New Books In Latin American Studies

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 of this remarkable woman, followed by a review of her evolving representation in Mexican arts and letters that shows how the legends became ever more fanciful after her death. How much of the story is rooted in fact, and how much is fiction sculpted to fit the cultural sensibilities of a given moment in time? This is an indispensable resource for those searching to understand late-colonial Mexico, the role of women in the independence movement, and the use of historic figures in crafting national narratives. Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in Histo

Today I talked to Viviana MacManus, author of Disruptive Archives: Feminist Memories of Resistance in Latin America’s Dirty Wars published by the University of Illinois Press in 2020. It has just received Honorable Mention for the 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize. The National Women's Studies Association awards the prize for groundbreaking scholarship in women's studies that makes significant multicultural feminist contributions to women of color/transnational scholarship. Viviana McManus is at the department of Spanish and French Studies, Occidental College in Los Angeles. Her current research focuses “on feminist uses of horror in contending with gender state and racialized violence in Latin American film and literature”. In Disruptive Archives, Macmanus throws light on the many women activists who survived the years of repression in Argentina and Mexico and who have been relegated to the category of the unseen or are portrayed as underlings to the men who they fought alongside with. She also discusses ho

Octopus month has morphed seamlessly into Multispecies month here at RtB, bringing with it not only last week's piece on chimpanzees, but also this sparkling conversation about all sorts of multi-species communities. Recorded live in front of an audience of writing students and introduced by Brandeis physicist Matthew Headrick, it features Patricia Alvarez Astacio, an anthropologist and filmmaker. She has made a film about her work in the Peruvian highlands, where people live with, respect, shear and sometimes eat alpacas. Gina Turrigiano, RtB guest-host of long standing, wears her biological hat in this conversation, bringing to bear insights about avian intelligence and the other sorts of animal community that silently surround our species (think microbiome...). John tries to steer the conversation towards SF as usual. Read Transcript Here (or Visit the Recallthisbook.org Transcript page) Upcoming episodes: What do you make of Amazon? The new Sears Roebuck? A terrifying monopoly threat? Satisfaction (a pape

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, musicians, and himself—from New Year's festivities in the highlands of Guanajuato, Mexico, to backyard get-togethers along the back roads of central Texas—Chávez shows how Mexicans living on both sides of the border use expressive culture to construct meaningful communities amid the United States’ often vitriolic immigration politics. Through Chávez's writing, we gain an intimate look at the experience of migration and how huapango carries the voices of those in Mexico, those undertaking the dangerous trek across the border, and those living in the United States. Illuminating how huapango arribeño’s performance refigu

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 abolished slavery in many of its territories decades before the American Civil War. Indeed, it was concern by Texas slaveholders that their human property may have been threatened that led them to revolt against Mexico and eventually join the United States and, in time, the Confederate States of America. For those who escaped, Mexico could be far from an anti-slavery paradise, but Mexican officials were loathe to return runaway former slaves back to the United States, a fact which was one of the many reasons why the United States went to war with Mexico in the 1840s. South to Freedom is a fresh look at America's slavery

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, 2020), Rocio Gomez examines the detrimental effects of the silver mining industry on water resources and public health in the city of Zacatecas and argues that the human labor necessary to the mining industry made the worker and the mine inseparable through the land, water, and air. Tensions arose between farmers and the mining industry over water access while the city struggled with mudslides, droughts, and water source contamination. Silicosis-tuberculosis, along with accidents caused by mining technologies like jackhammers and ore-crushers, debilitated scores of miners. By emphasizing the perspective of water and

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, traces that wealth southward, arguing that the growth of Los Angeles from a hamlet to the second largest city in the nation is rooted in imperialist acquisition of capital from Mexico. Kim builds on recent borderlands histories to show that not only did people regularly cross borders in the late 19th and early 20th century American West, but so too did wealth and capital. So great was the draining of Mexican wealth to fuel Los Angeles, that when the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, Americans, many of them Los Angelinos, owned over 1/3 of all Mexican land. That kind of wealth disparity was a feature, not a bug, of Los Ang

