Announcing a New Series—Visualidades: Studies in Latin American Visual History

Visualidades: Studies in Latin American Visual History seeks to further the exploration of visual history as a distinct field of inquiry on Latin America in dialogue with other disciplinary fields. This series conceptualizes visual history as the study of images and the past in the broadest sense and asks how images have shaped Latin American cultures. The series editors invite projects that both ground visual forms of communication in the rich and complex histories through which they took shape and that examine the direct agency of images in crafting historical narratives, stimulating change, and reshaping thought.

Proposals and queries may be sent to the series editors, Ernesto Capello at ecapello@macalester.edu and Jessica Stites Mor at jessica.stites-mor@ubc.ca, and the acquiring editor Kerry Webb: kwebb@utpress.utexas.edu.

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Dr. Jessica Stites Mor is an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of Transition Cinema: Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left since 1968 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), editor of Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), and coeditor of The Art of Solidarity: Visual and Performative Politics in Cold War Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2018).

Ernesto Capello is an associate professor of history at Macalester College. He is the author of City at the Center of the World: Space, History, and Modernity in Quito (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

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Q&A with Rachel Elfenbein on Gender and Labor in Bolivarian Venezuela

Rachel Elfenbein's Engendering Revolution: Women, Unpaid Labor, and Maternalism in Bolivarian Venezuela is the first in-depth study of the overlooked yet pivotal role played by poor and working-class women’s unpaid labor, maternal gender role, and organization in propelling and sustaining Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. It demonstrates that the Bolivarian revolution during Chávez’s presidency cannot be understood without comprehending the gendered nature of its state-society relations.

We asked Dr. Elfenbein a few questions about her book. Engendering Revolution is out now.

Describe your research and the resulting book. 

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In 1999, Venezuela became the first country in the world to constitutionally recognize the socioeconomic value of housework and enshrine homemakers’ social security. This landmark constitutional provision formed part of the larger Bolivarian state transformation project aiming to construct a new social contract between the state and society by expanding poor and working class—or popular-sector—participation and inclusion. This new social contract privileged popular participation in community service delivery and political mobilization. Because of their primary responsibility for household and community care work, popular women became key to this contract. The Bolivarian government recognized their centrality, asserting that the revolution had “a woman’s face.” In other words, the government was aware that there was no revolution without popular women’s participation.

My book brings to light a crucial tension at the heart of the Bolivarian revolution during Hugo Chávez’s presidency: state recognition of the centrality of poor and working-class women’s unpaid labor and maternal gender role to the revolutionary process rendered them vulnerable to state appropriation. To paraphrase one feminist activist, the state wanted popular women’s work, but not their power.

State recognition of the importance of popular women’s unpaid labor to national development created new opportunities for popular women’s organizing and their articulations with the state. The state instituted several programs that recognized some popular women’s unpaid labor, lightened and/or socialized their care burdens, and improved their and their families’ welfare.

Women's meeting with President Chávez, Caracas, 2012

Yet the Bolivarian government included popular women by drawing on the extant hegemonic gender role of women as mothers and resignifying it in service of the revolution, producing a revolutionary maternalism. While honoring popular women, the government’s revolutionary maternalist approach relied on and deepened the gendered division of labor. The government expected popular women to be both mobilized and contained for what it saw as the revolution’s broader interests.

My book shows that during Chávez’s tenure, the Bolivarian state forestalled initiatives to legislate homemakers’ social security, and many homemakers could not access it. I contend that popular women performed much of the unpaid social and political labor necessary to build and sustain the revolution, even as many of them remained socially, economically, and politically vulnerable.

My argument is developed by combining field research on three understudied areas of Bolivarian Venezuela: 1) the legal codification of women’s labor rights; 2) political mobilization around those rights; and 3) the lived experiences of women in the popular sectors. It is built from one and a half years of qualitative research with popular women, feminist analysts and organizations, social security analysts, state archives, and state women’s leaders and institutions in different geographic regions of Venezuela.

