New Books In Latin American Studies

Okezi Otovo’s Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945 (U Texas Press, 2016) explores the intersecting histories of race, gender, and class in modern Brazil. Between 1850 and 1945, the period covered in the book, Brazil experienced a range of profound socio-political transformations: from the end of the transatlantic slave trade (1850), to the wholesale abolition of slavery (1988), the demise of the monarchy followed by the rise of a republican system of government, and the ultimate inauguration of the Vargas dictatorship. Set in Bahia, the book considers the impact of these changes in the lives of black mothers and their children by following the rise of the maternalist movement in Brazil and its relationship to international discourses on race, public health reform, and national modernity. In addition to tracking changes to medical ideas about motherhood and children, Okezi Otovo gives agency to these black and brown mothers and considers both how they acte

Tiffany Jasmin González speaks with Dr. Gabriela González about her award-winning book, Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability and Rights (Oxford University Press, 2018) to talk about the strategies transborder activists used to redeem la raza from body politic exclusion happening in the U.S. She finds that middle-class Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans modernized la raza by encouraging Mexican-origin people to take ethnic pride and unity seriously, and to find strategies to create community during a time when Mexico and U.S. pushed for modernization. Dr. González’s rich analysis of the Idar family, the Munguía family, Leonor Villegas de Magnón and the Mexican Revolution, Emma Tenayuca, and LULAC illustrates another story of activism in the early twentieth century. Turn your volume up and tune in to this episode to learn more.Tiffany Jasmin González is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at Texas A&M University.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/ad

On January 28, 1918, just outside of town of Porvenir, Texas, US Army servicemen, Texas Rangers, and civilians murdered 15 unarmed Mexican men and boys. This massacre was not an aberration, writes Monica Muñoz Martinez, the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University and former Andrew Carnegie Fellow. In The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Harvard University Press, 2018), Martinez argues that the rampant violence inflicted by Anglos against Mexican and Latinx people in Texas in the early twentieth century left a long legacy which reverberates into the twenty first century. The Injustice Never Leaves You is a book about the long term tragedy of racialized violence, and the efforts by victims and their ancestors to seek justice and to remember, often in the face of state-sponsored historical erasure. Winner of several prizes including the Lawrence Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians, The Injustice Never Lea

In From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2019), Casey Lurtz explains how the fertile yet isolated region of the Soconusco became integrated into global markets in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. Located in what is today the state of Chiapas, the Soconusco was a lightly-populated borderlands region where sovereignty was murky, for both Mexico and Guatemala claimed the district and residents moved freely across the scarcely-delineated boundary between national territories. There were other challenges to developing an export economy: the Soconusco faced labor scarcity, lacked institutional and material infrastructure, and was regularly destabilized by political violence. Nevertheless, it became the primary coffee-producing region in Mexico in this era. To trace how this occurred, Lurtz notes the role of politicians and entrepreneurial large landowners, Mexican and foreign, in developing coffee plantations (fincas), but her cast of chara

The dawn of the new millennium bore witness to an unprecedented transformation of the population in the Southeastern United States as evidenced by Dr. Jennifer A. Jones in her new book The Browning of the New South (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Jones, an Assistant Professor of Sociology as well as Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines the evolution of race relations in the face of rapid demographic change as Mexican immigrants move into the traditionally biracial American South. Employing a community-based ethnographic approach, Jones vividly illustrates shifting Southern race relations through the case study of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Browning of the New South contributes to the scholarship on immigration and racial formation by revealing the mechanisms that spur collaboration (rather than division) between Latino immigrants and African Americans in a process that Jones calls “minority linked fate.” Counter to a generally national conception of

The secession of Texas from Mexico was a dry run for the slaveholder’s republic of the Confederate States of America, argues Andrew Torget in Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850(University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Torget, the University Distinguished Teaching Professor of history at the University of North Texas (and the Guinness World Record holder for longest history lesson), covers a pivotal swath of history in the American southwest. During the antebellum period, the Texas borderlands transitioned from Comanche, to Mexican, to Texan, to American territory. Slavery, Torget argues, was a crucial political and social institution each step of the way, and acted as a wedge which drove the United States apart and into Civil War. The region’s unique climate made plantation cotton cultivation profitable, and in turn shaped the history of an entire continent. Seeds of Empire won several awards in 2016, including the David J. Weber – Clements Center fo

Susan Ellison’s Domesticating Democracy: The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2018) explores the world of foreign-funded alternate dispute resolution (ADR) organizations working in El Alto, Bolivia. Ellison’s engaging ethnography takes readers into the streets, homes, and workplaces of Alteños who use ADR to avoid state bureaucracies and juridical procedures as well as the conflictólogos who make a living practicing ADR. Ellison captures the nuances of both groups’ relationships to ADR while still noting the disciplinary effects of programs aimed to create stable market conditions. Domesticating Democracy suggests that ADR programs foster a kind of counterinsurgent citizenship, encouraging residents of Bolivia’s most famously rebellious city to be less contentious in their dispute resolution and to resolve conflicts at an interpersonal rather than systemic level. Domesticating Democracy earned an Honorable Mention for the 2018 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing and w

