George H. Rodriguez has dedicated his life to sharing conservative values with fellow Hispanics and all-Americans. As a Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush appointee, he worked with the Department of Justice in community relations and immigration outreach, going on to work with the White House and on President Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. In recent years, Rodriguez has served with the GOP and was one of the first Hispanics to be president of a major Tea Party group. Now in El Conservador: Conservative Opinions, George H. Rodriguez shares a hard-hitting collection of his political essays and commentaries. As a nationally known blogger and political commenter, George Rodriguez is a constitutional conservative Texan of Mexican descent, also known as a Tejano. His essays reflect his belief in personal freedom, and they support the idea that all Texans and Americans should live life as they wish, as long as it does not harm others or infringe on another person’s rights. With a commitment to conservative values—and, in some cases, with a little bit of a chile picoso attitude—Rodriguez focuses on critical political topics that all Americans should be informed about: from the basics of constitutional government, personal property ownership, and states’ rights to contemporary issues, like debt, immigration, and the so-called diversity. Because liberal misinformation and a growing government can be dangerous to the freedom and liberty of citizens, Rodriguez believes it is important to remember why America is the greatest nation on earth and protect its God-given destiny.

Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s underwent a profound and often violent process of social change. From the Cuban Revolution to the massive guerrilla movements in Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, and most of Central America, to the democratic socialist experiment of Allende in Chile, to the increased popularity of socialist-oriented parties in Uruguay, or para-socialist movements, such as the Juventud Peronista in Argentina, the idea of social change was in the air. Although this topic has been explored from a political and social point of view, there is an aspect that has remained fairly unexplored. The cultural—and especially musical—dimension of this movement, so vital in order to comprehend the extent of its emotional appeal, has not been fully documented. Without an account of how music was pervasively used in the construction of the emotional components that always accompany political action, any explanation of what occurred in Latin America during that period will be always partial. This bookis an initial attempt to overcome this deficit. In this collection of essays, we examine the history of the militant song movement in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina at the peak of its popularity (from the mid-1960s to the coup d’états in the mid-1970s), considering their different political stances and musical deportments. Throughout the book, the contribution of the most important musicians of the movement (Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara, Patricio Manns, Quilapayún, Inti-Illimani, etc., in Chile; Daniel Viglietti, Alfredo Zitarrosa, Los Olimareños, etc., in Uruguay; Atahualpa Yupanqui, Horacio Guarany, Mercedes Sosa, Marian Farías Gómez, Armando Tejada Gómez, César Isella, Víctor Heredia, Los Trovadores, etc., in Argentina) are highlighted; and some of the most important conceptual extended oeuvres of the period (called “cantatas”) are analyzed (such as “La Cantata Popular Santa María de Iquique” in the Chilean case and “Montoneros” in the Argentine case). The contributors to the collection deal with the complex relationship that the aesthetic of the movement established between the political content of the lyrics and the musical and performative aspects of the most popular songs of the period.

Consists of English translations of articles in the Spanish American press.

No te fíes de su tamaño; esta es una historia muy grande. El mundo está lleno de luces y sombras, pero muy pocos pueden ver que hay tras ellas. Las fuerzas de la luz y la oscuridad luchan desde el albor de los tiempos por las almas de los hombres. Demonios, brujas, zombis, hadas, espectros y muchas otras criaturas se ocultan entre nosotros. A lo mejor, tras la sonrisa de ese camarero que te sirve el café por las mañanas o la de esa peluquera que te corta el pelo, o quizás también tras el político que con una amable sonrisa demanda tu voto... Aunque probablemente esto último no le extrañe a nadie. Conoceremos a la Sociedad de Conservación Histórica -una organización con más de mil años de antigüedad que lucha contra las fuerzas del mal, convencidos de que la mayor arma contra el mal es la educación- y a uno de sus miembros más controvertidos, Artai, un personaje políticamente incorrecto y con poderes sobrenaturales que se ve inmerso en una aventura más grande de lo que pensaba, mientras busca a su mentor desaparecido. Un poderoso aquelarre se ha reunido con la intención de cubrir el mundo de tinieblas. En su camino, Artai se encontrará con todo tipo de peligros y algunos nuevos amigos que lo ayudarán en su búsqueda, como Iria, la reina de las mouras y primera meiga. Situada en tierras gallegas, La luna de sangre es una trepidante aventura llena de magia y seres sobrenaturales que intercala momentos de acción y de comedia.

In the nineteenth century, Latin America was home to the majority of the world's democratic republics. Many historians have dismissed these political experiments as corrupt pantomimes of governments of Western Europe and the United States. Challenging that perspective, James E. Sanders contends that Latin America in this period was a site of genuine political innovation and popular debate reflecting Latin Americans' visions of modernity. Drawing on archival sources in Mexico, Colombia, and Uruguay, Sanders traces the circulation of political discourse and democratic practice among urban elites, rural peasants, European immigrants, slaves, and freed blacks to show how and why ideas of liberty, democracy, and universalism gained widespread purchase across the region, mobilizing political consciousness and solidarity among diverse constituencies. In doing so, Sanders reframes the locus and meaning of political and cultural modernity.