The public euphoria for pilot Alejandro Velasco Astete’s flight from the capital city of Lima to his hometown of Cuzco, Peru, in 1925 was surpassed only by the anguish over his death in a crash a month later. Residents in the former Inca capital shared the almost universal fascination with flight that two years later transformed Charles Lindbergh into an international celebrity after his electrifying Atlantic crossing. Aviation promised integration for a Peruvian city that resided nearly two miles up in the thin Andean air and lay several days’ journey by train and steamship from Lima. Flight in the indigenous region carried symbolic capital for intellectuals and public officials who bristled at their perceived racial inferiority and resented political, economic, and cultural marginalization by Lima. So when a Quechua-speaking pilot of Inca nobility and Spanish ancestry stepped down from an Italian-made biplane onto Cuzco soil in 1925, elite observers hailed him as nothing less than an Andean superman. Newspapers breathlessly described the authentic sierran blood, vitality, masculinity, and skill of the first Peruvian to make the treacherous if not suicidal flight across the Andes. Elites were convinced this “modern” sierran man and his mastery of the science and technology of aviation were undeniable proof Cuzco belonged at the vanguard of the ethnically and geographically divided Peruvian nation.

This article analyzes an individual, a context, and an experience. The individual is the photographer and filmmaker Paul Strand, widely recognized and occasionally criticized as one of the great modernist photographers of the twentieth century. The context is Mexico from 1932-34. In these years, Strand worked in Mexico amidst state-led efforts to construct a “new” national culture following the social upheavals and military conflicts associated with the Mexican Revolution. The experience was Strand’s effort to create a visual record of Mexico documenting what he thought of as its unique character, while furthering its “revolutionary” transformation through photography and filmmaking.

The Mendoza wine industry, currently the largest in Latin America and fifth largest in the world, is the inheritor of an almost 500 year-long process of evolution in the cultivation of grape vines and the development of wine making. The most studied period of its history corresponds to the construction of British railroads and the tremendous wave of Italian, Spanish and French immigration that began in the 1880s. Prior to the modern period, however, there was a traditional period in the Argentine wine industry, characterized by artisan production and ecclesiastical control. In the mid-nineteenth century, members of the clergy and religious groups controlled nearly 80 percent of the wine industry in Mendoza. This article examines the origins of viticulture in Mendoza, with particular reference to the influence of the clergy, and the subsequent secularization of the wine industry. At the same time, it discusses the role that the Godoy family played in the rise and consolidation of the wine making and its separation from ecclesiastical control.

Land for the landless, food for the hungry, literacy for the uneducated—not through charitable works, but by forcing the state to take seriously its responsibilities to its poorest citizens. This was integral to the theology of liberation as it was practiced by bishops, priests, and nuns in Brazil beginning shortly after the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Important sectors of the Brazilian Catholic Church were “opting for the poor” at a time when economic development, modernization, and democracy were not considered appropriate or meaningful partners in the repressive environment characterized by the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985).