"The River People in Flood Time" tells the astonishing story of how the people of nineteenth-century Tabasco, Mexico, overcame impossible odds to expel one foreign intervention after another. Tabascans resisted control by Mexico City, overcame the grip of a Cuban adventurer who seized control of the region for two years, turned back the United States Navy, and defeated the French Intervention of the early 1860s, thus remaining free territory while the rest of the nation struggled for four painful years under the imposed monarchy of Maximilian.
With colorful anecdotes and biographical sketches, this deeply researched and masterfully written history reconstructs the lives and culture of the Tabascans, as well as their pre-Columbian and colonial past. Rugeley reveals how over the centuries, one colorful character after another sets foot on the Tabascan stage, only to be undone by climate, disease, and more than anything else, tenacious Tabascan resistance. Virtually the only English-language study of this little-known province, "River People in Flood Time" explores the ways in which geography, climate, and social relationships contributed to their extraordinarily successful defense against unwelcome meddling from the outside world.
"River People in Flood Time" demonstrates the complex relationship between imperial forces in relation to remote parts of Latin America, and the way that resistance to external pressure helped mold the thoughts, attitudes, and actions of those remote peoples. Nineteenth-century Mexico was more a land of localities than a unified nation, and Rugeley's narrative paints an indelible portrait of one of its least known and most unique provinces.

This book explores the origins, process, and consequences of forty years of nearly continual political violence in southeastern Mexico. Rather than recounting the well-worn narrative of the Caste War, it focuses instead on how four decades of violence helped shape social and political institutions of the Mexican southeast. "Rebellion Now and Forever" looks at Yucatan's famous Caste War from the perspective of the vast majority of Hispanics and Maya peasants who did not join in the great ethnic rebellion of 1847. It shows how the history of nonrebel territory was as dramatic and as violent as the front lines of the Caste War, and of greater significance for the larger evolution of Mexican society. The work explores political violence not merely as a method and process, but also as a molder of subsequent institutions and practices.

Spanning the full breadth of Mexico's long and storied past in one compact volume, Epic Mexico provides an unparalleled view of Mexican history, at once comprehensive, succinct, and consistently engaging. The book's story reaches from the days of the saber-tooth tiger to those of its perhaps more dangerous modern counterpart, the narco-trafficker; and from the time of the Olmec and the Aztec through the Spanish Conquest to the complex pluralistic society of contemporary Mexico. Although the book does not shrink from today's urgent issues - including public violence, environmental challenges, public health problems, and struggles with diversity - historian Terry Rugeley underscores the many important accomplishments of the Mexican people over time, balancing political crises with genuine triumphs. Along with matters political and military, Epic Mexico addresses the development of the arts, including literature, music, and cinema. The volume also keeps an eye on the nation's long and often problematic relationship with its neighbor to the north. Though concise, Epic Mexico presents an inclusive portrait of Mexican history and society, exploring the varied roles and contributions of native ethnicities, Africans, women, immigrants, and peoples of different regional and religious orientations. It is the most thorough and thoroughly readable one-volume history of Mexico from antiquity to our day.

In the tumultuous decades following Mexico's independence from Spain, religion provided a unifying force among the Mexican people, who otherwise varied greatly in ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Accordingly, religion and the popular cultures surrounding it form the lens through which Terry Rugeley focuses this cultural history of southeast Mexico from independence (1821) to the rise of the dictator Porfirio Diaz in 1876.

Drawing on a wealth of previously unused archival material, Rugeley vividly reconstructs the folklore, beliefs, attitudes, and cultural practices of the Maya and Hispanic peoples of the Yucatan. In engagingly written chapters, he explores folklore and folk wisdom, urban piety, iconography, and anticlericalism. Interspersed among the chapters are detailed portraits of individual people, places, and institutions, that, with the archival evidence, offer a full and fascinating history of the outlooks, entertainments, and daily lives of the inhabitants of southeast Mexico in the nineteenth century. Rugeley also links this rich local history with larger events to show how macro changes in Mexico affected ordinary people.

Social history that challenges earlier views of the Caste War. Examines the development of the social, political, and economic structure of the Yucatâan during the first half of the 19th century and profiles four towns involved in the Caste War. Emphasizes the eroding status of Maya elites as a key to the revolt"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

The indigenous and Creole inhabitants (Mosquitians of African descent) of the Mosquito Reserve in present-day Nicaragua underwent a key transformation when two Moravian missionaries arrived in 1849. Within a few short generations, the new faith became so firmly established there that eastern Nicaragua to this day remains one of the world’s strongest Moravian enclaves.  The Awakening Coast offers the first comprehensive English-language selection of the writings of the multinational missionaries who established the Moravian faith among the indigenous and Afro-descendant populations through the turbulent years of the Great Awakening of 1881 to 1882, when converts flocked to the church and the mission’s membership more than doubled. The anthology tracks the intersection of religious, political, and economic forces that led to this dynamic religious shift and illustrates how the mission’s first fifty years turned a relatively obscure branch of Protestantism into the most important political and spiritual institution in the region by contextualizing the Great Awakening, Protestant evangelism, and indigenous identity during this time of dramatic social change.   

This book features a young explorer caught in the torments of civil war. This volume is the first-ever English translation of the memoirs of Karl Heller, a twenty-year-old aspiring Austrian botanist who traveled to Mexico in 1845 to collect specimens. He passed through the Caribbean, lived for a time in the mountains of Veracruz, and journeyed to Mexico City through the cities of Puebla and Cholula. After a brief residence in the capital, Heller moved westward to examine the volcanoes and silver mines near Toluca. When the United States invaded Mexico in 1846-47 conditions became chaotic, and the enterprising botanist was forced to flee to Yucatan. Heller lived in the port city of Campeche, but visited Merida, the ruins of Uxmal, and the remote southern area of the Champoton River. From there Heller, traveling by canoe, journeyed through southern Tabasco and northern Chiapas and finally returned to Vienna through Cuba and the United States bringing back thousands of samples of Mexican plants and animals. Heller's account is one of the few documents we have from travelers who visited Mexico in this period, and it is particularly useful in describing conditions outside the capital of Mexico City. In 1853, Heller published his German-language account as ""Reisen in Mexiko"", but the work has remained virtually unknown to English or Spanish readers. This edition now provides a complete, annotated, and highly readable translation.