In The Politics of Religion and the Rise of Social Catholicism in Peru (1884-1935): Faith, Workers, and Race Before Liberation Theology (Brill, 2018), Ricardo Cubas Ramacciotti, Associate Professor of Latin American History at the Universidad de los Andes (Chile), provides a lucid synthesis of the Catholic Church’s responses to the secularization of the State and society, whilst offering a fresh appraisal of the emergence of Social Catholicism and its contribution to social thought and development of civil society in post-independence Peru. Making use of diverse historical sources, Cubas Ramacciotti provides a comprehensive view of a reformist yet anti-revolutionary trend within the Peruvian Church that, decades before the emergence of Liberation Theology and under divergent intellectual paradigms, developed an active agenda that addressed the new social problems of the country, including those of urban workers, and of indigenous populations.Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Lo

A work of art about doing nothing; a work of art that invites people to take it apart; a work of art that consists of two people walking in a town in the Dominican Republic. These are just some examples Carlos Garrido Castellano takes up in Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere (Rutgers University Press, 2019), his provocative and complex exploration of conceptual art in the Caribbean as it has been presented over the last thirty years. He argues for a way of experiencing and writing about art that explodes all of our assumptions, and makes new spectators of us all. This book proposes that we can understand this art as creating agency in and through space. Its success is evident in the urgency it generates: we need to experience these creative interventions in order to better understand the Caribbean.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The increasing presence of interracial relationships is often read as an antidote to racism or as an indicator of the decreasing significance of race. In her book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race (NYU Press, 2019), Chinyere K. Osuji examines how interracial couples push against, navigate, and often maintain racial boundaries. In-depth interviews with black-white couples in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Los Angeles demonstrate how couples negotiate racial difference with their spouses, within their families, and during public encounters. This comparative study of interracial couples in Brazil and in the United States shows just how race can be constructed differently, while racial hierarchies persist. This book would be of interest to those in fields such as racial and ethnic studies, family and kinship studies, gender studies, and Latin American studies.Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her researc

Lina del Castillo’s book explores scientific, geographic, and historiographic inventions in nineteenth-century Colombia. In this fascinating book, well-known figures of Colombia’s history (such as Francisco José de Caldas, and José María Samper) are cast under new light, while unexplored institutions such as the Instituto Caldas and the Colegio Militar are analyzed in-depth and with striking clarity.  By bring such wide array of historical actors and institutions, del Castillo provides a nuanced historical narrative were liberal and conservative elites are not portrayed as ideological rivals, but as allies in the collective enterprise of republicanism, a project unrivaled at the time. But Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia (University of Nebraska, 2018) is more timely and original is in its analysis of colonial legacies. How, and to what purposes, were colonial legacies invented in Colombia during the nineteenth century? For del Castillo,

Yuko Miki’s book, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil(Cambridge University Press, 2018), was the recent recipient of LASA’s 19th-century section Honorable Mention for Best Book. Frontiers of Citizenship is a beautifully written book that integrates quite seamlessly the history black and indigenous peoples in 19th century Brazil. The book explores the intersections of race and ethnicity, borderlands studies, as well as the intersecting histories of citizenship, popular politics, national identity, emancipation, and labor. In the book, Dr. Miki explores the quandaries of citizenship in a multiracial society and challenges the idea that citizenship is an equally important and equally valued goal for everyone. The book not only demonstrates otherwise, but really helps the reader challenge these widely held assumptions in a compelling and grounded manner.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Anna Rose Alexander’s City on Fire: Technology, Social Change, and the Hazards of Progress in Mexico City, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks at fire as an active agent of change in the urban environment (a catalyst for change). She examines the approaches to dealing with the ever-present threat of fire in Mexico City in an era in which technology and modernity were transforming the city in fundamental ways. Using a methodology borrowed from “hazard studies,” Alexander looks not at the major disasters as agents of fundamental change, but the everyday conflagrations as creating a kind of “culture of disaster” in the porfirian city. Alexander highlights the efforts of fire inspectors and other officials in the realm of public safety to approach fire risk reduction from a perspective that ensured all capitalinos access to fire safety, as a matter of public safety.Julian Dodson is a Post-doctoral Teaching Fellow at Washington State University. His research interests include nineteenth and

