New Books In Latin American Studies

Jenny Shaw‘s recent book Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (University of Georgia Press, 2013) analyzes how social, religious, and ethnic categories operated in Barbados and the Leeward Islands. She documents the arrival of Irish migrants into the Caribbean who came in some cases involuntarily, and in other cases with dreams to make their own fortunes in the islands’ booming sugar trade. Their Catholicism and social standing long kept them from joining the ruling class. But, Shaw traces how the simultaneous arrival of enslaved Africans complicated those social standings, while also helping to simplify them at a later date. In the process, her study injects new life into the question of racial ideology in the British Americas, as well as the role and influence of religion in the Anglo-Caribbean.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mexican American religious healing – often called curanderismo – is a vital component of life in the US-Mexican borderlands. In his book Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo (New York University Press, 2014) – Brett Hendrickson tracks healers going back to the nineteenth century and even before. He argues that these healing practices were never only Mexican American nor were they a sign of an inability to develop modern bio-medicine. They have in fact been shaped in a transcultural context where ideas about metaphysical healing and the efficacy of gifted individuals circulated among Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Anglo-American settlers. Each population has contributed to the development and growing popularity of folk curanderismo. Brett Hendrickson is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her transformative text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua referred to the U.S.-Mexico border region as “una herida abierta (an open wound) where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country–a border culture.” To Anzaldua the “open wound” or new culture of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands resulted from “the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (i.e., the imposition of the U.S.-Mexico border in the mid-19th century). Since the establishment of the U.S.-Mexico border, politicians, local officials, businessmen, and residents have competed over the definition, control, and memory of the region. In Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, Deborah R. Vargas deconstructs the dominant narrative tropes th

Cuba is changing fast. Or is it? Our understandings of Cuban history are shaped by decades of polarized interpretations. Cubans themselves have a particularly vital relationship to their past, and have long used it to guide them in times of crisis and transformation. Louis A Perez‘s book The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of the Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2013)traces those uses of the past, from the breakdown of a colonial regime beginning in the nineteenth century to the very recent shifts in Cuba’s domestic and diplomatic politics. This beautifully written book lingers on the emotional dimensions of historical change, and leads us through those moments in Cuban history during which Cubans relied on the knowledge of their history, as transmitted through stories, memoirs, novels, and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the early decades of the 20thcentury the nation of Mexico entered the modern era through a series of social, political, and economic transformations spurred by the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. At the same time, American film companies increasingly sought opportunities to expand their market share by exporting films to exhibitionists in Mexico and Latin America. As government bureaucrats and progressive reformers sought to unify and rebuild the Mexican state, the cinema became a critical site through which the post-revolutionary ideals of modernization, secularism, and ethnic nationalism were promoted. In Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture Before the Golden Age (Duke University Press, 2014), Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California Laura Isabel Serna vividly describes the process of cultural exchange that played out across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during this critical period in the development of the m

In December 2014, Cuba and the United States announced their renewed efforts to normalize relations. Diplomatic ties were severed in 1961 following the rise of Fidel Castro and the intensification during the Cold War. An economic and intellectual embargo was instituted by President Kennedy, arguing that Cuba needed to be sealed from the free world in order to induce regime change and contain communist influence. The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 nearly brought the world to nuclear ruin. Negotiations between The United States and the Soviet Union averted disaster, and crystalized the necessity for antagonistic powers to maintain a line of communication. Thus, despite the embargo, Fidel Castro frequently expressed a desire to return to normalcy with the United States. Both sides have a long history of communicating in secret over a range of issues, including refugee policies and air piracy. William LeoGrande, professor of government at American University, and Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documen

Megan Threlkeld is an associate professor of history at Denison University. Her book Pan-American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) provides a rich transnational examination of the years following World War I and American women activists who saw themselves global leaders in promoting women’s rights and international peace. U.S. internationalists such as Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Doris Stevens sought to build friendships with Mexican women, including educator Margarita Robles de Mendoza and feminist Elena Torres. They established new organizations, sponsored conferences and rallied for peaceful relations between the two countries at a time of tense or broken diplomatic ties. The efforts at an apolitical “human internationalism” were complicated by differences in ideologies, and cross-cultural misunderstanding that took for granted that Mexican women wanted the same political rights as U.S. women. To U.S. women, Mexican

