Sharing a post-revolutionary sympathy with the struggles of the poor, the contributors to this first comprehensive collection of writing on subalternity in Latin America work actively to link politics, culture, and literature. Emerging from a decade of work and debates generated by a collective known as the Latin American Studies Group, the volume privileges the category of the subaltern over that of class, as contributors focus on the possibilities of investigating history from below. In addition to an opening statement by Ranajit Guha, essay topics include nineteenth century hygiene in Latin American countries, Rigoberta Menchu after the Nobel, commentaries on Haitian and Argentinian issues, the relationship between gender and race in Bolivia, and un-governability and tragedy in Peru. Aiming to provide a radical critique of elite culture and of liberal, bourgeois, and modern epistemologies and projects, the essays included here prove that Latin American Subaltern Studies is much more than the mere translation of subaltern studies from South Asia to Latin America.