Migrations (LA Review of Books, 2021) is a collection of short stories by the Puerto Rican born writer and now retired university professor J. L. Torres. Each story condenses a bit of the experience of a cross section of Puerto Rico: the rich who treat it like a playground, the stereotypical macho men, the shanty town dwellers. The ramifications of the stories are deep and the varied tales range from climate change and the destruction of natural ecosystems by tourism, to the Puerto Ricans of the diaspora who struggle in dysfunctional families and who long to be part of the mainstream but have weathered the subtle racism of American society that has taken a toll on their inner lives. Torres’s stories bring alive Puerto Rico to us, its natural beauty but also try to show the colonial economy that the country is. Minni Sawhney is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Delhi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbook

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 Indigenous peoples fought both for and against the revolution and the radical changes it bought to their homeland. To make sense of this complex history, Nathaniel Morris offers the first systematic understanding of the participation of the Náayari, Wixárika, O'dam, and Mexicanero peoples in the Mexican Revolution. They are known for being among the least "assimilated" of all Mexico's Indigenous peoples. It's often been assumed that they were stuck up in their mountain homeland--"the Gran Nayar"--with no knowledge of the uprisings, civil wars, military coups, and political upheaval that convulsed the rest of Mexico betw

In Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Kalle Kananoja tells the story of how pre-colonial communities throughout the west coast of Africa employed a wide range of medical and spiritual strategies to treat all kinds of diseases. In the sixteenth century, the arrival of European traders and colonists initiated an exchange of healing knowledge that moved across the Atlantic for the next three-hundred years. The initial links in this chain of exchanges were established by European settlers or visitors who, given the limited number of European doctors and medications available, sought the services of African healers whose methods were often seen as more suited and efficacious in the local environments. Missionaries, travelers and botanists also added to these exchanges by collecting and systematizing some of the knowledge they acquired from African informants. By documenting the richness and mobility of African healing knowledge, Kananoja points that even though plants, remedies and practice

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 unpredictable, fought at different levels, with different intensities with multiple goals. The war ISIS has declared against the West is another example of hybrid warfare. Voeten interprets drug cartels as ultra-capitalist predatory corporations thriving in a neoliberal, globalized economy. They use similar branding and marketing strategies as legitimate business. He also looks at the anthropological, individual level and explains how people can become killers. Voeten compares Mexican sicarios, West African child soldiers and Western jihadis and sees the same logic of cruelty that facilitates perpetrating 'inhumane' acts t

From the 1520s through the 1580s, thousands of African slaves fled captivity in Spanish Panama and formed their own communities in the interior of the isthmus. African Maroons in Sixteenth-Century Panama (U Oklahoma Press, 2021), a primary source reader, edited by Robert C. Schwaller, documents this marronage in the context of five decades of African resistance to slavery. The self-sufficiency of the Maroons, along with their periodic raids against Spanish settlements, sparked armed conflict as Spaniards sought to conquer the maroon communities and kill or re-enslave their populations. After decades of struggle, Maroons succeeded in negotiating a peace with Spanish authorities and establishing the first two free Black towns in the Americas. The little-known details of this dramatic history emerge in these pages, traced through official Spanish accounts, reports, and royal edicts, as well as excerpts from several English sources that recorded alliances between Maroons and English privateers in the region. The

In Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba (University of Florida Press, 2021), Dr. Takkara Brunson examines the political strategies used by Afro-Cuban women between 1886 and 1959 to call for greater rights and opportunities for Afro-Cubans. Afro-Cuban women channeled their energy for Black rights through letter writing, sitting for photographs and comportment, founding their own organizations, and seeking and winning political offices in the Communist Party, to name a few of their strategies. While pursuing the political avenues available to them, Black women also navigated and had to contend with patriarchy and racelessness. In putting together this compelling story, Brunson undertook research in archives in Cuba and the United States. She hones in on the lives of particular women in each chapter to show how they advanced calls for Black citizenship and rights. Brunson builds on the work of Latin American and Cuban history as well as Black feminist scholarship to center Black women as criti

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 across the rest of Latin America, in Mexico it was civilians who formed governments, moving punctiliously in and out of office through uninterrupted elections. Drawing on two decades of archival research, Gillingham uses the political and social evolution of the states of Guerrero and Veracruz as starting points to explore this unique authoritarian state that thrived not despite but because of its contradictions. Mexico during the pivotal decades of the mid-twentieth century is revealed as a place where soldiers prevented military rule, a single party lost its own rigged elections, corruption fostered legitimacy, violence