How did you get interested in the subject of your book?

My interest in this subject began far from Venezuela, when I was living and doing work around gender violence, labor, HIV/AIDS, and public health in southern Africa. I witnessed how poor and working-class women’s unpaid labor was vital to household and community survival in the face of structural unemployment, the HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis pandemics, and neoliberal state restructuring. In community after community, many poor women were organizing and doing so much of the necessary care work that held communities together. Yet a lot of that work went unrecognized and unpaid, and left the workers who carried it out themselves vulnerable to poverty, disease, and gender violence. I became interested in institutional mechanisms to recognize such work and socially protect the workers who carry it out as a means to mitigate their vulnerability. And that is when I heard of Article 88 in Venezuela’s 1999 Constitution, which recognized the value of unpaid housework for society and entitled homemakers to social security. I wanted to find out what Article 88 meant for the poor and working-class women in Venezuela largely carrying out unpaid labor.

How was the Bolivarian government able to leverage poor and working class women’s political participation during Chávez’s presidency?

The Bolivarian government’s approach to poor and working-class women’s political participation was not uniform. That said, the government was populated by leaders who knew that popular women, their labor, and their organization by and large sustained the revolution. The government knew that women voted more than men, that women mobilized politically at grassroots levels more than men, and that women organized more than men to meet community welfare needs. As government officials often asserted, “the revolution ha[d] a woman’s face.” Because of this awareness, the Bolivarian government progressively created a range of popular women’s organizations through which it incorporated thousands of women across Venezuela into the revolutionary process. Many of these new state-directed women’s organizations provided social and economic assistance to popular women and their families as well as opportunities to engage with the state, other women, and their communities in new ways. Yet these new organizations rendered popular women’s unpaid labor and organizing vulnerable to clientelistic use by the state. Popular women were more vulnerable to state authorities’ political direction and manipulation when they depended on the state for resources, like cash transfers, because the state could more easily control them, their organization, and their mobilization. It’s important to note that these clientelistic exchanges were not about traditional vote buying, as most popular women already supported the Bolivarian government. This was their process, a process that they helped to build and in which they saw themselves represented by Chávez and the revolution more broadly. Rather, the clientelistic exchanges were for popular women’s continuous political organization in support of the Bolivarian government and its interests.

At the same time, the broader political context of intense and constant political polarization hampered popular women’s organizing for their own rights and power. Many popular women—whether or not they were in state-led organizations—felt that they must unify to defend the government in the face of ongoing domestic and international opposition threats.

International Women’s Day parade, Coro, Falcón, 2012

Describe the broad tenets of the Latin American Left’s promotion of popular power and social justice. 

The Left came to national power in the majority of Latin America at the beginning of this century by recognizing popular and social movement demands to redress long-standing inequalities exacerbated by neoliberalism. The institutional Latin American Left did not promote a unified social justice program throughout the region; it varied nationally and sub-nationally. However, across the region, the Left prioritized redressing inequalities by reversing (some) neoliberal policies and reintroducing states’ progressive interventionist roles in markets and societies. Central to such interventions were expanded social spending and social protection programs. Yet the Left largely relied on a sustained primary commodity boom, and extractive industries in particular, to finance its pro-poor policies. And it largely relied on poor women’s unpaid labor to sustain its expanded social policies, which my book underscores in the case of Bolivarian Venezuela. This is why in Venezuela during Chávez’s tenure, poverty was massively reduced but the gendered burden of poverty did not change: women continued to bear it disproportionately. In other words, Bolivarian Venezuela’s and much of the Latin American Left’s reliance on natural resource extraction enabled large-scale social redistribution, yet Venezuela and most of the Latin American Left did not commit to large-scale social redistribution of reproductive labor.

