New Books in Latin American Studies

In The New Pan-Americanism and the Structuring of Inter-American Relations (Routledge, 2022), David Sheinin and Juan Pablo Scarfi bring together articles that reconsider many aspects of U.S.-Latin American history. Pan-Americanism, a late nineteenth and early twentieth century movement that attempted to foster closer relations among the nations of the Western Hemisphere, serves as the unifying thr...

The Brazilian Northeast has long been a marginalized region with a complex relationship to national identity. It is often portrayed as impoverished, backward, and rebellious, yet traditional and culturally authentic. Brazil is known for its strong national identity, but national identities do not preclude strong regional identities. In Region Out of Place: The Brazilian Northeast and the World, 19...

The term cacica was a Spanish linguistic invention, the female counterpart to caciques, the Arawak word for male indigenous leaders in Spanish America. But the term’s meaning was adapted and manipulated by natives, creating a new social stratum where it previously may not have existed. This book explores that transformation, a conscious construction and reshaping of identity from within. Cacicas f...

In this podcast Laura A. Ogden, cultural anthropologist at Dartmouth College, introduces her beautifully crafted book Loss and Wonder at the World's End (Duke University Press, 2021). In Loss and Wonder at the World's End, Ogden brings together animals, people, and things—from beavers, stolen photographs, lichen, American explorers, and birdsong—to catalog the ways environmental change and colonia...

A legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, Brazil is home to the largest number of African descendants outside Africa and the greatest number of domestic workers in the world. Drawing on ten years of interviews and ethnographic research, Second-Class Daughters: Black Brazilian Women and Informal Adoption as Modern Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the lives of marginalized inform...

In Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment (UNC Press, 2022), Cristina Ramos tells us the story of Mexico city’s oldest public institution for the insane, the Hospital de San Hipólito. This institution, founded in 1567, was the first mental hospital in the New World. Remarkable as this fact may be, this book is not simply about the singularity of this institution­­­...

Vanessa Walker's Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U. S. Human Rights Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 2020) explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the United States government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. Walker shows...

Daniel Silva’s Embodying Modernity: Global Fitness Culture and Building the Brazilian Body (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022) examines the current boom of fitness culture in Brazil in the context of the white patriarchal notions of race, gender, and sexuality through which fitness practice, commodities, and cultural products traffic. The book traces the imperial meanings and orders of power conveyed throu...

In Proscribing Peace: How Listing Armed Groups as Terrorists Hurts Negotiations (Manchester UP, 2021), Dr. Sophie Haspeslagh offers a systematic examination of the impact of proscription on peace negotiations. With rare access to actors during the Colombian negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia People's Army (FARC), Dr. Haspeslagh shows how proscription makes negotiations ha...

In this episode of the New Books in Latin America Studies podcast, Kenneth Sánchez spoke with Dr Francesca Lessa about her interesting new book The Condor Trials: Transnational Repression and Human Rights in South America published in 2022 by the Yale University Press. Stories of transnational terror and justice illuminate the past and present of South America's struggles for human rights. Through...

In today’s episode of How To Be Wrong we welcome Dr. Khytie Brown, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Brown’s research examines the intersections of religion, race, gender and sexual alterity, criminality, material culture, sensory epistemologies and social media practices among African diasporic religious practitioners in...

Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is a mesmerizing ethnography of the largest favela in Rio, where residents articulate their own politics of freedom against the backdrop of multiple forms of oppression. Normative liberalism has promoted the freedom of privileged subjects, those entitled to rights--usually white, adult, heteronormati...

Argentina lies at the heart of the American hemisphere's history of global migration booms of the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century: by 1910, one of every three Argentine residents was an immigrant—twice the demographic impact that the United States experienced in the boom period. In this context, some one hundred and forty thousand Ottoman Syrians came to Argentina prior to World War I, a...

A new generation of Afro-Brazilian media producers have emerged to challenge a mainstream that frequently excludes them. Reighan Gillam delves into the dynamic alternative media landscape developed by Afro-Brazilians in the twenty-first century. With works that confront racism and focus on Black characters, these artists and the visual media they create identify, challenge, or break with entrenche...

In this podcast, Lisa Blackmore, Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophy, History and Interdisciplinary Studies Centre at the University of Essex, and Liliana Gomez, Professor of Art and Society at the University of Kassel, introduce their edited volume Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean art (Routledge, 2020) and the multiple ways it proposes to "think with water". Spotlighting t...

For five hundred years, Latina/o culture and identity have been shaped by their challenges to the religious, socio-economic, and political status quo, whether in opposition to Spanish colonialism, Latin American dictatorships, US imperialism in Central America, the oppression of farmworkers, or the current exploitation of undocumented immigrants. Christianity has played a significant role in that...

The life and legacy of a young Argentinian woman whose disappearance in 1976 haunts those she left behind It started with a coincidence--when Marc Raboy happened to discover that he shared a surname with a young leftwing Argentinian journalist who in June 1976 was ambushed by a rightwing death squad while driving with her family in the city of Mendoza. Alicia's partner, the celebrated poet and fel...

Normative liberalism has promoted the freedom of privileged subjects, those entitled to rights—usually white, adult, heteronormative, and bourgeois—at the expense of marginalized groups, such as Black people, children, LGBTQ people, and slum dwellers. In this visceral ethnography of Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Moisés Lino e Silva explores what happens when liberalism is...

What drives and sustains participation in unemployed workers’ movements in Argentina? Today’s guest, Marcos Perez, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Washington and Lee University and author of the new book, Proletarian Lives. Routines, Identity and Culture in Contentious Politics. Marcos talks about how he came to study “piquetero” organizations that emerged...

In Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Dr. Ashley M. Williard demonstrates how problematics of gender played a central role in defining colonial others, male and female, at the moment when slavery was first introduced in the French-controlled Antilles. The book argues that seventeenth-century French Caribbea...

Today I spoke to Anjanette Delgado, a Puerto Rican writer and journalist based in Miami who has compiled emblematic stories and essays by writers from many countries who congregate in the city of Miami and the state of Florida. The stories are about those who have been touched by the Florida and Miami experience, and who have made the state their home. Her anthology titled Home in Florida. Latinx...

It is 2084. Climate change has made life on the Caribbean island of Bajacu a gruelling trial. The sun is so hot that people must sleep in the day and live and work at night. In a world of desperate scarcity, people who reach forty are expendable. Those who still survive in the cities and towns are ruled over by the brutal, fascistic Domins, and the order has gone out for another evacuation to less...

In Affect, Ecofeminism, and Intersectional Struggles in Latin America: A Tribute to Berta Cáceres (Peter Lang, 2020), Irune del Rio Gabiola examines the power of affect in structuring decolonizing modes of resistance performed by social movements such as COPINH (Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras). Despite a harsh legacy of colonialism, indigenous communities continu...

In this episode of the New Books in Latin America podcast, Kenneth Sánchez spoke with Lorena Cuya Gavilano about her interesting new book Fictions of Migration: Narratives of Displacement in Peru and Bolivia published in 2021 by the Ohio State University Press. This book analyses the impact of political and economic trends on migration narratives and films in Peru and Bolivia in the twentieth and...

In 2014 Barbados introduced a vaccine to prevent certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and reduce the risk of cervical cancer in young women. Despite the disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in the Caribbean, many Afro-Barbadians chose not to immunize their daughters. In Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and  the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados (Duke University Press,...