

Decolonizing Native Histories is an interdisciplinary collection that grapples with the racial and ethnic politics of knowledge production and indigenous activism in the Americas. It analyzes the relationship of language to power and empowerment, and advocates for collaborations between community members, scholars, and activists that prioritize the rights of Native peoples to decide how their knowledge is used. The contributors-academics and activists, indigenous and nonindigenous, from disciplines including history, anthropology, linguistics, and political science-explore the challenges of decolonization. These wide-ranging case studies consider how language, the law, and the archive have historically served as instruments of colonialism and how they can be creatively transformed in constructing autonomy. The collection highlights points of commonality and solidarity across geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and also reflects deep distinctions between North and South. Decolonizing Native Histories looks at Native histories and narratives in an internationally comparative context, with the hope that international collaboration and understanding of local histories will foster new possibilities for indigenous mobilization and an increasingly decolonized future.

Confronting Historical Paradigms argues that confrontation with major paradigms of world history has marked the fields of African and Latin American history during the last quarter-century and that the process has dramatically restructured historical and theoretical understanding of peasantries, labour and the capitalist world system. Moreover, it maintains, the intellectual reverberations within and across the African and Latin American fields constitute a challenging and under-appreciated counterpoint to laments that contemporary historical knowledge has suffered a splintering so extreme that it undermines larger dialogue and meaning. The authors in their substantive essays synthesise, order and evaluate the significance of the enormous resonating literatures that have come to exist for Africa and Latin America on the themes of the capitalist world system, labour and peasantries. They historicise these literatures by analysing an entire cycle of critical dialogue and confrontation with historical paradigms and the professional upheavals that accompanied them. They also review the initial confrontations with frameworks of historical knowledge that erupted in the 1960s and the early 1970s; the emergence of new ""dissident"" paradigms; the outpouring of subsequent scholarship on peasants, labour and capitalism that began to unravel the newly proposed paradigms by the 1980s and 1990s; and the outlines of the new interpretive frameworks that tended to displace both the ""traditional"" and ""early dissident"" paradigms. They also suggest possible outlines of a new cycle of ""Third World"" confrontations with paradigm, anchored in themes such as gender and ethnicity. ""Confronting Historical Paradigms"" employs a historicised awareness of intellectual networks, conversations and history-theory dialogues. The result is a critical analysis and synthetic presentation of substantive advances that have preoccupied scholarship on Africa and Latin America in recent decades and a powerful challenge of notions that ""new"" fields of history have ended up destroying intellectual coherence and community.

A pathbreaking contribution to Latin American testimonial literature, "When a Flower Is Reborn" is activist Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef's chronicle of her leadership within the Mapuche indigenous rights movement in Chile. Part personal reflection and part political autobiography, it is also the story of Reuque's rediscovery of her own Mapuche identity through her political and human rights activism over the past quarter century. The questions posed to Reuque by her editor and translator, the distinguished historian Florencia Mallon, are included in the text, revealing both a lively exchange between two feminist intellectuals and much about the crafting of the testimonial itself. In addition, several conversations involving Reuque's family members provide a counterpoint to her story, illustrating the variety of ways identity is created and understood.

A leading activist during the Pinochet dictatorship, Reuque--a woman, a Catholic, and a Christian Democrat--often felt like an outsider within the male-dominated, leftist Mapuche movement. This sense of herself as both participant and observer allows for Reuque's trenchant, yet empathetic, critique of the Mapuche ethnic movement and of the policies regarding indigenous people implemented by Chile's post-authoritarian government. After the 1990 transition to democratic rule, Reuque collaborated with the government in the creation of the Indigenous Development Corporation (CONADI) and the passage of the Indigenous Law of 1993. At the same time, her deepening critiques of sexism in Chilean society in general, and the Mapuche movement in particular, inspired her to found the first Mapuche feminist organization and participate in the 1996 International Women's Conference in Beijing. Critical of the democratic government's inability to effectively address indigenous demands, Reuque reflects on the history of Mapuche activism, including its disarray in the early 1990s and resurgence toward the end of the decade, and relates her hopes for the future.

An important reinvention of the testimonial genre for Latin America's post-authoritarian, post-revolutionary era, "When a Flower Is Reborn" will appeal to those interested in Latin America, race and ethnicity, indigenous people's movements, women and gender, and oral history and ethnography.

Florencia E. Mallon examines the development of capitalism in Peru's central highlands, depicting its impact on peasant village economy and society. She shows that the region's peasantry divided into an agrarian bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat during the period under discussion, although the surviving peasant ideology, village kinship networks, and the communality inspired by economic insecurity have sometimes obscured this division. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.