The institutional Latin American Left also sought to politically incorporate groups historically excluded from liberal democratic institutions and constitution- and policy-making processes, such as the popular sectors, women, and indigenous peoples. A number of countries governed by the Left, such as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, rewrote their constitutions, enshrining new rights for previously excluded social groups, such as homemakers’ right to social security in Venezuela. In most countries governed by the Left, redressing political inequalities included the creation of new institutions for participatory democracy. In Bolivarian Venezuela, the government instituted a number of new participatory democratic mechanisms in order to promote popular power.

What context might be missing from current coverage of Venezuela’s instability and how might that affect women and families?

Broadly speaking, current coverage in the Global North of Venezuela’s crisis tends not to situate it within the broader geopolitical and historical context shaping it. Specifically, much coverage of the Venezuelan crisis tends not to note how US sanctions and a US-led oil embargo have crippled the Venezuelan economy. Venezuela historically has been, and remains, heavily reliant on the oil industry for foreign currency. The Bolivarian government inherited an extractive economy, and despite its aspirations and initiatives to sustainably diversify the economy, Venezuela has remained a petro-state, heavily dependent on importation of essential goods. The Bolivarian government renationalized the oil industry, and has since used oil revenues to fund basic public services—like healthcare, housing, and subsidized food—for many people and communities throughout Venezuela. Currently, with very limited public oil revenues, the Bolivarian government is struggling to guarantee basic welfare. This is not to deny the domestic factors shaping the economic, social, and political crisis in Venezuela; rather, it is to highlight that the US-led intervention has severely compounded the mutually reinforcing crises in the country.

The current coverage of Venezuela’s crisis has rightly highlighted how it has been devastating for poor and working people in Venezuela. Yet it has largely ignored how the crisis itself is gendered; that is, how it affects poor and working-class people differently based on their gender and their positioning within the gendered division of labor. Research from past crises in Venezuela and many other countries has shown how poor women tend to bear much of the burden, because of the gendered division of labor, gender inequalities in the public and private spheres, and gender roles that charge them with the bulk of household reproduction responsibilities. In times of crisis, poor women tend to have to do more work with fewer resources in order to ensure their households’ survival. My book reveals that the Bolivarian revolution during Chávez’s tenure did not transform the gendered division of labor; it reinforced it, and in many cases, deepened it. The revolution preserved the normative underpinning of maternal altruism, while resignifying it as revolutionary. Because of the lack of transformation of the gendered division of labor in Venezuela, poor women, their maternal gender role, and their unpaid labor continue to be essential to ensuring households’ and communities’ subsistence during this crisis, especially as the state is no longer capable of meeting many welfare needs. And much of this labor that is so crucial to weathering the crisis remains invisible.

An independent scholar, Rachel Elfenbein holds a PhD in sociology from Simon Fraser University and was a Fulbright scholar to Venezuela. She was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s 2018 Helen Safa Award for the research featured in Engendering Revolution. She works as an educator, researcher, facilitator, and counselor with civil society organizations in North America and southern Africa.

www.utexaspress.com

2018 in Book Awards and Distinctions

As we look back on 2018, we will be sharing our proudest moments here at the University of Texas Press. As a testament to the high-quality scholarship our authors have produced and the heroic efforts by our editorial staff, we are pleased to highlight the books, below, that have earned awards or distinctions in 2018.

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Archaeology

Tom Dillehay’s Where the Land Meets the Sea: Fourteen Millennia of Human History at Huaca Prieta, Peru

2018 Society for American Archaeology's Book Award 

"This volume is a foundational landmark, and can be used to teach students both at undergraduate and graduate levels to provide guidance for how to conduct and publish future archaeological research."

—Antiquity

American Studies

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Stacy I. Morgan's Frankie and Johnny: Race, Gender, and the Work of African American Folklore in 1930s America

2018 Wayland D. Hand Prize (co-winner) 

“I am extremely impressed by this book. I think it will be a valuable addition to African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, and popular culture studies.”

