Description: The Return of the Native offers a look at the role of preconquest peoples such as the Aztecs and the Incas in the imagination of Spanish American elites in the first century after independence.
Review Quotes: "An ambitious and important contribution to Latin American cultural and intellectual history, The Return of the Native is unique in its broad, comparative focus on nationalism in Spanish America and the uses of the Amerindian past. Moreover, it is refreshing in its attention to nineteenth-century historiography and the relation between that historiography and the process of state-building."--Raymond B. Craib, author of Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes