New Books In Latin American Studies

Isaac Campos is the author of Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Campos is an assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. His book traces the intellectual history of marijuana from Europe to Mexico and the ways in which usage of the drug was portrayed – as a source of madness and violence — in the Mexican media. Campos turns on its head the popular myth that drug regulation in Mexico derives from US sources. For political scientists and for all those interested in the issue, the book offers a deep historical context for the current “war on drugs” and related violence in the US and in Mexico.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In my work with pre-Hispanic and colonial Mexican pictorial texts, I often wish I could talk with the people who authored them. In the academic setting, sometimes we forget that these documents represent conversations about what was happening in the lives of many people at the time they were created and that some aspects of these materials that we have found in archives or ancient cities are still part of the cultural heritage and daily lives of the descendants of the creators. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano helps us realize that the study of popular culture also can mean the sharing of knowledge. Ruiz Medrano’s research in the tiny town of Santa Maria Cuquila has led to a new way of thinking about our pasts and how they connect with our presents. Ruiz Medrano’s book Mexico’s Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500-2010 is a best-selling work on popular culture from the University of Colorado Press. Indigenous Communities traces a new context for our Amerindian heritage. Ruiz Medrano e

In my work with pre-Hispanic and colonial Mexican pictorial texts, I often wish I could talk with the people who authored them. In the academic setting, sometimes we forget that these documents represent conversations about what was happening in the lives of many people at the time they were created and that some aspects of these materials that we have found in archives or ancient cities are still part of the cultural heritage and daily lives of the descendants of the creators. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano helps us realize that the study of popular culture also can mean the sharing of knowledge. Ruiz Medrano's research in the tiny town of Santa Maria Cuquila has led to a new way of thinking about our pasts and how they connect with our presents. Ruiz Medrano's book Mexico's Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500-2010 is a best-selling work on popular culture from the University of Colorado Press. Indigenous Communities traces a new context for our Amerindian heritage. Ruiz Medrano examines local admi

Here’s something I learned by reading Joel Wolfe’s terrific Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford, 2010): the United States and Brazil have a lot in common. Both hived off European empires; both struggled with slavery and its legacy; both are profoundly multiethnic and multiracial; both have spent much of their respective histories settling a vast “wild” frontier (though, to be fair, it was already “settled” by indigenous people); and, most importantly for our purposes, both are car-crazy, and indeed for almost the same reason. In the United States, the automobile meant modernity. It was the implement with which we, Americans of every stripe, would “tame” a continent and thereby realize our national potential. The Brazilians, according to Wolfe, feel the same way. Joel does a masterful job of explaining how the promise of this crucial technology entered the Brazilian psyche and became not only the vehicle of modernity (pardon the pun) bu

It’s shocking and embarrassing how little I, as an American, know about Mexican history. Mexico shares a 2,000 mile long border with the United States. Mexico is America’s third largest trading partner (behind Canada–about which I also know nothing–and China). Over 20 million people in the U.S. say they are of “Mexican descent.” But all I can tell you about Mexican history is that the Aztecs built some really impressive pyramids, then the Spanish took over, then the Mexicans threw the Spanish out, then “we” beat the Mexicans and grabbed a bunch of their territory, then there was a confusing period involving France, and then Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata did some revolutionary stuff. The only phrase that comes to mind when I think of the period that followed–1910 to the present–is “illegal aliens.” My ignorance is just pathetic (not to mention irresponsible). So I was really happy when William H. Beezley told me that he and Colin M. Mac

The question of how we come to understand who we are–nationality-wise–is a thorny one. In a widely-read book, Benedict Anderson said we got nationality, inter alia, by reading about it in books. William Beezley‘s got a different, though complementary, thesis regarding Mexicans of the 19th century: they were shown nationality in things like puppet shows. That’s right. Puppet shows. In his excellent Mexican National Identity. Memory, Innuendo and Popular Culture (University of Arizona Press, 2008) he explores how Mexicans were taught Mexican nationality through a variety of popular performances, games, carnivals, holidays, and household items. “Taught” might be a little too strong, as the point of each of these folk enterprises was, well, enterprise and entertainment. In any event, Mexican nationality seems to have came from the bottom up, not the top down. Seems about right to me. I learned I was American by reading a comic book called “Sergeant Rock.” Please bec