—James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Amherst, author of The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance

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Music

Holly Gleason’s Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives

2018 Belmont Award for the Best Book on Country Music 

“Woman Walk the Line radiates heartfelt sincerity, revealing how women in country music—world-famous and little-known, black and white, vintage and contemporary—helped shape the lives of many different kinds of women. It’s concrete evidence that country should and does belong just as much to women as to men.”

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—Ann Powers, author of Good Booty

Photography

Dawoud Bey's Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply

Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist 

"Photographs from all of Bey’s major projects are presented in chronological sequence, allowing viewers to see how the collective body of portraits and recent landscapes create an unparalleled historical representation of various communities in the United States."

—Photo-eye Blog

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Classics and Ancient World

Jeffrey M. Hunt, R. Alden Smith, and Fabio Stok’s Classics from Papyrus to the Internet: An Introduction to Transmission and Reception

2018 AAP Prose Awards, Classics Category

"Hunt, Smith, and Stok have produced a valuable and useful book…Especially as Classics continues to be a source of interest and even contention in the public eye, the history of the field should remain of vital interest to students…The present volume offers a rich and engaging starting point."

—New England Classical Journal

Middle Eastern Studies

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Ahmed Naji’s Using LifeIllustrations by Ayman Al Zorkany, translated by Benjamin Koerber

2018 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards Shortlist 

“Using Life is a riotous novel about a failing state, a corrupt city, a hypocritical authority, but it is also about tequila shots and getting laid and smoking weed with your infuriating girlfriend and debating whether rock music died in the seventies and if Quentin Tarantino is a genius or a fraud. It’s a young man’s book. A young man whose youth is colliding with a dark moment in history.”

—Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books

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Camila Pastor's The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate

2018 Khayrallah Prize in Migration Studies 

“A groundbreaking work that presents the social configuration of Arabic-speaking migrants and their descendants in a new and revelatory light. This study stands to be an excellent example of a global, connected colonial approach to migration and nationalism. It reconfigures Latin American and Middle Eastern studies in a sound and compelling way, highlighting the ways in which Mexico and the Levant participate in, and interact with, the same structures of power.”

—Christina Civantos, University of Miami, author of Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity

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Film, Media & Popular Culture

Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant’s Hysterical! Women in American Comedy

2018 Susan Koppleman Award for Best Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in Feminist Studies, Popular and American Culture Associations (PACA) 

"Here to meet all your funny female deep-read needs . . . a juicy read for those who love the many ways female comics use their art to question the patriarchy."

—BUST

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Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis’s Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics

2018 Best Academic/Scholarly work, Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Shortlist 

“Picturing Childhood is a much needed and long-awaited interdisciplinary project that looks at representations of children throughout the history of comics.”
—Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature

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Jennifer Fronc's Monitoring the Movies: The Fight over Film Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century Urban America

2017 Richard Wall Memorial Award finalist (Theatre Library Association)

“Not unlike Facebook, the nascent movie industry resisted regulation; it fought back with self-imposed guidelines aided by the rhetoric of civil libertarians. . . . Fronc has written an engaging and balanced account of questions whose debating points remain relevant today.”

—Shepherd Express 

Latin American Studies

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Gary Urton’s Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources

2018 AAP Prose Awards, Biological Anthropology, Ancient History & Archaeology category 
2018 Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize
2017 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Honorable Mention

“This volume goes a long way toward explaining and interpreting Inca khipus as encoded political, social, ritual, and economic structures, and as such, is essential reading not only for all Peruvianists and students of ancient civilizations but also, because of the book's code-breaking arguments related to binary coding, hierarchy, and markedness, for scholars in those areas as well.”

—Choice

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Harper Montgomery’s The Mobility of Modernism: Art and Criticism in 1920s Latin America

2018 Annual Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation Margaret Arvey Book Award 

“Deeply researched and passionately argued, this book is a model for effective transnational scholarship. Much like her protagonists, Montgomery is a visionary.”

—Tatiana Flores, Rutgers University, author of Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30!

