New Books In Latin American Studies

Impure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina (Rutgers UP, 2019) investigates the period from the 1890s until the 1930s, when prostitution was a legal institution in Argentina and the international community knew its capital city Buenos Aires as the center of the sex industry. At the same time, pogroms and anti-Semitic discrimination left thousands of Eastern European Jews displaced, without the resources required to immigrate. For many Jewish women, participation in prostitution was one of very few ways they could escape the limited options in their home countries, and Jewish men facilitated their transit and the organization of their work and social lives. Instead of marginalizing this story or reading it as a degrading chapter in Latin American Jewish history, Impure Migration interrogates a complicated social landscape to reveal that sex work is in fact a critical part of the histories of migration, labor, race, and sexuality. Mir Yarfitz has lived in each of the four corners of the country

Uber's April 2016 launch in Buenos Aires plunged the Argentine capital into a frenzied hysteria that engulfed courts of law, taxi drivers, bureaucrats, the press, the general public, and Argentina's president himself. Economist and anthropologist Juan M. del Nido, who had arrived in the city six months earlier to research the taxi industry, suddenly found himself documenting the unprecedented upheaval in real time. Taxis Vs. Uber: Courts, Markets and Technology in Buenos Aires (Stanford UP, 2021) examines the ensuing conflict from the perspective of the city's globalist, culturally liberal middle class, showing how notions like monopoly, efficiency, innovation, competition, and freedom fueled claims that were often exaggerated, inconsistent, unverifiable, or plainly false, but that shaped the experience of the conflict such that taxi drivers' stakes in it were no longer merely disputed but progressively written off, pathologized, and explained away. This first book-length study of the lead-up to and immediate

In PUNK! Las Americas Editions (Intellect Books, 2021), editors Olga Rodrguez-Ulloa, Rodrigo Quijano, and Shane Greene have compiled a collection of academic essays and punk paraphernalia (including interviews, zines, poetry, and visual segments) exploring punk life. Part of the Global Punk Series, the volume is a collective challenge to the global hegemonic vision of punk. The book interrogates the dominant vision of punk--particularly its white masculine protagonists and deep Anglocentrism--by analyzing punk as a critical lens into the disputed territories of "America," a term that hides the heterogeneous struggles, global histories, hopes, and despairs of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century experience. The book explores punk life through its multiple registers: vivid musical dialogues, excessive visual displays, and underground literary expression. Check out the Book Trailer on YouTube or Instagram.  Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Weste

My conversation with Laurie Lambert, author of Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2020). This book asks us to rethink the Grenadan Revolution through the literature of authors including Merle Collins, Dionne Brand, Derek Walcott and others. Lambert's attention to gender offers new narratives through which to consider the relationships between violence, memory, trauma, and colonialism. We talk about her writing process and methods, and about the broader implications of her book to Caribbean historiography.  Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany. 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

Stephanie M. Pridgeon's book Revolutionary Visions: Jewish Life and Politics in Latin American Film (U Toronto Press, 2020) examines recent cinematic depictions of Jewish involvement in 1960s and 1970s revolutionary movements in Latin America. In order to explore the topic, the book bridges critical theory on religion, politics, and hegemony from regional Latin American, national, and global perspectives. Placing these theories in dialogue with recent films, the author asks the following questions: How did revolutionary commitment change Jewish community and families in twentieth-century Latin America? How did Jews contribute to revolutionary causes, and what is the place of Jews in the legacies of revolutionary movements? How is film used to project self-representations of Jewish communities in the national project for a mainstream audience? Jewish involvement in revolutionary movements is rife with contradictions. On the one hand, it was a natural progression of patterns of political participation, based on

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), the editors and contributors cement the issue that state-sanctioned violence affected the Mexican community in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. The volume brings together eminent researchers of Mexican American and borderlands studies to showcase the varying ways the Tejana/o community navigated and challenged state-encouraged violence in the early twentieth century. The book consists of fourteen essays to illustrate the formation of the Refusing to Forget collective, the influence that the Texas Rangers held in Texas, lynching and extralegal violence in Mexico and the United States, educational justice, the Idar fami

