Western Hemisphere
In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall and the Search for Mexico’s Ancient Civilizations
By Merilee Grindle. Harvard University Press, 2023, 400 pp.
Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America
By Timothy R. Pauketat. Oxford University Press, 2023, 352 pp.
Two recent books shed light on evolving interpretations of pre-Columbian civilizations. Zelia Nuttall, who died in 1933 at the age of 75, was a pioneering anthropologist whose many contributions ranged from decoding a giant Aztec calendar to burnishing the reputation of the sixteenth-century English navigator Sir Francis Drake. In this beautifully crafted biography, Grindle situates Nuttall’s work in Mexico in the lead-up to the 1910 revolution. Her research helped Mexicans understand their pre-Columbian national heritage, in its sophisticated engineering, gardening, artistry, and cosmology, as being as glorious as that of Mediterranean societies in the classical era. Nuttall came from a background of privilege and wealth in San Francisco, but she was also a divorced single mother who succeeded in a male-dominated professional world through assertiveness, dogged research, incessant travel, and prolific publication. She built vast networks among senior museum administrators and scholars, philanthropists, and politicians, including U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and Mexican President Porfirio Díaz. In her stately villa in Mexico City, she formidably presided over a European-style salon of elite gatherings. A product of her times, Nuttall preferred to uncover commonalities across ancient civilizations, whereas twenty-first-century cultural anthropology often celebrates diversity and difference.
Pauketat argues that climate change explains the rise and fall of many pre-Columbian civilizations. A medieval warm period, from about AD 800 to 1300, allowed complex civilizations to emerge in Central America, Mexico, and what is now the southwest and central United States, just as a subsequent cooling period contributed to their decline. These somewhat interconnected societies acknowledged the decisive forces of nature by worshiping the wind-and-rain-feathered serpent
god, Quetzalcoatl. Drawing on an array of evidence, including the chronicles of Spanish conquistadors, recent anthropological and archaeological research, and his own extensive observations from the field, Pauketat finds striking similarities among these diverse societies, including in their architecture, cosmology, creation myths, ceramics, and use of psychotropic substances and therapeutic steam baths. The influence of Mesoamerica reached up the Mississippi River as far north as the urban complex of Cahokia (near modern-day St. Louis). Just as current research finds contacts throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, Pauketat speculates that long-distance travel for pilgrimage, migration, and cultural exchange yielded a more integrated precolonial Central America and North America than most scholars previously imagined.
Dead Men Cast No Shadows
By Sergio Ramírez. Translated by Daryl R. Hague. McPherson, 2023, 284 pp.
This wrenching political thriller is a thinly veiled critique of the Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega and his brutal repression of large-scale protests in 2018. Ramírez’s hard-hitting novel has been banned in Nicaragua, and Ortega has stripped the prolific, high-profile author of his Nicaraguan citizenship. When Ortega served as president in the 1980s, Ramírez was his vice president but was ultimately marginalized by political intrigues within the once revolutionary Sandinista Party. In Dead Men Cast No Shadows, Ramírez’s political disillusionment, evident in his earlier writings, has deepened into an anguished sorrow. His vivid, well-drawn characters—often former revolutionary fighters—have turned opportunistic, deceitful, even savage. His stinging takedowns of Ortega’s wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo, and of a former guerrilla commander, Edén Pastora, hit their marks. He also calls out the Catholic Church for accommodating the increasingly repressive regime. Ortega’s relentless concentration of power has brutalized Nicaragua and darkened the imagination of one of its most creative minds.
Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life
By Asad L. Asad. Princeton University Press, 2023, 344 pp.
Asad challenges the conventional notion that undocumented immigrants in the United States hide in the shadows, fearful of all forms of institutional authority. Rather, he persuasively argues, many engage selectively and rationally with both law enforcement and service institutions such as schools, hospitals and health clinics, and organizations that provide social assistance. Immigrant parents seek to gain access to these services for their children; they also accumulate records of good, moral behavior to eventually make the case for their own formal permanent residency or citizenship status. Life in their adopted homeland is an ever-shifting balance between feeling excluded and feeling included, between anxiety and trust. Asad derives his ethnographic
evidence from intensive interviews with 28 Latino immigrant households in Dallas, mostly undocumented and of Mexican origin, whose families include 97 children born in the United States. The author rigorously validates his conclusions with U.S. government survey data. Asad’s detailed policy recommendations, which stem as much from his moral belief in “the freedom and equality of every human being” as from his empirical research, would make it much easier for the approximately ten million undocumented immigrants in the United States to finally become naturalized citizens.