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Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico

2018 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Award 

“A rich history of how race was conceptualized and materially inscribed in colonial Mexico—and a pleasure to read. The book’s contributions are manifold, and it will be in conversation with other books in the field, while expanding the discussions with which the colonial period can engage.”

—Ivonne del Valle, University of California, Berkeley

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Amy Sara Carroll’s REMEX: Toward and Art History of the NAFTA Era 

2018 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Award, Honorable Mention
2017 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Honorable Mention

“Incredibly smart, well-articulated, and very much needed. REMEX is not only an important contribution to the fields of Mexican and border visual cultural and performance studies, but it is the book that will move the conversations in the fields in new and provocative ways. It is the book many of us have been waiting for.”

—Laura G. Gutiérrez, University of Texas at Austin, author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage

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John Lear’s Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico 1908–1940

2018 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Award, Honorable Mention

“This superb study intertwines a history of artistic representations of Mexican workers on public walls and in labor publications with that of the artists who produced them. I know of no other work that attempts such an endeavor and, though it is an ambitious project, it is most successful. The wide swath cut by Lear makes the book important for a broad audience: those interested in the history of Mexico, the history of Mexican labor, and the history of Mexican art. The scholarship is impeccable.”

—John Mraz, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, author of Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons

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Mariana Mora’s Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities

2018 LASA Mexico Social Science Book Award, Honorable Mention

“Kuxlejal Politics is a most eloquent testimony to the dynamic Zapatista struggle and to what an engaged academy can do when it genuinely walks along the paths of subaltern groups intent on defending their worlds. By theorizing and embodying a farsighted vision of decolonized and decolonizing research, Mora renews our commitment to the idea that another academy is possible and practicable. This work is a gift to us all by one of the most inventive exponents of Mexican anthropology at present, in the best tradition of Latin American critical thought.”

—Arturo Escobar, Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Robert W. Wilcox’s Cattle in the Backlands: Mato Grosso and the Evolution of Ranching in the Brazilian Tropics

2018 Henry A. Wallace Award, The Agricultural History Society 

“This book fills a large hole in historical scholarship. English-language treatments of ranching history anywhere in Brazil are few and far between. It also makes a strong case for the importance of linking agro-pastoral studies to environmental specificity and to careful consideration of labor practices.”

—Thomas D. Rogers, Emory University, author of the award-winning book The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil

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Isabel M. Córdova’s Pushing in Silence: Modernizing Puerto Rico and the Medicalization of Childbirth

2018 NWSA Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize 

“A brilliantly written, accessible, and comprehensive analysis of the multifaceted social, cultural, and historical conditions that led to the medicalization of birthing in Puerto Rico, which enabled doctors to replace midwives. This history has not been written before. The research is original and unique and is a contribution to the fields of sociology, anthropology, history, and biomedicine.”

—Iris O. Lopez, City College of New York, author of Matters of Choice: Puerto Rican Women’s Struggle for Reproductive Freedom

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Patricia Acerbi’s Street Occupations: Urban Vending in Rio de Janeiro, 1850–1925

2017 Warren Dean Memorial Prize in Brazilian Studies, Conference on Latin American History 

“This book makes a huge contribution to our understanding of street life and commerce in Rio de Janeiro and to the transition from flexible slavery to radically unequal freedom. Acerbi’s research is extensive and groundbreaking.”

—Bryan McCann, Georgetown University, author of Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro

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Dispatches from the Latin American Studies Association International Congress in Peru

By Kerry Webb, Senior Editor

Acquisitions areas: Latin American and Pre-Columbian studies, Latin American history, Latino/a studies

Series: Border Hispanisms, Historia USA, Inter America

Recently, my colleague Inés ter Horst and I attended the 2017 Latin American Studies Association meeting in Lima, Peru. We quickly got into the swim of things with a walk along the famed Malencón, situated on the edge of cliffs overlooking beautiful views of the beaches of Lima and the Pacific Ocean, and a lunch of some delicious ceviche. To set up our book exhibit, after lunch we made our way to Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, the site for most of the panels at the conference and which was also celebrating its 100th anniversary.