Mabel Moraña's book Philosophy and Criticism in Latin America: From Mariátegui to Sloterdijk (Cambria Press, 2020) explores the complex relationships between the fields of philosophy and criticism, focusing on methodological, ideological and cultural aspects in which European canonical reflection connects, in many cases conflictively, with Latin American thought. Philosophy and criticism analyzes aspects of the work of influential modern thinkers (Benjamin, Foucault, Bourdieu, Sloterdijk) vis a vis the proposals of representative authors of Latin American philosophy (Mariátegui, Dussel, Bartra, Echeverría), trying to discover convergences and challenges between both slopes. Likewise, this volume focuses on crucial issues of our time: the crisis of humanism, the strategies of biopolitics, the problems of scarcity, violence, the critique of modernity, the world of affections, and the challenges of globalization. The marked profile of Latin American thought is thus imprinting its brand in current debates, reveal

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 recently Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, The Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature (Northwestern UP, 2018). Strategic Occidentalism examines the transformation, in both aesthetics and infrastructure, of Mexican fiction since the late 1970s. During this time a framework has emerged characterized by the corporatization of publishing, a frictional relationship between Mexican literature and global book markets, and the desire of Mexican writers to break from dominant models of national culture. In the course of this analysis, engages with theories of world literature, proposing that “world

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) how Poniatowska’s personal and political trajectory intertwined with Mexico’s growing critical public after 1968. The earthquake of 1985, the Chiapas uprising and Subcomandante Marcos as well as the recent occupation of the Zócalo in Mexico City are in Stephen’s words “historical moments when the status quo is cracked open, when people take to the streets and demand change, when another future seems possible”. These are the moments when gifted writers and artists step up and document movements and create new historical actors. We might have read Elena Poniatowska but we didn't know her. Lynn Stephen has reflected o

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 thirteen languages.  His most recent work, World Literature Decentered: Beyond the West through Turkey, Mexico and Bengal, was published in 2021 by Routledge. World Literature Decentered offers a unique departure from world literature as it has been understood, theorized, and anthologized. It asks: what would world literature look like if we stopped referring to the “West”? Starting with the provocative premise that the “‘West’ is ten percent of the planet,” World Literature Decentered is the first book to decenter Eurocentric discourses of global literature and global history – not just by deconstructing or historicizi

This new history of the Christian right does not stop at national or religious boundaries. In Moral Majorities Across the Americas, Brazil, the United States, and the Creation of the Religious Right (UNC Press, 2021), Benjamin A. Cowan chronicles the advent of a hemispheric religious movement whose current power and influence make headlines and generate no small amount of shock in Brazil and the United States. These two countries, Cowan argues, played host to the principal activists and institutions who collaboratively fashioned the ascendant religious conservatism of the late twentieth century. Cowan not only unearths the deep historical connections between Brazilian and U.S. religious conservatives but also proves just how essential Brazilian thinkers, activists, and institutions were to engendering right-wing political power in the Americas. Cowan shows that both Protestant and Catholic religious warriors began to commune in the 1930s around a passionate aversion to mainstream ecumenicalism and moderate po

In this episode of the New Books in Latin America Podcast, Kenneth Sánchez spoke with Dr Anna Cant about her very interesting book Land without Masters: Agrarian Reform and Political Change under Peru’s Military Government published in 2021 by the University of Texas Press.   The book is a fresh perspective on the way the Peruvian government's major 1969 agrarian reform transformed the social, cultural, and political landscape of the country. Dr Anna Cant is a Latin American historian with expertise in twentieth-century politics, cultural history and rural development. She gained her PhD in History at the University of Cambridge (2015) with a thesis on land reform in Peru. Dr Cant has taught in the UK and Colombia and received scholarships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust. She is currently an assistant professor of Latin American history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Kenneth Sanchez is a Peruvian journalist that works as a freelance journalist a

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a revered classic today fifty five years after it was first published in 1967. Today I talked to Alvaro Santana Acuña a sociologist and historian who describes the ingredients that went into manufacturing the success of this book. In Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic (Columbia UP, 2020), Alvaro Santana-Acuña first deconstructs the “fake news” surrounding García Márquez and then describes the cultural brokers, the literary cognoscenti of the Boom, the gatekeepers, the Spanish publishing industry and the Casa de las Americas who made the One Hundred Years of Solitude a bestseller across generations. The multitudinous references in this book are part of the archives that Alvaro Santana-Acuña has curated for an exhibition “Gabriel Garcia Márquez – The Making of a Global Writer” by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin which will run till January 2022. Minni Sawhney is a professor of Hispanic Studies at t