These days, anyone paying close attention to Peru is awash in déjà vu: the ghosts of Peru’s four-decade-old war with the Maoist insurgent group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) have resurfaced time and again following the surprise victory of the country’s new left-leaning president. To understand how and why that conflict continues to shape Peruvian society, we invited Dr. Jo-Marie Burt onto the podcast to discuss her (not so) new book, Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru: Silencing Civil Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). An Associate Professor of Political Science at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, Dr. Burt first traveled to Peru in the 1980s during the height of the civil conflict. The research she conducted across Peru and in Lima’s shantytowns led her to two major conclusions about the conflict. Despite its brutality, Sendero Luminoso had made inroads with Peru’s disaffected because it was able to provide a form of stability in areas the Peruvian s

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 aims for their future in Mexico and the world. The teachers, thinkers, and communities that took indigenista policy into their own hands are the focus of historian A.S. Dillingham's new book, Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2021). Dillingham combines federal documents with ethnographic materials to understand how twentieth-century Oaxacans - especially those connected to education initiatives - navigated the "double bind of indigenismo" that defined state indigenista policy in Mexico. In this "double bind," Indigenous peoples were at onc

"El Chapo. The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Drug Lord" (Atria Books, 2021) is a stunning investigation of the life and legend of Mexican kingpin Joaquín Archivaldo “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, building on Noah Hurowitz’s revelatory coverage for Rolling Stone of El Chapo’s federal drug-trafficking trial. This is the true story of how El Chapo built the world’s wealthiest and most powerful drug-trafficking operation, based on months’ worth of trial testimony and dozens of interviews with cartel gunmen, Mexican journalists and political figures, Chapo’s family members, and the DEA agents who brought him down. Over the course of three decades, El Chapo was responsible for smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine, marijuana, heroin, meth, and fentanyl around the world, becoming in the process the most celebrated and reviled drug lord since Pablo Escobar. El Chapo waged ruthless wars against his rivals and former allies, plunging vast areas of Mexico into unprecedented levels of violence, even as many in his

In 1974, the International Congress on World Evangelization met in Lausanne, Switzerland. Gathering together nearly 2,500 Protestant evangelical leaders from more than 150 countries and 135 denominations, it rivaled Vatican II in terms of its influence. But as David C. Kirkpatrick argues in A Gospel for the Poor: Global Social Christianity and the Latin American Evangelical Left (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019), the Lausanne Congress was most influential because, for the first time, theologians from the Global South gained a place at the table of the world's evangelical leadership—bringing their nascent brand of social Christianity with them. Leading up to this momentous occasion, after World War II, there emerged in various parts of the world an embryonic yet discernible progressive coalition of thinkers who were embedded in global evangelical organizations and educational institutions such as the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, and the International Fello

Fair trade certified coffee is now commonly found on the supermarket shelves of the Global North, but the connections between the consumer and producer of fair trade coffee are far from simple. Lindsay Naylor’s book, Fair Trade Rebels: Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), examines the contested politics of fair trade coffee production in the indigenous highlands of Mexico. Using theoretical approaches based in diverse economies scholarship and decolonial thinking, Naylor highlights the significance of the multiple, diverse economic practices and relations that campesinos/as use in their struggle to form more dignified livelihoods. While she critiques the narratives of economic development and problematic understandings of solidarity that underpin many fair trade discourses, Naylor’s empirically grounded research produces a nuanced analysis of the possibilities and limitations inherent in contemporary fair trade coffee production. Rather than understand

During the independence era in Mexico, individuals and factions of all stripes embraced the printing press as a key weapon in the broad struggle for political power. In Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-century Mexico (University of California Press, 2021) historian Corinna Zeltsman takes readers into the printing shops, government offices, courtrooms, and streets of Mexico City, and reconstructs the practical negotiations and discursive contests that surrounded print over a century of political transformation, from the late colonial era to the Mexican Revolution. Centering the diverse communities that worked behind the scenes at urban presses and examining their social practices and aspirations, Zeltsman explores how printer interactions with state and religious authorities shaped broader debates about press freedom and authorship. Beautifully crafted and ambitious in scope, Ink under the Fingernails sheds new light on Mexico's histories of state formation and political culture, iden