New Books In Latin American Studies

Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2021) provides an urgent and nuanced portrait of collective action that resists racial capitalism, colonialism, and climate disruption. Weaving together historical and ethnographic research, this story challenges the master narratives of Puerto Rico as a tourist destination and site of "natural" disasters to demonstrate how fossil fuel economies are inextricably entwined with colonial practices and how local community groups in Puerto Rico have struggled against energy coloniality to mobilize and transform power from the ground up. Catalina M. de Onís documents how these groups work to decenter continental contexts and deconstruct damaging hierarchies that devalue and exploit rural coastal communities. She highlights and collaborates with individuals who refuse the cruel logics of empire by imagining and implementing energy justice and other interconnected radical power transformations. Diving deeply

How can scholars use digital tools to better understand the African diaspora across time, space, and disciplines? And how can African diaspora studies inform the practices of digital humanities? These questions are at the heart of this timely collection of essays about the relationship between digital humanities and Black Atlantic studies, offering critical insights into race, migration, media, and scholarly knowledge production. The Digital Black Atlantic (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) spans the African diaspora’s range—from Africa to North America, Europe, and the Caribbean—while its essayists span academic fields—from history and literary studies to musicology, game studies, and library and information studies. This transnational and interdisciplinary breadth is complemented by essays that focus on specific sites and digital humanities projects throughout the Black Atlantic. Covering key debates, The Digital Black Atlantic asks theoretical and practical questions about the ways that researchers and

Germán Campos Muñoz, The Classics in South America: Five Case Studies (Bloomsbury, 2021) examines the long and complex history of the Greco-Roman tradition in South America, arguing that the Classics have played a crucial, though often overlooked, role in the self-definition in the New World. Chronicling and theorizing this history through a detailed analysis of five key moments, chosen from the early and late colonial period, the emancipatory era, and the 20th and 21st centuries, it also examines an eclectic selection of both literary and cinematographic works and artefacts such as maps, letters, scientific treatises, songs, monuments, political speeches, and even the drafts of proposals for curricular changes across Latin America. The heterogeneous cases analysed in this book reveal cultural anxieties that recur through different periods, fundamentally related to the 'newness' of the continent and the formation of identities imagined as both Western and non-Western – a genealogy of apprehensions that South

No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media (Vernon Press, 2020) examines the social phenomenon of construction and dissemination of colonial-like racist discourses fostered against upwardly-mobile black women through disparagement humour on social media platforms, adopting a fresh and innovative perspective. In this book, Luiz Valério P. Trindade explores the idea that disparagement humour might not be as exempt of social impact as the jokers might believe, and that, in fact, this kind of humour reveals the hidden facet of deep-seated colonial ideologies still present in Brazilian society despite being hailed as a unique model of a post-racial society. The author argues that these ideologies establish and naturalise superior social positions and symbolic privileges to whites while undermining and delegitimising black women's upward social mobility. Social media platforms enable the proponents of these beliefs not only to engage in the practice of online hate speech but also to at

In Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture (University of Alabama Press, 2020), Dr. Mariusz Kałczewiak, senior research associate and lecturer in the Eastern European studies department at the University of Potsdam, recreates a mosaic of entanglements that Jewish migration wove between Poland and Argentina. Kałczewiak sheds light on marginalised aspects of Jewish migration and enriches the dialogue between Latin American Jewish studies and Polish Jewish studies. This book is highly readable, provocative and thoughtful. Dr Max Kaiser can be reached at kaiserm@unimelb.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Contrary to claims that socialism opposed the family unit, in Laboring for the State : Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959-1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Rachel Hynson argues that the revolutionary Cuban government engaged in social engineering to redefine the nuclear family and organize citizens to serve the state.  Drawing on Cuban newspapers and periodicals, government documents and speeches, long-overlooked laws, and oral histories, Hynson reveals that by 1961, and increasingly throughout this decade, revolutionary citizenship was earned through labor. While men were to work outside the home in state-approved jobs, women found their citizenship tied to affording the state control over their reproduction and sexual labor.  Through all four campaigns examined in this book - the projects to control women's reproduction, promote marriage, end prostitution, and compel men into state-sanctioned employment - Hynson shows that the state's progression toward authoritarianism and its attend

Javier Guerrero's "Narcosubmarines: Outlaw Innovation and Maritime Interdiction in the War on Drugs" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) is about the encounters of Colombian drug smugglers and the Colombian Navy, both in the open seas and along coastlines. Guerrero specifically examines the technologies involved in the War on Drugs, such as the narcosubmarines and patrol boats, the knowledge required to transport drugs and the knowledge required to stop the illicit flows.  The author presents compelling new evidence for advancing an understanding of technological innovation in antagonist contexts, as well as the symbiotic and co-evolutionary character of the process of technological innovation in the War on Drugs. This book will appeal both to practitioners and scholars interested in the War on Drugs and the production of technologies in outlaw contexts. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him o

In Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War (Duke UP, 2021), Jennifer Ponce de León examines the roles that art can play in the collective labour of creating and defending another social reality. Focusing on artists and art collectives in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States, Ponce de León shows how experimental practices in the visual, literary, and performing arts have been influenced by and articulated with leftist movements and popular uprisings that have repudiated neoliberal capitalism and its violence. Whether enacting solidarity with Zapatista communities through an alternate reality game or using surrealist street theatre to amplify the more radical strands of Argentina's human rights movement, these artists fuse their praxis with forms of political mobilization from direct-action tactics to economic resistance. Advancing an innovative transnational and transdisciplinary framework of analysis, Ponce de León proposes a materialist understanding of art and politics

Edited by Dr. Cécile Fromont, Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition (Penn State University Press, 2019), demonstrates how, from the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, enslaved and free Africans in the Americas used Catholicism and Christian-derived celebrations as spaces for autonomous cultural expression, social organization, and political empowerment. Their appropriation of Catholic-based celebrations calls into question the long-held idea that Africans and their descendants in the diaspora either resignedly accepted Christianity or else transformed its religious rituals into syncretic objects of stealthy resistance. In cities and on plantations throughout the Americas, men and women of African birth or descent staged mock battles against heathens, elected Christian queens and kings with great pageantry, and gathered in festive rituals to express their devotion to saints. The contributors to this volume draw connections between t

Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries (Oxford University Press, 2020) takes on the circulation of Brazilian music in the Global North since the 1960s. The challenge faced by Brazilian musicians who wish to break into Anglophone markets is formidable. They must deal with the demoralizing effects of the exoticization of the music and the performers, while also struggling with networks of distribution that create fads and just as quickly drop them. K. E. Goldschmitt focuses on watershed moments of Brazil's musical breakthrough, exploring what the music may have represented in a particular historical moment alongside its deeper cultural impact.  Through a discussion of the political meaning of mass-mediated music, they argue for a shift in scholarly focus--from viewing music as simply a representation of Otherness to taking into account the broader media environment where listeners and intermediaries often have conflicting priorities. Throughout the book, Goldschmitt traces several lines

Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (Stanford University Press, 2020) is a history of migration and nation-building from the vantage point of those who lived between states. Author Devi Mays traces the histories of Ottoman Sephardi Jews who emigrated to the Americas—and especially to Mexico—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the complex relationships they maintained to legal documentation as they migrated and settled into new homes. Mays considers the shifting notions of belonging, nationality, and citizenship through the stories of individual women, men, and families who navigated these transitions in their everyday lives, as well as through the paperwork they carried. These Ottoman Sephardi migrants resisted unequivocal classification as either Ottoman expatriates or Mexicans through their links to the Sephardi diaspora in formerly Ottoman lands, France, Cuba, and the United States. By making use of commercial and familial networks, Sephardi mig

Bounded by desert and mountains, El Centro, California, is isolated and difficult to reach. However, its location close to the border between San Diego and Yuma, Arizona, has made it an important place for Mexican migrants attracted to the valley’s agricultural economy. In 1945, it also became home to the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp. The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) tells the story of how that camp evolved into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service Processing Center of the 2000s and became a national model for detaining migrants—a place where the policing of migration, the racialization of labor, and detainee resistance coalesced. Using government correspondence, photographs, oral histories, and private documents, Jessica Ordaz reveals the rise and transformation of migrant detention through this groundbreaking history of one detention camp. The story shows how the U.S. detention system was built to extract

Ethnic Mexicans living in the United States have always struggled to understand their position within the fabric of the nation-state. The groups that fall under the banner of “ethnic Mexican,” however, are complex. They include Mexican nationals fleeing war in the early 1900s, U.S.-born Mexican Americans asserting themselves as firstly American, and more radical communist and Chicanx leftists of the midcentury and postwar eras who challenged notions of belonging. While it may seem difficult to hold these histories alongside each other amidst the shifting sociopolitical landscape of the century, a recent book titled Homeland: Ethnic Mexican Belonging Since 1900 by Aaron E. Sánchez published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2021 completes this task. By recounting how different groups of ethnic Mexicans understood themselves in relation to each other, the nation, and the world, Sánchez provides readers with a strong understanding of homeland politics in the twentieth century.  “Belonging is complex,” writes Sá