Despite the hustle and bustle of the city, it was hard not to be constantly reminded of the deep and rich history of Lima and Peru, from the archaeological sites of many little-known, pre-Incan civilizations to Lima’s unique history as a colonial stronghold of the Spanish Empire in South America. In fact, there was an Incan site right on the edge of campus and adjacent to the book exhibit hall. When I asked one of our authors who was from Lima what it was, he said that it was one of the Incan roads that was part of a massive transportation network that stretched the length of the Incan Empire at it’s height, from Colombia all the way down to Chile and Argentina.

It was the perfect place to showcase our books, including several recent additions to the list that are focused on Peruvian and Andean studies such as The Peculiar Revolution: Rethinking the Peruvian Experiment Under Military Rule, Kevin Young’s Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Boliva, and Gary Urton’s Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources. We were also happy to learn that three of our recent books won major awards at LASA: Barbara Mundy’s The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City won the Bryce-Wood award and Mark Christensen’s book The Teabo Manuscript: Mayan Christian Copybooks, Chilam Balams, and Native Text Production in Yucatan won the Mexico section’s award, while Inez Hernandez-Avila and Norma Cantú’s anthology of Tejana cultural production Entre Guadalupe Y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature and Art won the prize for the Latino studies section, further highlighting published work from other important parts of our publishing lists for LASA.

This conference is always a special opportunity to meet with current and potential authors, and we were especially pleased to be one of the US presses that were able to showcase our books and meet with authors, many of whom reside outside of the States, at a conference that, more than ever, has a truly international flavor.

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Steve Bourget on Sacrifice, Violence, and Ideology Among the Moche

In a special precinct dedicated to ritual sacrifice at Huaca de la Luna on the north coast of Peru, about seventy-five men were killed and dismembered, their remains and body parts then carefully rearranged and left on the ground with numerous offerings. The discovery of 

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this large sacrificial site—one of the most important sites of this type in the Americas—raises fundamental questions. Why was human sacrifice so central to Moche ideology and religion? And why is sacrifice so intimately related to the notions of warfare and capture?

Steve Bourget is a world authority on the Moche and author of Sex, Death, and Sacrifice in Moche Religion and Visual Culture and coeditor of The Art and Archaeology of the Moche: An Ancient Andean Society of the Peruvian North Coast. He is currently a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at the Université de Montréal. We asked him some questions about his latest book, Sacrifice, Violence, and Ideology Among the Moche: The Rise of Social Complexity in Ancient Peru. His study uncovers some fascinating relationships, like how El Niño conditions influenced broader aspects of Moche religion and cosmology, how a concomitant relationship emerges between the practice of human sacrifice and the rise of social complexity across New World societies, and how uniting iconography with archaeology helps scholars deepen our understanding of the Moche people and their power structures.

Why was human sacrifice so central to Moche ideology and religion?

The practice of human sacrifice in any ancient society is a complex matter. Each situation must be approached with caution and understood within its own cultural context. In the Moche case, the archaeology and its visual culture have shown that this ritual practice was closely related to their power structure. In death, high-ranking individuals are regularly buried with retainers who appear to have been sacrificed, and in life, sophisticated sacrificial rituals were apparently carried out to celebrate the link between these individuals with the divine domain.

Remains of a pair of victims, precisely laid in opposite directions on the ground of the sacrificial site

Ritual violence and sacrifice clearly index the power of the ruler and separate its status from that of the Moche population in general. The most complex rituals depicted in the iconography, the remains of which have sometimes been detected in the archaeological record, often culminate with human sacrifice and the exchange of the blood of the victims between high-status individuals. In these contexts, the rulers possess, like divine beings, the power over life and death. The presence of the same individuals instigating the cycle of ritual violence in the scenes of ritual warfare leading to capture and, eventually, human sacrifice indicates that they oversee all the aspects of the ritual process. They are both the instigators of this violence and the recipients of the benefits of sacrifice.

