Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory (review)
in his concluding chapter. He contends that Batopilas is, above all, an example of the larger late nineteenth-early twentieth century pattern of United States industrial capitalism coming to localities across the Caribbean Basin. In the more general sense it is. But probing more deeply, perhaps, one uncovers a dual structure within that general pattern. The well-established contrast of Robinson and Shepard reveals two stages of North American capitalism’s intrusion into Latin America: one, between 1850 and 1880, in which more individual, entrepreneurial capitalists introduced modernizing instruments and practices to extractive and infrastructure ventures, but compromised with, as much as changed the local societies they encountered; and a second, beginning in the 1880s, that brought the full weight of industrial, corporate capitalism to bear on those localities, radically altering them. It is the contrast of Henry Meiggs in Peru with the Cananea and Guggenheim Mining Companies in northern Mexico, the transportation ventures of Cornelius Vanderbilt with the United Fruit Company in Central America.