New Books in Latin American Studies

Long neglected in mainstream history books, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now being claimed across a range of academic disciplines as an event of world-historical importance. The former slaves' victory over their French masters and the creation of the independent nation of Haiti in 1804 is being newly heralded not only as a seminal moment in the transnational formation of the 'black Atlant...

In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced the start of a crisis that decimated its economy. Helen Yaffe examines the astonishing developments that took place during and beyond this period. Drawing on archival research and interviews with Cuban leaders, thinkers, and activists, We Are Cuba!: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World (Yale UP, 2020) tells for...

In 1937 tens of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic were slaughtered by Dominican troops wielding machetes and knives. Dominican writer and lawyer Freddy Prestol Castillo worked on the Haiti-Dominican Republic border during the massacre, known as "The Cutting," and documented the atrocities in real time in You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot (Duke UP, 2019).  Written in 1937, pub...

During the Cold War, U.S. intervention in Latin American politics, economics, and society grew in scope and complexity, with diplomatic legacies evident in today's hemispheric policies. Development became a key form of intervention as government officials and experts from the United States and Latin America believed that development could foster hemispheric solidarity and security. In parts of Lat...

When Rains Became Floods: A Child Soldier’s Story (Duke UP, 2015) is the gripping autobiography of Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, who as a child soldier fought for both the Peruvian guerrilla insurgency Shining Path and the Peruvian military. After escaping the conflict, he became a Franciscan priest and is now an anthropologist. Gavilán Sánchez's words mark otherwise forgotten acts of brutality and kind...

Between 1939 and 1947, the Caribbean island of Jamaica--then a British colony--was haven or detention centre for thousands of displaced Europeans; an often under-recognized contribution to the Allied war effort. A civilian camp accommodated evacuees from Gibraltar and, belatedly, provided sanctuary for groups of mainly Jewish refugees. Others who had fled Europe ahead of looming fascist threats wo...

The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration (Routledge, 2022) offers a systematic account of population movements to and from the region over the last 150 years, spanning from the massive transoceanic migration of the 1870s to contemporary intraregional and transnational movements. The volume introduces the migratory trajectories of Latin American populations as a complex web of trans...

What is the Third World? The term has essentially been scrubbed from our collective consciousness. What once used to be something concrete seems to have vanished into thin air. Today, the Third World seems to be “a closed chapter in world history.” But my guests today are determined that it not remain so. In their new edited volume, Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar G...

Identity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume titled Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh explore the particular meanings of a Dougla identity and examine Dougla maneuverability both at home and in the...

When late eighteenth-century New Spanish viceregal administrators installed public lamps in the streets of central Mexico City, they illuminated the bodies of Indigenous, Afro-descended, and plebeian Spanish urbanites. The urban patrolmen, known as guarda faroleros, or “lantern guards,” maintained the streetlamps and attempted to clear the streets of plebeian sexuality, embodiment, and sociability...

A century after being expelled from Portugal, cryptoJews in Mexico, false converts to Christianity, could not speak of their beliefs for fear of becoming embroiled in the imprisonment, torture, and death in flames that characterized the Inquisition. Without written texts, the Jewish liturgy lost, clans of cryptoJews created a unique body of religious poetry, connecting them to the Laws of Moses, s...

This week, RBI director John Torpey interviews Prof. Enrique Desmond Arias, a professor of political science at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, about recent developments in Latin American politics. Arias delves into Peru's recent political unrest and how it resembles the times of Fujimori's authoritarianism and discusses the origins of polarization in the politics of Brazil. Arias also ass...

Art has a long history of engaging with conflict and violence. From the antiquities, through Goya, to Guernica, our museums are filled with depictions of battles, pogroms, uprisings, and their suppression. Not all of these stories are told from the perspective of the victors. Many contemporary creatives have continued this tradition. While the position of the official war artist seems to have gone...

In her detailed cultural history of technological change, Electrifying Mexico, Diana Montaño argues that ordinary Mexicans became electrifying agents who actively negotiated the extent and manner electricity entered their lives and lived spaces in Mexico City. An Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, Dr. Montaño's teaching and research interests broadly include the...

Frank Wolff's ground-breaking Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund (Haymarket Books, 2021) investigates how this social movement transformed itself from one of the most important revolutionary protagonists in early twentieth-century Russia to a socialist institution of secular Jewish life and yidishkayt for Jews in North and South America. By fo...

Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and the incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter's health in the United States. When she arrived in Texas, Claudia discovered that being undocumented would mean more than just an immigration...

Barbadians were among the thousands of British West Indians who migrated to Cuba in the early twentieth century in search of work. They were drawn there by employment opportunities fueled largely by US investment in Cuban sugar plantations. Tell My Mother I Gone to Cuba: Stories of Early Twentieth-century Migration from Barbados (U West Indies Press, 2016) is their story. The migrants were citizen...

In Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction (U California Press, 2022), historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most...

Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) offers English translations of more than one hundred articles published in Black newspapers in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay from 1870 to 1960. Those publications were as important in Black community and intellectual life in Latin America as African American newspapers were in the United Stat...

In the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivaling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government. The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing how indigenous-led mass movements reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011.  Dra...

Sovereign Joy Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) explores the performance of festive black kings and queens among Afro-Mexicans between 1539 and 1640. It illustrates how the first African and Afro-creole people in colonial Mexico transformed their ancestral culture into a shared identity among Afro-Mexicans, with particular focus on how public festival part...

Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality (Beacon Press, 2022) will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “...

In A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke UP, 2021), Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female protagonists who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive communities. Reading novels by Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, René Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, Glover shows how these authors' women characters enact practices of freedom that privilege the...

On this episode, Martín Garrido Lepe y Beatriz Rodriguez-Satizabal talk with Clemente Penna winner of the Tamás Szmrecsányi Prize for thesis in economic history of the period 1810 to 1913 during the second edition of the Prize for the best PhD thesis in Latin American economic history, awarded by the Peruvian Association of Economic History, in the VII Latin American Congress of Economic History....

The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (Stanford UP, 2022), Christopher A. Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and de...