Cristina Beltrán has written a thoughtful and interrogating analysis of the concept of citizenship, particularly in the United States, and how the history of the United States as a country has shaped an understanding of who gets to be “belong” as a member of this society. The book, Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy is part of the Forerunners book series published by the University of Minnesota Press—this series, as we discuss in our conversation, publishes shorter works that dig into ideas across a broad and interdisciplinary spectrum. And this is precisely what Beltrán has done in this book, in terms of engaging historiography, Cultural Studies, LatinX Studies, political theory, American Studies, and other disciplines to aid her unwrapping of our understanding of immigrants and migrants, and why there is an interest in seeing these groups as “others” and, among certain segments of the population, wanting to make sure they suffer in this exclusionary position. Beltrán take

Swashbuckling tales of valiant gauchos roaming Argentina and Uruguay were nineteenth-century Latin American best sellers. But when these stories jumped from the page to the circus stage and beyond, their cultural, economic, and political influence revolutionized popular culture and daily life. In Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay (University of New Mexico Press), William Acree guides readers through the deep history of popular entertainment before turning to circus culture and rural dramas that celebrated the countryside on stage. More than just riveting social experiences, these dramas were among the region’s most dominant attractions on the eve of the twentieth century. Staging Frontiers further explores the profound impacts this phenomenon had on the ways people interacted and on the broader culture that influenced the region. This new, modern popular culture revolved around entertainment and related products, yet it was also central to making sense of social

Um retrato original da Bahia no século XIX, num livro cheio de movimento e vozes, sobretudo da gente negra. Em Ganhadores: A Greve Negra de 1857 na Bahia (Companhia das Letras, 2019), o historiador João José Reis reconstitui a história dos negros de ganho, ou ganhadores, protagonistas de uma insólita greve que paralisou o transporte na capital baiana durante vários dias em 1857. Esses trabalhadores escravizados, libertos ou livres, todos africanos ou seus descendentes, se organizavam em grupos de trabalho e percorriam a cidade de cima a baixo fazendo todo tipo de serviço, sobretudo o carrego de pessoas e objetos ou a venda de alimentos e outras mercadorias. Em 1857, porém, a Câmara Municipal baixou uma postura impondo-lhes medidas que combinavam arrocho fiscal e controle policial. Mas os ganhadores, que já viviam dia e noite sob a vigilância e a violência de autoridades, senhores e "cidadãos de bem", não se deixariam abater. O resultado foi a primeira mobilização grevista no Brasil a paralisar todo um setor v

Eleni Kefala's book The Conquered: Byzantium and America on the Cusp of Modernity (Dumbarton Oaks, 2021) probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems composed soon after the conquest of Constantinople and Tenochtitlán. These texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic, and articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In the late nineteenth century, Spanish intellectuals and entrepreneurs became captivated with Hispanism, a movement of transatlantic rapprochement between Spain and Latin America. Not only was this movement envisioned as a form of cultural empire to symbolically compensate for Spain?s colonial decline but it was also imagined as an opportunity to materially regain the Latin American markets. Paradoxically, a central trope of Hispanist discourse was the antimaterialistic character of Hispanic culture, allegedly the legacy of the moral superiority of Spanish colonialism in comparison with the commercial drive of modern colonial projects. This study examines how Spanish authors, economists, and entrepreneurs of various ideological backgrounds strove to reconcile the construction of Hispanic cultural identity with discourses of political economy and commercial interests surrounding the movement.  Drawing from an interdisciplinary archive of literary essays, economic treatises, and political discourses, The Spiri

Evo Morales, Bolivia's first Indigenous president, won reelection three times on a leftist platform championing Indigenous rights, anti-imperialism, and Bolivian control over the country's natural gas reserves. In Bolivia in the Age of Gas (Duke UP, 2020), Bret Gustafson explores how the struggle over natural gas has reshaped Bolivia, along with the rise, and ultimate fall, of the country's first Indigenous-led government. Rethinking current events against the backdrop of a longer history of oil and gas politics and military intervention, Gustafson shows how natural gas wealth brought a measure of economic independence and redistribution, yet also reproduced political and economic relationships that contradicted popular and Indigenous aspirations for radical change. Though grounded in the unique complexities of Bolivia, the volume argues that fossil-fuel political economies worldwide are central to the reproduction of militarism and racial capitalism and suggests that progressive change demands moving beyond

In Black Market Capital Urban Politics and the Shadow Economy in Mexico City (University of California Press, 2018), Andrew Konove traces the history of illicit commerce in Mexico City from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, showing how it became central to the economic and political life of the city. The story centers on the untold history of the Baratillo, the city’s infamous thieves’ market. Originating in the colonial-era Plaza Mayor, the Baratillo moved to the neighborhood of Tepito in the early twentieth century, where it grew into one of the world’s largest emporiums for black-market goods. Konove uncovers the far-reaching ties between vendors in the Baratillo and political and mercantile elites in Mexico City, revealing the surprising clout of vendors who trafficked in the shadow economy and the diverse individuals who benefited from their trade.  Andrew Konove, he is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas, San Antonio. He is Ph.D. in History by Yale University and his resear