New Books in Mexican Studies

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo adored adventure. In November, 1930, she was thrilled to realize her dream of traveling to the United States to live in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York. Still, leaving her family and her country for the first time was monumental. Only twenty-three and newly married to the already world-famous forty-three-year-old Diego Rivera, she was at a crossroads in her life and...

Today I spoke to Dr. Rebecca Janzen, Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at the University of South Carolina about her book Unholy Trinity: State Church and Film in Mexico published by the State University of New York Press 2021. She says in the Introduction that her aim is not to promote religious devotion but to research how films critically engage with their context thr...

Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández once again engages in the fearless work of challenging structures of domination. In her most recent book, Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2021), Profesora Guidotti-Hernández theorizes through the idea of the masculinized Mexican subject and leads us to the possibilities of historicizing how masculinities are archived and to what degr...

In the 1920s, Mexico established rural normales—boarding schools that trained teachers in a new nation-building project. Drawn from campesino ranks and meant to cultivate state allegiance, their graduates would facilitate land distribution, organize civic festivals, and promote hygiene campaigns. In Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Me...

On this episode I spoke to Dr. Susie Porter, Professor in History and in Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She is the author Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879-1931 published in 2003, and in today's podcast we will be talking about her more recent book From Angel to Office Worker: Middle-Class Identity and Female Consciousness in Mexico, 1890–1950...

The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (NYU Press, 2021) tells the story of the founding of American Christianity against the backdrop of devastating disease, and of the Indigenous survivors who kept the nascent faith alive Many scholars have come to think of the European Christian mission to the Americas as an inevitable success. But in its earl...

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is Professor of Spanish, Latin American Studies, and Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His areas of research include Latin American intellectual history, neoliberal culture, world literary theory, and Mexican cultural studies. He is the author and editor of several books, including Screening Neoliberalism: Mexican Cinema 1988-2012 and most recen...

In the wake of protests and marches for racial and gender justice in the twenty-first century, scholars have located and argued that racial violence has been embedded in the very fabric of the United States since its inception. In Drs. Sonia Hernández and John Morán González recent anthology, Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on the History of the Border (U Texas Press, 2021)...

Elena Poniatowska is a legendary Mexican journalist who has chronicled popular celebrities, politicians as well as important social movements in Mexico since the 1968 Tlatelolco students massacre. Today I talked to Lynn Stephen, a professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon who has described in her book Stories That Make History: Mexico through Elena Poniatowska’s Crónicas (Duke UP, 2021...

Ian Almond is Professor of World Literature at Georgetown University in Qatar, and author of six books, including Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims Marched with Christians across Europe’s Battlegrounds, published in 2011 by Harvard University Press and The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Islam, Empire and Loss published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. His work has been translated into thi...

A vast and desolate region, the Texas-New Mexico borderlands have long been an ideal setting for intrigue and illegal dealings--never more so than in the lawless early days of cattle trafficking and trade among the Plains tribes and Comancheros. This book takes us to the borderlands in the 1860s and 1870s for an in-depth look at Union-Confederate skullduggery amid the infamous Comanche-Comanchero...

The avocado is the iconic food of the twenty-first century. It has gone from a little-known regional food to a social media darling in less than a hundred years. This is an astounding trajectory for a fruit that isn’t sweet, becomes bitter when it is cooked and has perhaps the oddest texture of any fruit or vegetable. But the idea that this rich and delicious fruit is also healthy despite being fa...

Mexico City's public markets were integral to the country's economic development, bolstering the expansion of capitalism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. These publicly owned and operated markets supplied households with everyday necessities and generated revenue for local authorities. At the same time, they were embedded in a wider network of economic and social relations that...

Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security. Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in t...

In Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals (Rutgers University Press, 2021), Vania Smith-Oka follows a cohort of interns throughout their year of medical training in hospitals to understand how medical students become medical doctors. She ethnographically tracks their engagements with one another, interactions with patients, experiences with doctors, and presentations of cases to show...

Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network (U California Press, 2020) is the true story of how, against all odds, a remote Mexican pueblo built its own autonomous cell phone network—without help from telecom companies or the government. Anthropologist Roberto J. González paints a vivid and nuanced picture of life in a Oaxaca mountain village and the collective tribulation, t...

In La Guera Rodriguez: The Life and Legends of a Mexican Independence Heroine (U California Press, 2021), Silvia Marina Arrom traces the legends of María Ignacia Rodríguez de Velasco y Osorio Barba (1778–1850), known by the nickname "La Güera Rodríguez." Seeking to disentangle the woman from the myth, Arrom uses a wide array of primary sources from the period to piece together an intimate portrait...

In Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke UP, 2017), Alex E. Chávez explores the contemporary politics of Mexican migrant cultural expression manifest in the sounds and poetics of huapango arribeño, a musical genre originating from north-central Mexico. Following the resonance of huapango's improvisational performance within the lives of audiences, m...

For some enslaved Americans, the path to freedom led not north, but south, argues Dr. Alice Baumgardner, an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California. In South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (Basic Books, 2020), Baumgartner reveals an untold story of enslaved African Americans finding redemption from slavery in Mexico, which had abo...

In Mexico environmental struggles have been fought since the nineteenth century in such places as Zacatecas, where United States and European mining interests have come into open conflict with rural and city residents over water access, environmental health concerns, and disease compensation. In Silver Veins, Dusty Lungs: Mining, Water, and Public Health in Zacatecas, 1835-1946 (U Nebraska Press,...

Between 1865 and 1900, the population of Los Angeles grew from around 5,000 people to over 100,000. With population growth that explosive came the opportunity for vast riches to be made. In  Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941 (UNC Press, 2019), Dr. Jessica Kim, an associate professor of history at the University of Southern California, trace...

The Mexican Revolution gave rise to the Mexican nation-state as we know it today. Rural revolutionaries took up arms against the Díaz dictatorship in support of agrarian reform, in defense of their political autonomy, or inspired by a nationalist desire to forge a new Mexico. However, in the Gran Nayar, a rugged expanse of mountains and canyons, the story was more complex, as the region's four Ind...

With an estimated 250,000 people killed in 15 years, the Mexican drug war is the most violent conflict in the Western world. It shows no sign of abating. In Mexican Drug Violence: Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty (2020), Dr Teun A. Voeten analyzes the dynamics of the violence. He argues it is a new type of war called hybrid warfare: multidimensional, elusive and unpred...

An essential history of how the Mexican Revolution gave way to a unique one-party state. In Unrevolutionary Mexico: The Birth of a Strange Dictatorship (Yale University Press, 2021), Paul Gillingham addresses how the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) gave way to a capitalist dictatorship of exceptional resilience, where a single party ruled for seventy-one years. Yet while soldiers seized power acros...

Oaxaca, in the view of the Mexican federal government, was in need of serious reform at midcentury. Reports detailing issues of land ownership, language education, and poverty prompted the Institutio Nacional Indigenista (INI) to pursue a number of reforms to integrate Oaxaca and its people into the nation. But where federal policy met local practice, Indigenous Oaxacans had their own ideas and ai...