New Books in Latin American Studies

Dengue fever is on the rise globally. Since it is transmitted by mosquitoes which reside and reproduce in human environments, eradication efforts involve households and the people who keep them clean as well as moral and persuasive campaigns of surveillance and invigilation. In his new book Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health and the Politics of Entanglement (University of California Press, 2014), Al...

Scott Mainwaring and Anibal Perez-Linan are the authors of Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Mainwaring is the Eugene and Helen Conley Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Perez-Linan is an associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh. Why do authoritarian regimes...

Lyman Johnson‘s book Workshop of Revolution: Plebian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776-1810 (Duke University Press, 2011) analyzes the economic, political, and social lives of working people in Argentina’s colonial capital.  Johnson traces the economic challenges facing plebian workers in Buenos Aires, including competition from foreign goods, the arrival of enslaved Africans into the city...

Successive waves of migration brought thousands of Chinese laborers to Cuba over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The coolie trade, which was meant to replace waning supplies of slaves, was but the first. In the twentieth century, a sugar boom in Cuba facilitated the entry of thousands more. Many of these itinerant workers stayed, and this book uses Chinese and Spanish languages sources and...

Caterina Pizzigoni’s book The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico’s Toluca Valley, 1650-1800 (Stanford University Press, 2012) provides a close examination of indigenous society in central Mexico. Analyzing more than 200 testamentary documents, Pizzigoni chronicles what Nahua homes looked like, who lived within them, and how indigenous households regulated their property and kinship co...

Kirsten Weld‘s book Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2014) tells the story of the 2005 discovery of a vast police archive in Guatemala. Officials had long denied that it existed, and for good reason, because it documented years of kidnapping and murder under the auspices of counterinsurgency. Weld’s book accounts for the repercussions of that discov...

Marcia Ochoa‘s book Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela (Duke University Press, 2014) is a detailed ethnography of Venezuelan modernity and nationhood that brings two kinds of feminine performances into the same analytical frame. Her focus on transformistas and beauty queens allows her to draw relationships among power, beauty, violence, a...

What factors compel Central American residents to flee their home countries and head to the United States? What do national elections in Latin America mean, and why should the U.S. be concerned? Which Latin American nations are emerging international powers? These are some of the questions Dr. Gregory Weeks prepares students to answer with his book, Understanding Latin American Politics (Pearson,...

Passion. Flair. Instinct. Improvisation. As the World Cup advances to the knockout stage, you’ll hear these terms associated with the football styles of Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico rather than those of Belgium and Germany. As historians Roger Kittleson and Joshua Nadel explain, the soccer cultures of Brazil and other countries of Latin America have long been bound in such stereotypes. Their new...

Historically speaking, who you were depended on who your rulers were and the ethnic identity (including language, religion, and folkways) of “your” people. In the era of nation-states–that is, our era–these two characteristics have, for most people, been fused. Ethnic Germans live in Germany, ethnic Chinese live in China, ethnic Egyptians live in Egypt. The exceptions to this rule are two: ethnic...

With Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua (Duke University Press, 2013), Cymene Howe offers an ethnography of activism. Woven into Nicaragua’s political history of revolution and U.S. intervention, the struggle for sexual rights there takes place on three stages: in intimate settings of lesbian discussion groups, in the public sphere marked by demonstrat...

Inherently problematic in most mainstream discussions of the impact of technology is the dominant western or global northern perspective. In this way, the impact of technology on societies in developing countries, the impact of these societies on technology, and how those technologies are used is often ignored or marginalized. In his book Favela Digital: The Other Side of Technology (GSA Editora e...

Daniel Altschuler and Javier Corrales are the authors of The Promise of Participation: Experiments in Participatory Governance in Honduras and Guatemala (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014). Altschuler is a visiting scholar at the New School for Public Engagement, while Corrales is professor of political science at Amherst College. Participatory governance has long drawn the interest of scholars in politica...

In Americans in the Treasure House: Travel to Porfirian Mexico and the Cultural Politics of Empire (University of Texas Press, 2014), Jason Ruiz explores the role of a distinct group of actors in the relationship between the United States and Mexico: American travelers, travel writers and photographers who visited and worked in Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With...

In Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard University Press, 2012), historian Miranda Spieler tells of the transformation of a slave plantation colony into a destination for metropolitan convicts in the eight decades following the French Revolution. Unlike the better-known case of British Australia, French Guiana failed to turn... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon...

I have a colleague at Newman who takes students to Guatemala every summer.  Since I arrived she’s encouraged me to join her.  I would stay with the order of sisters who sponsor our university. I’d learn at least a few words of rudimentary Spanish.  And, she says, if I’m really interested in genocide, I must visit this complicated, conflicted country. I’ve always declined (granted, I’m usually taki...

Americans talk a lot about the flow of Mexican immigrants across their southern border. To some that flow is seen as patently illegal and dangerous. To others it’s seen as unstoppable and essential for the functioning of the U.S. economy. Everyone agrees that something must be done about it though, in fact, little is ever done. It’s an American problem that seems to have no American solution. But,...

New Mexico is a cultural borderland, marked by the interaction of Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American peoples over the past four hundred years. The question of how to commemorate this history and promote the traditions that arose from it is the subject of ongoing discussing, disagreement, and activism. In Recognizing Heritage: the Politics of Multiculturalism in New Mexico (University of...

When you open Eduardo Kohn‘s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you are entering a forest of dreams: the dreams of dogs and men, dreams about policemen and peccaries, dreams prophetic and dreams instrumental. In this brilliant new ethnography of a village in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, those dreams are woven into the lives and deaths of a...

Videography is a powerful tool for recording and representing aspects of human society and culture, and anthropologists have long used – and debated the use of – video as a tool to study indigenous and traditional peoples. Indigenous people themselves, however, have increasingly turn video towards their own cultural and communal ends, and this indigenous use of video raises its own questions: who...

From the sounds of Samba to the spectacles of Carnival, Afro-Brazilian traditions are today seen as emblematic of Brazil and especially of Salvador de Bahia, the northeastern city where many Afro-Brazilian cultural traditions were first established. Salvador’s present status as the “Black Rome” of Brazil marks a shift from the early Twentieth Century, when Afro-Brazilian practices – particularly t...

Today I spoke to Ioan Grillo about his book El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency (Bloomsbury, 2012). This book is an excellent introduction to the state of conflict between drug cartels themselves, the government and the Mexican community. This is not an academic study of criminology. Ioan has reported from Mexico for many years and he has brought together his accumulated wisdom into this...

Ron Schmidt is the co-author (with Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh, Andrew L. Aoki, and Rodney Hero) of Newcomers, Outsiders, and Insiders: Immigrants and the American Racial Politics in the Early 21st Century (University of Michigan Press, 2013). Schmidt is professor of political science at California State University Long Beach. This is a big book that covers long and complex histories of numerous group...

Most people today think of war–or really violence of any sort–as for the most part useless. It’s better, we say, just to talk things out or perhaps buy our enemies off. And that usually works. But what if you lived in a culture where fighting was an important part of social status and earning a living? What if, say, you couldn’t get married unless you had gone to war? What if, say, you couldn’t fe...

The violence in Mexico is receiving a lot of media attention internationally. Paul Rexton Kan has produced a book that provides us with a comprehensive and comprehendible introduction to the background to the conflict and its effects. Cartels at War: Mexico’s Drug-Fueled Violence and the Threat to US National Security (Potomac Books, 2012) is a relatively short book packed with detailed informatio...