Although the designation now applies to American citizens of Mexican ethnicity writ large, the term Mexican American (hyphenated or not) also refers to the rising generation of ethnic Mexicans born and raised in the U.S. that came into adulthood during the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War years. In a new biography, George I. Sanchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (Yale University Press, 2015) Professor of History at Texas A&M University Carlos Kevin Blanton provides the first in-depth study of one of the Mexican American generation’s most prolific intellectuals and activists. Born into humble circumstances in rural New Mexico in 1906, George I. Sanchez became a tireless and tremendously influential academic, policy advisor, and activist who devoted his career to battling poverty and discrimination against Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest. Whether engaged in teaching as a professor of education at the University of Texas, a researcher for numerous gov

When the Haitian Revolution abolished slavery in Haiti and established its independence from France, it affected surrounding colonies in profound and unexpected ways. Ada Ferrer‘s new book Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2015) centers on the tension between the abolition of slavery in Haiti and the coterminous intensification of slavery in nearby Cuba. Even as Cuban and Spanish officials worked to contain information circulating about the successful slave revolt just across the water, they also seized the opportunity to bring thousands of enslaved people to Cuba to expand their sugar-producing capacity. In the midst of this, people, information, ships and objects circulated within a Caribbean space in which slavery, anti-slavery, imperialism and sovereignty mirrored one another in paradoxical ways. Freedom’s Mirror immerses readers in this moment with stories of unlikely alliances, fear, greed and idealism. It is a beautifully written an

In the mid-1950s, Venezuela’s military government razed a massive slum settlement in the heart of Caracas and replaced it with what was at the time one of Latin America’s largest public housing projects. When the dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez was overthrown on January 23, 1958, however, thousands of people rushed to occupy the uninhabited portions of the project, taking it over and renaming the resulting neighborhood for the date of the fall of the regime: the 23 de Enero. The neighborhood that emerged stood at the geographic and in some cases political center of Venezuela’s transition to democracy over the decades that followed. This unruly, often contradictory transition is detailed the newly released Barrio Rising: Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela (University of California Press, 2015) by Alejandro Velasco, Assistant Professor at the Gallatin School at New York University. The book traces how the residents of the 23 de Enero came to fashion an expansive understanding of

Due in large part to sensationalist representations in contemporary media and politics, the U.S.-Mexico border is popularly understood as a space of illegal activity defined by threats of foreign intrusion including: undocumented migration, drug trafficking, and national security risks. Viewed through the late-20th and early-21st century prisms of drug wars, immigration restriction, terrorism, surveillance, and resurgent American nationalism, the border itself appears to be a definitive boundary between dichotomous societies, nations, and people. Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University Geraldo L. Cadava challenges this view in his book Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Harvard University Press, 2013). Focusing on the Arizona-Sonora segment of the U.S.-Mexico border during the mid-to-late 20th century, Cadava narrates the interlocked histories of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and whites as regional boosters (i.e., politicians and businessmen on

Historically, Venezuela is known as one of the most stable Latin American nations of the twentieth century. The subsequent discovery of oil transformed Venezuela into a petrostate. Yet wealth inequality dramatically increased. Against this economic and social disparity, Hugo Chavez rose to power, becoming one of a number of dynamic Latin American politicians. But what legacy did Chavez leave behind after his death in 2013, and how has his successor, Nicholas Madruo, fared in continuing the Bolivarian Revolution? Rory Carroll is a journalist with The Guardian and spent a number of years in Venezuela. His book, Comandante: Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela (Penguin Books, 2013), recounts his time in Latin America. Speaking to Venezuelans on both side of the political spectrum, from farmers to ex-politicians and government insiders, Carroll discovers that opinions of Chavez’s presidency are sharply divided. However, many agree that Hugo fundamentally changed the destiny and vision of Venezuela.Learn more about

Kevin O’Neill‘s fascinating book Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala (University of California Press, 2015) traces the efforts of multi-million dollar programs aimed at state security through gang prevention in Guatemala. O’Neill is most interested in the ways that Christianity and ideas about piety, salvation, redemption, and transformation guide and shape a variety of programs in prisons, rehabilitation centers, and, perhaps surprisingly, reality television and call centers. This is a finely hewn multi-sited ethnography as well as a moving account of the life of a single former gang member. At its core is a tension between the critique of programs that range from the absurd to the tragic, and a recognition that without those programs, former gang members in Guatemala would be relegated to the barest of bare lives.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cesar Chavez founded a labor union. Launched a movement. And inspired a generation. Two Decades after his death, Chavez remains the most significant Latino figure in U.S. history.” So reads the inside flap ofMiriam Pawel’s new biography The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (Bloomsbury Press, 2014). However, while many are acquainted with the iconography of Chavez as the leader of the Farmworker Movement that took on California’s powerful grape industry during the mid-to-late 1960s, much less is known about Chavez himself and his personal and organizational background prior to the formation of the National Farm Workers Association (the precursor to the United Farm Workers or UFW) or the internal dynamics and struggles between Chavez and his top brass. With great detail and empathy, Pawel provides a complex portrait of Chavez as a visionary and tireless organizer whose humility, strategic brilliance, and improbable success was matched only by his own arrogance, tactical blunders, and embarrassing defe