In Charros: How Mexican Cowboys Are Remapping Race and American Identity (University of California Press, 2019), Dr. Laura R. Barraclough tells a surprising story about the urban American West. Barraclough, the Sarai Ribicoff Associate Professor in American Studies at Yale University, writes the history of elite Mexican and Mexican-American cowboys – charros – and how charro culture served as a site of contested national identity in the mid twentieth century United States. In Western cities such as Los Angeles, Denver, and San Antonio, Chicano men and women used charro organizations and events as places where one could assert both Mexican and American, as well as middle- and upper-class, identities. Rather than the archetypical image of a white, dusty, cowboy riding alone across a desolate mesa, Charros portrays a Western ranching culture that is more urban, more flamboyant, more crowded, and less white than many Americans may assume.Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting I

Almost 30 years ago, following the lead of scholars and thinkers of color and from the global South, anthropologist Faye Harrison and some of her colleagues published Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology of Liberation. Harrison asked her readers: "How can anthropological knowledge advance the interests of the world’s majority during this period of ongoing crisis and uncertainty?" The lives of many have become even more precarious in the ensuing decades, among them people who have emigrated to the United States in search of greater economic stability.Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (Duke University Press, 2019) responds directly to Harrison's call. The book explores ways in which ethnography, as practiced by people who have historically been objects of ethnographic study, can yield transformative and liberatory results. During former President Obama's second term, immigrant activists Lucía López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos Gar

Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico(University of Texas Press, 2017) examines the long history of how Spanish imperial rule depended upon spatial concentration – the gathering of people and things into centralized spaces – to control populations and consolidate power. Through four case studies spanning nearly 300 years of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico, Nemser illustrates how different modes of concentration -- centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections – reflected the prerogatives and imperatives of domination and expropriation. Compellingly, Infrastructures of Race argues that these spatial infrastructures and strategies were central and instrumental in the creation of racial identities and their inscription upon colonial subjects. Through designed and engineered spaces, racial identities were lived, sensed, and experienced, and as the built environment faded into barely noticeable infrastructure, rac

In Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957 (NYU Press, 2017), Nancy Mirabal details New York Cuban diasporic history between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with keen attention to how political debates about the potential future, visibility, and belonging in Cuba played out along issues of race and gender. By shifting moments of importance in Cuban and U.S. history, it becomes clear exactly how contentious the differing opinions on how to move the island away from Spanish colonial rule and the role it would come to play – if any – on the political, racial, and economic landscape of the United States. Mirabal utilizes vast archival material spanning club records, literary texts, newspapers, photographs, and oral histories to tell how exiled Cuban migrants formed, maintained, and disagreed within social clubs in New York. Her inclusion of labor history, intellectual history, political history, social history, and immigration history makes for an incredibly det

What happens when scholars approach the category of “indigenous” without presupposing its otherness? Edited by Paula López Caballero and Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo, Beyond Alterity: Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2018) is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that take such an approach to studying indigenous communities and the concept of indigeneity. As the editors explain in the podcast, the indigenous subject has been often assumed to be defined by difference, so scholars tend to overlook the existence of practices, ideas, and politics that do not align with preconceived, essentialized ideas about indigenous alterity. This book examines, on the one hand, the range of lived experiences within indigenous communities, and on the other, the ongoing construction of the category of “indigenous.” Its first section uncovers ways in which indigenous communities’ practices and politics were more similar to than distinct from those of their nonindigenous counterparts. In t

Brenda Elsey and Joshua Nadel’s new book, Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2019), uncovers the hidden history of the arrival of physical education for girls in the late-nineteenth century, it’s expansion beyond schools, and the subterranean struggles of girls and women to play and expand access and support for sports across Latin America. While sports has often been sidelined in histories of gender, class, nationalism, and the so-called Social Question in the region, Elsey and Nadel show how women’s involvement in sports animated eugenic debates over healthy citizens, nationalism, and proper motherhood in government, the Church, and the press. Beginning with women’s sports clubs in schools and moving to charity events, informal play, and regional leagues, women began to take up previously denied national and international pastimes much earlier than previously acknowledged. With women’s sports facing opposition, underfunding, neglect, silence, and outright o

Paul Ramírez’s first book explores how laypeople impacted the new medical techniques and technologies implemented by the imperial state in the final decades of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico.  More than a scholarly intervention, Ramírez seeks to answer a very pragmatic and timely question: how and why do successful public health measures succeed?  Through his surprising, nuanced, and complicated answer, Ramírez broadens our understanding of who counts as a vital actor in public health programs.  Whereas historians have long thought of enlightened reform in the terms of absolutist monarchical power, Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason (Stanford University Press, 2018)cracks the nut to find within a effervescent world of competitive and cooperative medical cultures. Through careful analyses of the Royal Vaccination Campaign of the early 19th century as well as prior public methods of responding to epidemic disease, Ramírez demonstrates a consis