Despite its importance, the twentieth-century Latin American right has received little scholarly attention. This is the first book to explicitly compare extreme rightist organizations, ideas, and actions in different national settings in Latin America. Hardly an undifferentiated whole, the right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile has changed over time and has contained moderate and extreme factions; the book's title, "Las Derechas," emphasizes this diversity. The author focuses on extreme right-wing movements, showing how their class and gender composition, motives, programs, and activities varied over time and between countries.
To demonstrate the variety of thought and fluidity of positions within the far right, the author brings to life the many voices it contained: its highbrow and lowbrow figures, its male and female exponents, and its mass-circulation periodicals and more erudite literature. The depiction of rallies, social welfare projects, and brutal clashes with opponents also reveals the flavor of the radical right and the rich texture of its history. Although extreme right-wing movements defined themselves as masculine, some nevertheless recruited women; this is only one of the many contradictions between their ideology and actions.
Concentrating on domestic roots, the study shows how radical rightists incorporated local concerns, not simply European dogma, into their agendas. It explores their relations with the military, Catholic Church, government, labor, and other groups throughout the political spectrum. The ties of radical rightists to moderate rightists are of particular interest, for the ideological and tactical differences between the two factions tended to diminish during periods of crisis. The book concludes with an epilogue that traces radical rightist movements up to the present, demonstrating the importance of the analysis for understanding current conditions as well as the past.

Despite its importance, the twentieth-century Latin American right has received little scholarly attention. This is the first book to explicitly compare extreme rightist organizations, ideas, and actions in different national settings in Latin America. Hardly an undifferentiated whole, the right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile has changed over time and has contained moderate and extreme factions; the book's title, Las Derechas, emphasizes this diversity. The author focuses on extreme right-wing movements, showing how their class and gender composition, motives, programs, and activities varied over time and between countries. To demonstrate the variety of thought and fluidity of positions within the far right, the author brings to life the many voices it contained: its highbrow and lowbrow figures, its male and female exponents, and its mass-circulation periodicals and more erudite literature. The depiction of rallies, social welfare projects, and brutal clashes with opponents also reveals the flavor of the radical right and the rich texture of its history. Although extreme right-wing movements defined themselves as masculine, some nevertheless recruited women; this is only one of the many contradictions between their ideology and actions. Concentrating on domestic roots, the study shows how radical rightists incorporated local concerns, not simply European dogma, into their agendas. It explores their relations with the military, Catholic Church, government, labor, and other groups throughout the political spectrum. The ties of radical rightists to moderate rightists are of particular interest, for the ideological and tactical differences between the two factions tended to diminish during periods of crisis. The book concludes with an epilogue that traces radical rightist movements up to the present, demonstrating the importance of the analysis for understanding current conditions as well as the past.

In "Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation," Sandra McGee Deutsch brings to light the powerful presence and influence of Jewish women in Argentina. The country has the largest Jewish community in Latin America and the third largest in the Western Hemisphere as a result of large-scale migration of Jewish people from European and Mediterranean countries from the 1880s through the Second World War. During this period, Argentina experienced multiple waves of political and cultural change, including liberalism, "nacionalismo," and Peronism. Although Argentine liberalism stressed universal secular education, immigration, and individual mobility and freedom, women were denied basic citizenship rights, and sometimes Jews were cast as outsiders, especially during the era of right-wing "nacionalismo." Deutsch's research fills a gap by revealing the ways that Argentine Jewish women negotiated their own plural identities and in the process participated in and contributed to Argentina's liberal project to create a more just society.

Drawing on extensive archival research and original oral histories, Deutsch tells the stories of individual women, relating their sentiments and experiences as both insiders and outsiders to state formation, transnationalism, and cultural, political, ethnic, and gender borders in Argentine history. As agricultural pioneers and film stars, human rights activists and teachers, mothers and doctors, Argentine Jewish women led wide-ranging and multifaceted lives. Their community involvement--including building libraries and secular schools, and opposing global fascism in the 1930s and 1940s--directly contributed to the cultural and political lifeblood of a changing Argentina. Despite their marginalization as members of an ethnic minority and as women, Argentine Jewish women formed communal bonds, carved out their own place in society, and ultimately shaped Argentina's changing pluralistic culture through their creativity and work.