Therefore, the use of ritual violence and human sacrifice is structurally associated with the development of Moche power and the nature of rulership. In addition to creating a fundamental difference between the rulers and the rest of the society, human sacrifice reinforces the sacred dimension of these individuals and that of their lineages.

Explain how the ritual ecology of El Niño conditions influenced broader aspects of Moche religion and cosmology.

Firstly, the term "ritual ecology" refers to the use of the natural environment in its broadest sense to anchor and validate ideological precepts and religious beliefs disseminated by Moche elite. Therefore, the animal species and the environmental conditions selected by the Moche systematically contributed to highlighting and reinforcing certain ideological aspects. El Niño conditions were embedded in this overall scheme to create a symbolic system of everything that was both ritually and ideologically significant for the exercise of power. By using such an elaborate metaphorical system centered around the impact of El Niño events in the north coast region, their objective was to provide a rationale for the exercise of power and rulership. During the humid conditions brought by El Niño, the land is drastically transformed, the desertic landscape is transformed, countless animal species thrive and multiply, both on the land, in the air and in the waters, and the limitless power of the gods become apparent in the physical world. Harnessing the power of this climatic event to serve their ideological needs has to be recognized as one of the most brilliant ideas ever devised by an Early State society.

'Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between' Q&A with Ananda Cohen Suarez

Examining the vivid, often apocalyptic church murals of Peru from the early colonial period through the nineteenth century, the new book Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes explores the sociopolitical situation represented by the artists who generated these murals for rural parishes. Arguing that the murals were embedded in

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complex networks of trade, commerce, and the exchange of ideas between the Andes and Europe, Ananda Cohen Suarez also considers the ways in which artists and viewers worked through difficult questions of envisioning sacredness.

Ananda Cohen Suarez is an assistant professor of history of art at Cornell University. She is editor and principal author of Pintura colonial cusqueña: el esplendor del arte en los Andes. She has also published articles in the journals Colonial Latin American Review, Americas, and Allpanchis. We talk to Professor Suarez about her work, her intentions, the preconquest and postconquest visual world in Latin America, and the challenges she faced in documenting, photographing, and writing about mural painting. 

In the region you cover in your book, what are the differences between rural art production and how religious art changed in urban centers?

I have found that by the seventeenth century, we begin to see a shift in artistic production between the city of Cuzco and its rural environs. The churches and convents in the urban center tend to feature larger-than-life canvas paintings, elaborate gilded retablos, and an array of aesthetic embellishments that endow these religious spaces with a sense of grandeur and architectural complexity. Rural parishes located in Cuzco’s southern provinces are usually much smaller with humbler interiors, especially the farther you travel from the city. You see a sparser prevalence of gold and silver, given their high cost. The artworks contained within these churches are often produced by so-called “second rate” artists whose prices would have been more affordable for the priests, donors, and confraternities that commissioned their works. However, their visual impact is no less stunning. It is in these spaces that you find the exuberant murals featured in this book.

Interior view of the Church of Rondocan, Acomayo Province, with murals dating to the late 17th or 18th century. Note the combination of trompe l’oeil framed paintings, depictions of angelic musicians, and textile murals lining the choir and nave. Photo by Raúl Montero Quispe.

Mural painting remained a prevalent art form in the rural Andes well into the nineteenth century. Even today, you can find political slogans and imagery painted along the exteriors of residences and stores throughout the Andean countryside. Murals were expected to do much of the “heavy lifting” for church decoration, imitating retablos, picture frames, textiles, and an array of other expensive materials through the medium of tempera on adobe walls. These murals began to develop their own aesthetic language by the eighteenth century, and in fact, we can trace uncanny similarities across far-flung mural programs by this period, demonstrating the cohesiveness of rural artistic networks across the southern Andes.