Deck 5: Progress and Modernization: The Elites Strategy, 1870-1929

Question 1

In nineteenth-century Latin America, unlike South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and the southern United States, social segregation on the basis of race was not often explicitly enshrined in law.

Answer 1

True

Question 2

Indigenous communities in South America welcomed Bolívar and San Martín's decisions to end their tribute obligations.

Answer 2

False

Question 3

In Mexico and Gran Colombia, and then in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, eliminating Indian tribute created financial problems that necessitated either a reversal or the imposition of new taxes.

Answer 3

True

Question 4

Which of the following is FALSE?

A) Indigenous communities in El Salvador and Guatemala were allowed to bid on their former lands at auction, but seldom had the cash or credit available to outbid private commercial landowners.
B) Invited by the Guatemalan government, German immigrants displaced many Maya communities.
C) The desire to expand coffee cultivation was a primary motive behind the land grabs in El Salvador and Guatemala.
D) It was El Salvador's Conservative Party that took the lead in breaking up indigenous communal landholdings.

Question 5

In Bolivia in the decades immediately after independence,

A) The collapse of the mining industry caused severe hardship for the indigenous population.
B) Indigenous communities and haciendas mostly produced food crops for local markets.
C) The state followed through effectively on Bolívar's vision of turning residents of indigenous communities into individual small-scale private landowners.
D) The booming agricultural economy led hacendados to encroach aggressively on indigenous lands.

Question 6

Sugar almost always went hand in hand with slavery, deforestation, the concentration of landholding into large plantations, and the rise of a powerful planter class.

Question 7

Which of the following was NOT a factor that encouraged the expansion of sugar cultivation in nineteenth-century Cuba?

A) Spain's decision not to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave trade until well after the other Atlantic empires did.
B) The impact of two major hurricanes in western Cuba in the 1840s.
C) Cuban planters' desire for independence from Spain.
D) The effects of the Haitian Revolution on Cuba.

Question 8

Which of the following is FALSE about Cuba's mid-century independence movement?

A) Slaves, former slaves, and free people of color made up the majority of the independence army, including many leading officers.
B) Some planters who favored independence also desired that Cuba be annexed to the United States.
C) Questions of abolition and race war limited the expansion of the rebellion in the western half of the island.
D) Spain made concessions of greater free speech and labor organizing in an effort to maintain the loyalty of the colony.

Question 9

All of the following undermined the institution of slavery in late-nineteenth century Brazil EXCEPT

A) The inability or refusal of the Brazilian army to suppress the growing runaway slave communities.
B) The Conservative government's refusal to make concessions on the issue.
C) The abolitionists' use of freedom of the press.
D) The coffee planters' transition to immigrant wage labor.

Question 10

The phenomenon of "folk Catholicism" shows that Latin Americans' religious devotion was not necessarily correlated with the strength of the institutional Catholic Church.

Question 11

Mexico's "popular liberals" tended to support

A) Expanded powers of taxation, spending, and self-government for local municipalities.
B) The end of military conscription.
C) Universal male suffrage.
D) All of the above.

Question 12

Colombia's Liberal governments introduced all of the following EXCEPT

A) Abolishing slavery.
B) Granting universal adult suffrage for men and women.
C) Expelling the Jesuit religious order.
D) Reducing tariffs.

Question 13

Which of the following is FALSE about the phenomenon of social banditry in Mexico and Brazil?

A) It arose from the weakness of the central government.
B) It can be considered another example of the caudillo phenomenon in post-independence Latin America.
C) It was linked to the economic hardship and precariousness experienced by many armed rural men.
D) Bandits usually served a higher social purpose beyond mere self-enrichment.

Question 14

Women in the great pre-colonial Meso-American and Andean civilizations had enjoyed less independence and gender equality than Spanish women.

Question 15

Elites in nineteenth-century Latin America

A) Tended to prefer the quiet and wholesome life of the hacienda to the filth and noise of the cities.
B) Struggled to keep their estates intact in part due to the particularities of Spanish-derived inheritance laws.
C) Were usually the direct descendants of the conquistadores.
D) Were fixtures in the urban markets, where the male head of the family oversaw selling and the lady of the house did the household shopping.