This edited volume places Jewish-Latin Americans within the context of Latin American and ethnic studies. It departs from traditional scholarship that segregates Jews as inhabitants "in" Latin America republics rather than as citizens "of" Latin American republics. The essays draw examples primarily from Argentina and Brazil, the two South American countries with the largest Jewish populations, and span from the late nineteenth century into the 1990s.

By giving primacy to the national identity of Jewish-Latin Americans, the essays included here emphasize human actors and accounts of lived experiences. Lesser and Rein's thought-provoking introduction outlines seven new formulations of the relationship between Jews, the nation-state, and their Diasporic experience. Individual contributors then pursue new perspectives of the Jewish experience, including those of the working class, labor organizing and anarchist activities, women, and the reconceptualization of racism and anti-Semitism.

"Contributors: "
Edna Aizenberg, Marymount Manhattan College of New York
Judah M. Cohen, Indiana University
Roney Cytrynowicz, the Arquivo HistA3rico Judaico Brasileiro
Sandra McGee Deutsch, University of Texas at El Paso
Donna J. Gu, Ohio State University
JosA(c) C. Moya, UCLA and Barnard College at Columbia University
Rosalie Sitman, Tel Aviv University
Natasha Zaretsky, Princeton University
Erin Graff Zivin, University of Pittsburgh

A History of the Women’s Antifascism Movement in Argentina that Contains Lessons for Opposing Fascism Today Argentine women’s long resistance to extreme rightists, tyranny, and militarism culminated in the Junta de la Victoria, or Victory Board, a group that organized in the aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in defiance of the neutralist and Axis-leaning government in Argentina. A sewing and knitting group that provided garments and supplies for the Allied armies in World War II, the Junta de la Victoria was a politically minded association that mobilized women in the fight against fascism. Without explicitly characterizing itself as feminist, the organization promoted women’s political rights and visibility and attracted forty-five thousand members. The Junta ushered diverse constituencies of Argentine women into political involvement in an unprecedented experiment in pluralism, coalition-building, and political struggle. Sandra McGee Deutsch uses this internationally minded but local group to examine larger questions surrounding the global conflict between democracy and fascism.

In Women of the Right, Kathleen M. Blee and Sandra McGee Deutsch bring together a groundbreaking collection of essays examining women in right-wing politics across the world, from the early twentieth-century white Afrikaner movement in South Africa to the supporters of Sarah Palin today. The volume introduces a truly global perspective on how women matter in the national and transnational links and exchanges of rightist politics. Suitable for classroom use, it sets a new agenda for scholarship on women on the right.

Aside from the editors, the contributors are Nancy Aguirre, Karla J. Cunningham, Kirsten Delegard, Kathleen M. Fallon, Kate Hallgren, Randolph Hollingsworth, Jill Irvine, Vandana Joshi, Carol S. Lilly, Annette Linden, Julie Moreau, Margaret Power, Mariela Rubinzal, Daniella Sarnoff, Ronnee Schreiber, Meera Sehgal, Louise Vincent, and Veronica A. Wilson.

In "The Argentine Right: Its History and Intellectual Origins" scholars of Argentine and Latin American history chart the growth of the Right from its roots in 19th-century European political theory through to the collapse of the conservative government in the 1980s. The contributors describe the Right's development, uneasy alliance with Peronists, years of triumph and subsequent retreat to opposition status. Arguing that the Right was unified, if at all, by no more than a fear of the Left, the essays distinguish the many groups and individuals prominent in the conservative and "nacionalista" movements. The discussions refer frequently to parallel events in Europe, identifying differences and similarities, and allowing the reader to make comparisons. In the process, the authors refute the myth that the right was substantially influenced by the Nazi party and convincingly document instead the more prevalent relationship between the ideology of the Spanish Falangists and that of like-minded activists struggling for a purifying Argentine renewal.