ND stages a trialogue this week with MacArthur "Genius" Cristina Rivera Garza and Notre Dame critics Kate Marshall and Dominique Vargas. Professor Rivera Garza recalls roadtripping through Mexico in a bochito (a Volkswagen). For her, such drives became the mother of literary invention: there was no car radio and when family conversations died down, the window (and not an iPhone) became the screen that occupied her. In a more serious vein, CRG, Kate, and Dominique also discuss the role of linguistic mobility and translation in bringing Rivera Garza’s novels and essays to English-speaking audiences. CRG reflects on how books change when they cross languages and reminds us that the United States is the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. This episode productively estranges us from a number of received narratives about national monolingualism and experimental writing. Professor Rivera Garza rejects the notion of aesthetic individualism and the idealized image of the solitary writer. She declares

Known around the world simply as Lula, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva was born in 1945 to illiterate parents who migrated to industrializing São Paulo. He learned to read at ten years of age, left school at fourteen, became a skilled metalworker, rose to union leadership, helped end a military dictatorship--and in 2003 became the thirty-fifth president of Brazil. During his administration, Lula led his country through reforms that lifted tens of millions out of poverty. In Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), John D. French, one of the foremost historians of Brazil, provides the first critical biography of the leader whom even his political opponents see as strikingly charismatic, humorous, and endearing. Interweaving an intimate and colorful story of Lula's life--his love for home, soccer, factory floor, and union hall--with an analysis of large-scale forces, French argues that Lula was uniquely equipped to influence the authoritaria

I sat down with award winning author Tessa Bridal to talk about her latest book, The Dark Side of Memory: Uruguay's Disappeared Children and the Families Who Never Stopped Searching, published by Invisible Ink (October 2021). The Dark Side of Memory examines the largely unknown history of the state sponsored kidnapping of children in Uruguay and Argentina during the Cold War. For this book, Bridal interviewed parents, family members, and the children (now adults) for first person accounts detailing the circumstances of the kidnappings and the illegal adoption of newborns from the torture centers where they were born. Mothers and grandmothers, often involved in decades-long searches for their missing children and grandchildren, shared their determined and courageous confrontations with the kidnappers and with the governments and military forces that protected them. Rozzmery Palenzuela Vicente is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Florida International University. Her dissertation examines the cult

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 trade in stolen Texas livestock. In 1862, the Confederates abandoned New Mexico Territory and Texas west of the Pecos River, fully expecting to return someday. Meanwhile, administered by Union troops under martial law, the region became a hotbed of Rebel exiles and spies, who gathered intelligence, disrupted federal supply lines, and plotted to retake the Southwest. Using a treasure trove of previously unexplored documents, authors James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely trace the complicated network of relationships that drew both Texas cattlemen and Comancheros into these borderlands, revealing the urban elite

Brazil markets itself as a racially mixed utopia. The United States prefers the term melting pot. Both nations have long used the image of the mulatta to push skewed cultural narratives. Highlighting the prevalence of mixed race women of African and European descent, the two countries claim to have perfected racial representation-all the while ignoring the racialization, hypersexualization, and white supremacy that the mulatta narrative creates. In Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U. S. and Brazilian Media (U Illinois Press, 2020), Jasmine Mitchell investigates the development and exploitation of the mulatta figure in Brazilian and U.S. popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, she analyzes policy debates and reveals the use of mixed-Black female celebrities as subjects of racial and gendered discussions. Mitchell also unveils the ways the media moralizes about the mulatta figure and uses her as an example of an "acceptable" version of blackness that at once dreams of erasing undesirable bl

Over the course of the twentieth century, campaigns to increase access to modern birth control methods spread across the globe and fundamentally altered the way people thought about and mobilized around reproduction. This book explores how a variety of actors translated this movement into practice on four islands (Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and Bermuda) from the 1930s-70s. The process of decolonization during this period led to heightened clashes over imperial and national policy and brought local class, race, and gender tensions to the surface, making debates over reproductive practices particularly evocative and illustrative of broader debates in the history of decolonization and international family planning. Nicole C. Bourbonnais' book Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930–1970 (Cambridge UP, 2016) is at once a political history, a history of activism, and a social history, exploring the challenges faced by working class women as they tried

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 fatty and energy-dense gives it unicorn status among modern eaters, especially millennials. Through lively anecdotes, colourful pictures and delicious recipes, Jeff Miller's book Avocado: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2020) explores the meteoric rise of the avocado, from its co-evolution with the megaherbivores of the Pleistocene to its acceptance by the Spanish conquistadores in Mexico and its current dominance of food consumers’ imagination. Jeff Miller is an Associate Professor of Hospitality Management at Colorado State University. He is the co-author of Food Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods (2009)