Brazilian society is rife with inequality. In her brilliant new book The Color of Modernity: Sao Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2015), Barbara Weinstein argues that one of the sources of enduring inequality is the historical production of the region of Sao Paulo as Brazil’s engine of modernity, and of whiteness. Maintaining that discourses of difference informed political decisions that in turn delineated regional inequalities, her book gleans a discursive trail from a variety of sources and archives. It makes a powerful case for understanding region as a deeply politicized historical artifact rather than defined by natural boundaries. The book centers on the Constitutionalist uprising of 1932 in Sao Paulo as well as its memorialization in subsequent years, and draws from a wide variety of sources including memoirs, press, music, photography, graphic design, exhibits and staged spectacles. Despite the participation of people of African descent and women, narrat

Since September 2014, much of Mexico has been gripped by the story of the Ayotzinapa kidnappings – the mass abduction of 43 rural schoolteachers in Iguala in the state of Guerrero. The tragic disappearance of the students has raised questions about the origins, nature, and methods of terror that have seized the nation. Alexander Avina’s new book, Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside (Oxford University Press, 2014), details the origins and memories of state violence during the peasant movement in Guerrero in the 1960s and 1970s. While the nation has long been heralded for its economic growth and political stability in the mid-twentieth century–the so-called Mexican Miracle– Avina reveals the deep, but overlooked, forms of everyday violence waged by the state at the local level. Using declassified military and intelligence records with oral histories of peasants, this work examines the mobilization of two peasant groups from Guerrero know as the

Rebecca Earle‘s recent book The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America (Cambridge University Press, 2012) investigates the importance of food during the first two centuries of Spanish imperialism in the Americas. She explores how food took a central place in conceptions of bodily health and composition, both in the Old and New Worlds. Not only did the Spanish come to see themselves as different from Amerindians due to the different foods that they both ate, but missionaries worried about the potential to convert native peoples in the colonial absence of theologically-mandated wheat bread and grape wine. This work adds an important layer of analysis to studies of early Spanish imperialism, as well as to the historical debate on colonial ideas about race and perceptions of bodily difference.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beyond what people say, what their voices sound like matters. Voice, as Ana Marcia Ochoa Gautier argues in this marvelous new book Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Colombia(Duke University Press, 2014), was embedded in 19th-century conversations and debates about the boundaries between nature and culture, between the civilized and barbaric, between inclusion or marginalization in a public civic sphere. Set in Colombia but relevant for much of Latin America and the Caribbean, the book draws on brilliant interpretations of the sonorous written archive to take up questions of sound, inscription and the epistemological and ontological status of voice. The book will prompt new formulations in both Sound Studies and Latin American Studies.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Riots, audiences on stage, fabulous costumes, gripping stories. That’s what theater was like in the Atlantic world in the age of slavery and colonialism. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon wonderful book New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849 (Duke University Press, 2014) vividly invokes a transatlantic network of performances and their publics, and argues for the making of a performative commons that worked out tensions among societies bent on simultaneously profiting from, and negating the existence of, enslaved Africans and indigenous people. They did this in part through a tradition of dramatizing those very tensions on stage. The book is full of stories of how the riotous multitude witnessed and interacted with those performances, as plays, actors, music, and costumes made their way around the colonial Atlantic world.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do race, ethnicity and appearance work on Latin America? Edward Telles‘ and the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America‘s (PERLA) new book Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race and Color in Latin America (UNC Press, 2014) shatters the idea that there is a single answer to that question, and proceeds instead with probing studies of four different countries: Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Peru. A team of researchers working in each country conducted extensive surveys and interviews with hundreds of participants. The results are surprising in many ways and indicate dynamic changes in ideas about and performances of race as well as ongoing patterns of inequality and exclusion.How and why those occur in each place has to do with a complex combinations of legal regimes, socioeconomic measures, discursive histories, and the history of emancipatory movements. As the product of a research collective, this book will open new paths of inquiry in the midst of what seems to be a turn towards multiculturali