New Books in Latin American Studies

In Deference and Divergence in Regional Human Rights Courts (Cornell UP, 2026), Dr. Maria A. Sanchez tackles a central tension in global governance: how international human rights courts balance their mandates with the imperative to respect national sovereignty. Despite having similar mandates, the world's three regional human rights courts—the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Co...

Over the last thirty years, Latin America has undergone an unprecedented wave of reparations targeting victims of political violence during military regimes, Indigenous and Afro-Latin groups affected by historical processes of dispossession, and citizens suffering from environmental harm. Reparations prompt us to face uncomfortable pasts and in so doing, create conditions for imagination of multip...

From Aztec sun stones to satellite launches, from muralist visions to dark sky parks, Mexico's engagement with outer space is fundamental to its identity. Mexico in Space: From La Raza Cósmica to the Space Race (University of Arizona Press, 2026) offers a groundbreaking look at how the country has navigated the tensions between technological dependence and sovereign dreams. Anthropologist Anne W....

Brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group. Globally, Black people are among the most affected by the climate crisis, despite contributing very little to it. For a long time, the crisis was portrayed as yet another injustice for Black people to care about, on top of the day-to-day oppression they face. In Black Climates: Notes on Race, Our Environment, and Visions fo...

Forging a Mexican People: Collective Subjectivities in Postrevolutionary Print Culture, 1917–1968 (University of Arizona Press, 2026) shows how illustrated print culture helped to construct and deconstruct versions of “a people” in postrevolutionary Mexico. Through meticulous research, Dr. Pablo Zavala uncovers the ways photographers, graphic artists, writers, and activists used print culture to c...

Strangely, Friends: A History of Cuban-Canadian Encounters (Between the Lines, 2025) delves into the rich, often overlooked history of personal and cultural connections between Cubans and Canadians. From the early days of the Cuban Revolution to the present, this book uncovers the stories of Canadians who were drawn to Cuba--teachers, artists, development aid workers, filmmakers, and activists--...

Mexico is among the most unique nations in the world, writes Northwestern University historian Paul Gillingham in Mexico: A 500-Year History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025). The country has several claims to fame in this regard - one of the first to abolish slavery, North America's first Black president, North America's only Indigenous president, and its only woman president. Gillingham explains th...

In Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico (U California Press, 2020), based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Maurice Magaña considers how urban and migrant youth in Oaxaca embrace subcultures from hip-hop to punk and adopt creative organizing practices to create meaningful channels of participation in local social and political life. In the process, yo...

Authorities in postrevolutionary Cuba worked to establish a binary society in which citizens were either patriots or traitors. This all-or-nothing approach reflected in the familiar slogan “patria o muerte” (fatherland or death) has recently been challenged in protests that have adopted the theme song “patria y vida” (fatherland and life), a collaboration by exiles that, predictably, has been bann...

All over the world, masses of people watch, follow, document, and obsess over baseball. Everything remarkable about the impact of baseball derives from the game's history and cultural status as events that draw people together in these ways. Understanding baseball as a cultural phenomenon is therefore less a matter of mastering the vocabulary of the game or merely recollecting its iconic stadiums,...

“Black Orpheus” and the Globalization of Afro-Brazilian Culture (Rutgers UP, 2026) is the first historical study in English to examine the development, production, and reception of the 1958 film Black Orpheus and its legacy in the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the making of the film and the trajectories of the major actors and musicians who helped construct an image of Black Brazil and provides a...

A sobering investigation of the rush for lithium for electric vehicles, the problematic history of lithium mining, and the consequences for sustainability. Consumers today are buying electric vehicles with lithium-ion batteries motivated by the belief that they are doing good and decarbonizing society. But is sustainable lithium extraction possible? In Living Minerals, Javiera Barandiarán examines...

When young people began disappearing in Argentina, their mothers searched for answers. Despite laws prohibiting protests and political gatherings, the women still met to walk the Plaza de Mayo, a central square in Buenos Aires near the president’s residence. The government worked to deny their reports of the missing, to discredit the women, and to erode their standing among their peers. But the Ma...

Located in the Papantla municipality of the Mexican state of Veracruz, El Tajín is a UNESCO World Heritage site but a lesser-known tourist destination and national symbol. The Indigenous Totonac residents of the region know well that the site’s relative absence from discussions of global archaeology and heritage belies a century of wide-ranging labor, extractive industries, and commodity exchange....

In the high Andean grasslands 4,500 meters above sea level, Quechua alpaca herders live on the edges of glaciers that have retreated more rapidly in the past fifty years than at any point in the previous six millennia. Women are the primary herders, and their specialized knowledge and skill is vital to the ability of high-elevation communities to survive in changing climatic conditions. In the pas...

My Excellency: Comedy in Three Acts (Swan Isle Press, 2025) by Luis Rechani Agrait was translated into English by William Carlos Williams but not published in his lifetime. This first-ever edition of Williams’s translation was edited and has an introduction by Jonathan Cohen. It includes a foreword by Julio Marzán and an afterword by José Luis Ramos Escobar. It also includes the lecture Williams g...

Economies of Gender: Masculinity, "Mail Order Brides," and Women's Labor (Rutgers University Press, 2025) by Dr. Julia Meszaros offers a provocative exploration of the international dating industry, challenging simplistic narratives of human trafficking and scams while shedding light on the economic dynamics of gender. Through twelve years of fieldwork, the book delves into the motivations and exp...

Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Consuming Empire, 1492-1700 (Amsterdam University Press, 2025) by Dr. Danielle Alesi examines how the perceived edibility of animals evolved during the colonization of the Americas. Early European colonizers ate a variety of animals in the Americas, motivated by factors like curiosity, starvation, and diplomacy. As settlements increased and became...

Lithium, a crucial input in the batteries powering electric vehicles, has the potential to save the world from climate change. But even green solutions come at a cost. Mining lithium is environmentally destructive. We therefore confront a dilemma: Is it possible to save the world by harming it in the process? Having spent over a decade researching mining and oil sectors in Latin America, Thea Riof...

The Caribbean port city of Veracruz is many things. It is where the Spanish first settled and last left the colony that would go on to become Mexico. It is a destination boasting the “happiest Carnival in the world,” nightly live music, and public dancing. It is also where Blackness is an integral and celebrated part of local culture and history, but not of the individual self. In Local Color: Rec...

Migration between the United States and Mexico is often compared to the river that runs along the border: a "flow" of immigrants, a "flood" of documented and undocumented workers, a "dam" that has broken. Scholars, journalists, and novelists often tell this story from a south-to-north perspective, emphasizing Mexican migration to the United States, and the American response to the influx of people...

News media and pundits too frequently perpetuate the notion that Latinos, both US-born and immigrants, are an invading force bent on destroying the American way of life. Leo R. Chavez challenges the basic tenets of this assumption and other myths of the "Latino threat," providing a critical investigation into the fears and prejudices that are used to malign an entire population. In this updated an...

Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas (U Michigan Press, 2024) offers a new lens for examining diaspora and borderlands texts and performances that considers the inseparability of race, ethnicity, and gender in imagining and enacting social change. Theresa Delgadillo crosses interdisciplinary and canonical borders to investigate the interrelationships of African-desce...

Hailed in the New York Times as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? (W.W. Norton, 2025) is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as su...

Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United States has come to nuclear war. That history has largely been a bilateral narrative of the US-USSR struggle for postwar domination, with Cuba as the central staging ground--a standard account that obscures the shock waves that reverberated throughout L...