Preface

1. The Nineteen Century: Progress and Cultural Conflict
2. The Elite Preference for Progress
3. Preservation and Glorification of the Elite Preference
4. An Intellectual Counterpoint
5. The Patriarchal Preference
6. The Folk Speak
7. The Poverty of Progress

Chapter Notes
Statistical Table
Glossary
Index

"Put this at the top of your reading list. It addressed 'the major enigma of Latin America: prevalent poverty in a potentially wealthy region.'"—Times of the Americas

"This brief but provocative reassessment of the human costs of modernization in nineteenth-century Latin American opens, as the author intends, an interpretive window on the region's recent and more distant past. . . . His principal thesis in this book is blunt: European-imposed modernization relentlessly dragged down the quality of life, exacerbated cultural devastation, and implanted barriers to healthy development and to national integration. . . .The triumph of progress as defined by the elites bequeathed a legacy of mass poverty, elite condescension, and continued conflict throughout the twentieth century. The poor paid for the progress of the privileged, and faced increasing cultural distance from them. . . . a valuable book for classroom consideration and a counter to approaches to Latin American historical evolution in the standard textbooks."—Journal of Historical Geography

"The well-documented thesis of this book is that the victory of the European-oriented ruling class over the Latin American folk, with their community values, fastened on contemporary Latin America a deepening dependency and the declining quality of life for the majority. In the process the lack of social and economic justice engendered violence. . . . A significant contribution."—Latin America in Books

"A thought-provoking argument about Latin America that forces us to come to grips with all effects of the panacea called development."—Caribbean Review