New Books in Latin American Studies

What is a book? The answer, at first glance, may seem apparent: printed material consisting of a certain amount of pages. However, when a printed item goes under the scrutiny of readers, writers, editors, scholars, etc., the discussion gets complicated. The matter is that, when read, discussed, or analyzed, a book is situated in a specific environment that creates additional layers for considerati...

Puerto Rico is often depicted as a “racial democracy” in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2015), Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaeton musicians critique racial democracy’s privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center...

In contrast to official narratives that reiterate claims about hostility between Haiti and Santo Domingo since the 19th century, Anne Eller‘s, We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom (Duke University Press, 2016) goes a long way towards both historicizing those narratives and digging deep into an array of popular sources to argue for a complex history...

Moving through the saunas of Rio de Janeiro, the Amazonian eco-resorts of Manaus, and the Afro-Brazilian heritage of Bahia, Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazils Sexual Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2015) explores sex as an epistemology – a way of knowing. The ethnographic, theoretical and prosaic prowess of Assistant Professor Gregory Mitchell captures the indivi...

Veronica Herrera has written Water & Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Herrera is assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. What happens to the basic services of government after democratic institutions take hold? Specifically, when do elected officials relinquish the clientelistic approach to the provision of wa...

Matthew James Crawford’s new book is a fascinating history of an object that was central to the history of science, technology, and medicine in the early modern Spanish Atlantic world. The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks closely at the struggles of the Spanish Empire in the second half of the eig...

You find a lot of strange things on late medieval and “Age of Discovery” era maps. Of course there are weird beasts of every sort: dragons, griffins, sea monsters, and sundry multi-headed predators. But you also find a lot of bizarre, well, people. These include giant people, tiny people, one-footed people, people with two heads, and people with no heads at all (their eyes, mouths and noses are in...

What difference can a trial make, really? In Guatemala: The Question of Genocide (Taylor and Frances, 2016), Elizabeth Obglesby and Diane Nelson start from this question to examine much more broadly the memory and politics of genocide in Guatemala. To do so, they invited many of the scholars familiar with the conflict in Guatemala to reflect on the role genocide has played in that country. Many au...

In Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling Across the Rio Grande (University of Texas Press, 2015) Professor George T. Diaz examines a subject that has received scant attention by historians, but one that is at the heart of contemporary debates over U.S.-Mexico immigration and border enforcement. Focusing on trans-border communities, like Laredo/Nuevo Laredo, Diaz details the interplay between s...

Mireya Loza’s Defiant Braceros How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) sheds new light on the private lives of migrant men who participated in the Bracero Program (1942-1964), a binational agreement between the United States and Mexico that allowed hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to enter the U.S. on temporary work pe...

In the early 2000s, the press–at least in Boston, where I was living at the time–was full of shrill stories about drug-crazed addicts breaking into area pharmacies in search of something called “Oxycontin.” I had no idea what Oxycontin was, but I was pretty sure there must be something remarkable about it if ordinary drug fiends were risking jail time and worse by robbing mom-and-pop drug stores t...

Over the past quarter-century, scientists have been mapping and exploring the human genome to locate the genetic basis of disease and track the histories of populations across time and space. As part of this work, geneticists have formulated markers to calculate percentages of European, African, and Amerindian genetic ancestry in populations presumed to originate or inhabit particular geographic r...

In Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015), John Alba Cutler provides a literary history of Chicano/a literature that tracks the fields formation and evolution from the 1960s forward. The central focus of the book examines the tension between the theories posited by scholars of assimilation sociology and Chicano/a writers whose literary works, focu...

Rio de Janeiro recently celebrated its 450th anniversary. Founded March, 1565, The Very Loyal and Heroic City of Saint Sebastian of Rio de Janeiro (the full title) is a cosmopolitan city with a fusion of indigenous, African, Asian, and European influences. But how can we make sure that the millions of Caricoas who have made Rio their home have an opportunity to tell their stories? Daryle Williams,...

In Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898-1961 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) Dr. Frank P. Barajas details the central role of Mexican labor in the development of the agriculturally rich coastal plane located between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. In this thoroughly researched history, Barajas relates the curious unions (i.e., unlikely partnership...

Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Harvard University Press, 2016) maps the intricate, intersecting channels of information exchange in the early American South, exploring how people in the colonial world came into possession of vital knowledge in a region that lacked a regular mail system or a printing press until the 1730s. Challenging the notion of early colonial America...

Symbols have meanings that change depending upon the cultural context. But how do we discuss symbols, their meanings, and their cultural contexts without an adequate vocabulary? Phillip Penix-Tadsen, assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Delaware and author of the new book Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America (MIT Press, 2016), offers insight in to how culture is signified in...

El Sistema, the massive Venezuelan youth orchestra program, has been hailed in some quarters as the next big idea in music education (if not as the savior of classical music itself). Any who have found the press coverage of El Sistema suspiciously rosy, however, will find quite another account in Geoffrey Baker‘s engrossing and at times sharply critical book, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s ...

David Sartorius‘s recent book Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba (Duke University Press, 2014), examines Cuban society in the nineteenth century, and the islanders’ proclamations of loyalty to the colony and to Spain. He challenges the notion that Cubans grew increasingly independent minded as events transpired during that century. Instead, he shows that both free...

When former Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas traveled to Havana in 1959 to celebrate the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Fidel Castro in front of a crowd of thousands, providing the early sketches of an image of unquestioned Mexican support for revolutionary Cuba that would persist over the next few decades. Mexico was the only country in the Western Hemisphere...

In her new book, Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production (University of California Press, 2015), Sarah Bowen presents the challenges and politics associated with the establishment of Denominations of Origin (DOs) for tequila and mezcal. On one hand, establishing these DOs protects a crucial part of Mexico’s national identity as well as the quality of these fermented bevera...

This episode features Michelle Chase, who joins us to discuss her fascinating new book, Revolution Within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). The book is a rich and nuanced history of women’s participation in the movements of resistance that began in the immediate aftermath of Fulgencio Batista’s coup d’etat in 1952—resistance th...

Ulla Berg’s new book Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S. (New York University Press, 2015) highlights the deeply historical and central role of migration as a strategy for social mobility, as well as its affect on the formation of identity, in the lived experiences of migrants from the central highlands of Peru. Documenting the aspirational, material, and moral force...

What does it mean to be free? How can paying attention to the relationship between freedom and slavery help construct a concept and practice of freedom that is “perpetual, unfinished, and rooted in acts of flight” (181)? In his book Freedom as Marronage University of Chicago Press, 2015), Neil Roberts (Africana Studies, Religion, and Political Science, Williams College) explores this and many othe...

Julie M. Weise‘s new book Corazon de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South Since 1910 (UNC Press, 2015) is the first book to comprehensively document Mexicans’ and Mexican Americans’ long history of migration to the U.S. South. It recounts the untold histories of Mexicanos’ migrations to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina as far back as 1910. In the heart of Dixie, Mexica...