New Books in Latin American Studies

“There are Mexicans in Alaska?” This was the response Sara Komarnisky heard repeatedly when describing her research on three generations of transnational migrants who divide their time between Anchorage, Alaska and Acuitzio del Canje, Michoacán, Mexico. In her multi-sited ethnography, Mexicans in Alaska: An Ethnography of Mobility, Place, and Transnational Life (University of Nebraska Press, 2018)...

A searching and richly textured history of the affinities and common origins of Latin American and North American liberation theologies, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press 2018) dives into the work of thinkers who understood that theology must must have something to offer to people suffering under oppressive systems. By offering sharp rea...

Today we are joined by Antonio Sotomayor, Assistant Professor and Librarian of Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Sotomayor is the author of The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), which asks the question of how a colonial possession became a “sovere...

The North American Free Trade Agreement—or NAFTA, as we Americans call it—is very much in the news of late, primarily because President Trump has decided to make good on what he famously called “the single worst trade deal” that the United States has ever approved. Trump’s assessment, like so many of his statements, isn’t quite the fact he’d like it to be. In study after study, economists have fou...

In Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins (Duke University Press, 2017), David García reminds us that how culture is understood and interpreted not only reflects the political and social discourses of the day, but also shapes those discussions. Drawing on figures as diverse as academics like Melville Herskovitz, performers such as Duke Ellington, a...

Cuba’s grassroots revolution prevailed on America’s doorstep in 1959, fueling intense interest within the multiracial American Left even as it provoked a backlash from the U.S. political establishment. In this groundbreaking book, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), historian Teishan A. Latner contends th...

Histories of banking and finance aren’t particularly well-known for being riveting, adventurous reads: they tend to be technical at the expense of being strongly narrative-driven. Peter James Hudson’s Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (University of Chicago Press, 2017) defies this stereotype. An examination of private lending in the Caribbean by North American bankers be...

The early-modern Atlantic World was a chaotic place over which European empires frequently had little control. In her new book American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Molly Warsh uses the pearl trade to explain the complications around imperial economies and imaginations.  She looks at human fascination with the jewel, the challenges...

Water politics have long figured prominently in Mexico, and scholars have addressed such critical topics as irrigation, dam and canal building, and resource management, but few have examined how everyday people think about and use the waters in the daily lives. Casey Walsh‘s Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico (University of California Press, 2018) fills this ho...

In his book, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008), Pekka Hämäläinen refutes the traditional story that Indians were bit players or unfortunate victims of the white man’s conquest of the American West. Old maps that divided America into Spanish, French, and British territories, Hämäläinen argues, are “fictions” insofar as they entirely miss great indigenous contenders of military, econ...

With so much political effort placed into forcing a wall between the US and Mexico, Andrew Selee’s new book shows how the ties that bind the two countries together are much stronger. Selee has been on the podcast before with his book, What Should Think Tanks Do?: A Strategic Guide to Policy Impact (Stanford, 2018). His latest book, Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United Stat...

More than just a civil war, the Mexican Revolution in 1910 triggered hostilities along the border between Mexico and the United States. In particular, the decade following the revolution saw a dramatic rise in the lynching of ethnic Mexicans in Texas. Nicholas Villanueva Jr.‘s new book The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands (University of New Mexico Press, 2017) argues that ethnic and r...

In The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism, and Crisis in Argentina (University of Wales Press, 2018), Ignacio Aguiló studies the sociocultural impact caused by the failure of the IMF economic measures in Argentina of 2001-2002. Through the lens of cultural production (films, novels, short stories, artwork and music), the author explores two of the country’s so-called exceptionalisms: whiteness...

In Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico (University of California Press, 2018), Nicole Von Germeten explains the most important changes, in both ideas and practices, over three centuries of commercial sex in New Spain. By using literature and extensive archival records, the author explores the gradual criminalization of places and people involved in transactional sex from the 1...

When Pope Francis visited the United States in 2015, he canonized the eighteenth-century Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, rekindling the smoldering controversy that surrounds this historical figure—both a holy man with zeal for the Gospel and an imperial agent with little concern for the indigenous culture he was supplanting. Serra is also a secular figure, a “founding father” of California,...

It would be difficult to argue against Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn as the most bold and audacious chapter in the history of cybernetics.  In the early 70’s, at the invitation of leftist president, Salvador Allende, the “father of management cybernetics” (as Norbert Wiener christened Beer) attempted nothing less than the development and implementation of a cybernetic governance system for Chil...

On November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction—the prelude to the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to European colonization of the mainland of the Americas—has long been the symbol of Cortés’s bold and brilliant military genius. Montezuma, on the other hand, is remembered...

In Saamaka Dreaming (Duke University Press, 2017), Sally and Richard Price take readers back to their initial moments of fieldwork and recall their struggles, insights and encounters as they learned to live with and understand the Saamaka Maroons in Suriname.  With poignancy and frankness they recount the ways they eventually gained the trust of the people and participated in everyday life. At the...

Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015) describes the implementation of public health reforms in late eighteenth-century Guatemala and the diverse ways that indigenous communities engaged and resisted these programs.  Contrary to expectations, colonists were often ahead of administrators in Spain in...

Benjamin Bryce, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern British Columbia, has written a history of belonging within a culturally plural Argentina. To Belong in Buenos Aires: Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society (Stanford University Press, 2018) describes a period from the 1880s to the 1930s, when a massive wave of immigration transformed Argentine society a...

A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico (University of California Press, 2017) explores the definitive changes that the justice system as well as criminal ideas and practices underwent during the 1920s-1950s. For his most recent book, Pablo Piccato investigated spaces, actors, and fictions that shaped the complicated relationship between crime, justice, and truth during the consol...

In Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2013), Marc Hertzman revisits the history of Brazil’s quintessential music and dance genre to explore the links between popular music, intellectual property, law, racial democracy and nation formation. Charting more than a century of samba’s development, Hertzman challenges simplistic narratives of the all too often...

The ancient Maya are popularly known for their calendar, but their concept of time and the metaphysics surrounding that conception are not. In Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time (Lexington Books, 2018), Alexus McLeod reconstructs an ancient Mayan metaphysical system based on key texts and other artifacts plus using analogies with ancient Chinese philosophical thought. On his view, the M...

As immigration from Mexico to the United States grew through the 1970s and 1980s, the Border Patrol, police, and other state agents exerted increasing violence against ethnic Mexicans in San Diego’s volatile border region. In response, many San Diego activists rallied around the leadership of the small-scale print shop owner Herman Baca in the Chicano movement to empower Mexican Americans through...

In U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance (University of Arizona Press, 2017) editors Karina O. Alvarado, Alicia Ivonne Estrada, and Ester E. Hernandez have produced the first anthology to focus on the scholarship and experiences of 1.5 and second -generation Central American migrants to the United States. Consisting of nine interdisciplinary essa...