New Books in Latin American Studies

In his new book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s (Faber, 2020), Simon Hall, a Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds, colorfully details an extraordinary visit by Fidel Castro to New York in the Autumn of 1960 for the opening of the UN General Assembly. Holding court from the iconic Hotel Theresa in Harlem, Castro's riotous stay in New York saw him conne...

In Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America (Cornell UP, 2020), Theresa Keeley analyzes the role of intra-Catholic conflict within the framework of U.S. foreign policy formulation and execution during the Reagan administration. She challenges the preponderance of scholarship on the administration that stresses the influence of evangelical...

Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fact” that could be ascertained with scientific testing. Though the advent of DNA testing might seem to make paternity less elusive, Milanich’s book invites readers to think about paternity not as a biologi...

For over a century Mexico has been embroiled in a drug war dictated by the demands of their neighbor to the north. In The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade (W. W. Norton, 2021), Benjamin T. Smith offers a history of the trade and its effects upon the people of Mexico. As he reveals, at the start of the 20th century drugs such as marijuana and opium were largely on the margins of Mex...

The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to solve their fundamental problem: how to extract labor from captive workers who had every reason to resist. In this system, enslaved Black drivers were tasked with supervising and punishing other enslaved laborers. In The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power...

In Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (Duke UP, 2024), Matthew Chin investigates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present, critically responding to the island’s global reputation for extreme homophobia and anti-queer violence. Chin advances a theory and method of queer fractals to bring together genealogies of queer and Caribbean formation. Fractals—a kind...

What does mourning have to do with politics? How do practices of forced disappearance and improper burial shape subjects, spaces, and what is intelligible? What are people doing in movements across the globe when they gather in public space and recount nightmares of their disappeared loved ones?  In Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance (Northwestern Unive...

During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them onshore. Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (U Chicago Pr...

Mexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of wom...

From 1845 to 1865 the Gulf of Mexico was at the center of American expansion and southern imperialism. A Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War–Era Gulf South (University of Georgia Press, 2024) by Dr. Maria Angela Diaz tells the story of several communities, such as Galveston, New Orleans, and Pensacola, as well as countries such as Mexico and Cuba, to uncover t...

Today’s book is: Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States (U California Press, 2024), a which explores how each year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, Cal...

In the latest edition of Ethnographic Marginalia, we talk with Roxani Krystalli about her new book Good Victims: The Political as a Feminist Question (Oxford UP, 2024). Roxani describes the dilemmas she faced in her research on encounters between those recognized as victims of the Colombian conflict and the state agencies that attend them. She also explains what makes this a feminist book—not beca...

An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods: Political Ideology and Insurrection in the Mayan Popul Vuh and the Andean Huarochiri Manuscript (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) is the first comprehensive comparison of two of the greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: the Popul Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala and the Huarochiri Manuscript of Peru's lower Andean regions. The rebel...

Following the Great Depression, as the world searched for new economic models, Brazil and Portugal experimented with corporatism as a “third path” between laissez-faire capitalism and communism. In a corporatist society, the government vertically integrates economic and social groups into the state so that it can manage labor and economic production. In the 1930s, the dictatorships of Getúlio Varg...

At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (Cornell UP, 2021) helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. Eric Helleiner identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic p...

In Cattle in the Postcolumbian Americas: A Zooarchaeological Historical Study (University Press of Florida, 2024), Nicolas Delsol compares zooarchaeological and material evidence from sites across Mesoamerica and the Caribbean to show how the introduction of cattle, beginning with imports by Spanish colonizers in the 1500s, shaped colonial American society. Before European colonization, cows were...

Today’s book is: Reunited: Family Separation and Central American Youth Migration (Russell Sage Foundation, 2024), by Dr. Ernesto Castañeda and Daniel Jenks, which explains the reasons for Central American youth migration, describes the journey, and documents how minors experienced separation from their families and their subsequent reunification. Castañeda and Jenks find that these minors migrate...

Dan La Botz's book Riding with the Revolution: The American Left in the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1925 (Brill, 2024) tells the story of Americans who from 1900 to 1925 became involved with the Mexican Revolution. John Reed actually saddled up and rode with Pancho Villa. Later, American war resisters crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, where they helped found the Communist Party, the Industrial Work...

Economic history has always emphasized the importance of long-distance trade in the emergence of modern financial markets, yet almost nothing is known about the Manila trade. The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) offers the first reconstruction of the capital market of Manila using new archival sources that have never been used in the economic his...

How do families care for each when they are divided over generations by powerful geopolitical forces beyond their control? In this episode, Hanna Torsh speaks with Lynnette Arnold about her new book Living Together Across Borders: Communicative Care in Transnational Salvadoran Families (Oxford University Press, 2024). Lynnette also shares her tips for emerging scholars in the field about how to co...

The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History (Cambridge UP, 2019) offers the first, in-depth comparison of the Holocaust and new world slavery. Providing a reliable view of the relevant issues, and based on a broad and comprehensive set of data and evidence, Steven Katz analyzes the fundamental differences between the two systems and re-evaluates our understanding of the Nazi agenda....

Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America (SUNY Press, 2022) proposes the existence of a recognizably distinct Holocaust consciousness in Latin America since the 1970s. Community leaders, intellectuals, writers, and political activists facing state repression have seen themselves reflected in Holocaust histories and have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities...

We tend to think of sixteenth-century European artistic theory as separate from the artworks displayed in the non-European sections of museums. In A New Antiquity: Art and Humanity as Universal, 1400–1600 (Penn State University Press, 2024) Dr. Alessandra Russo argues otherwise. Instead of considering the European experience of “New World” artefacts and materials through the lenses of “curiosity”...

Why do armed groups employ terrorism in markedly different ways during civil wars? Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Dr. Andreas E. Feldmann examines the disparate behaviour of actors including guerrilla groups, state security forces, and paramilitaries during Colombia’s long and bloody civil war. Analysing the varieties of violence in this conflict, he develops a new theory of the dynam...

Caree A. Banton's book More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic (Cambridge UP, 2019) chronicles the migration of Afro-Barbadians to Liberia. In 1865, 346 Afro-Barbadians fled a failed post-emancipation Caribbean for the independent black republic of Liberia. They saw Liberia as a means of achieving their post-emancipation goals and pr...