New Books In Latin American Studies

Working-through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial, Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) formulates a theory of collective trauma, drawing on the work of Sándor Ferenczi. Dr. Soreanu takes Ferenczi into the public square to answer a series of questions. What does it mean to understand the operation of the confusions of tongues at the social level? What are the consequences of imagining the social as an encounter between different registers? And how did we come to postulate the importance, among all social registers, of the tension between the register of recognition and the register of redistribution? Applying Ferenczian theory to these “interrogations” Soreanu utilizes psychosocial vignettes to make a series of arguments. “Akin to clinical vignettes, their aim is to capture a movement of the libido, or the expression of a symptom, or the resolution of a symptom, or a particular kind of regression, or a kind of dreaming-up that puts some symbols in relation to others.” In addition t

In Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), Luz María Hernández Sáenz follows the trajectory of physicians in their quest for the professionalization of medicine in Mexico. In the nineteenth century, medical practitioners sought to earn scientific and professional recognition both at home an internationally, and in doing so, they created institutions that shaped their profession, and sought to establish a monopoly in the realm of public health. Hernández Sáenz places this story in an international context and demonstrates the importance of the French model in the establishment of a modern medical profession in Mexico. Significantly, we see how medical institutions changed as Mexico transitioned from a colonial society to a liberal, independent republic. As we hear by the end of the interview, Mexican medical practitioners were eventually successful in earning professional status, and in monopolizing medical knowledge, however, they did not oust their

By the time Bolivian President Evo Morales was deposed in December 2019, it had become increasingly clear that Latin America’s Pink Tide – the wave of left-leaning, anti-poverty governments which took hold of the region in the mid-2000s – was fast receding. Many have attempted to explain the rise and fall of that extraordinary historical movement, but few have done it with the historical depth, ethnographic subtlety, and theoretical capaciousness of Concordia University-based anthropologist Kregg Hetherington, whose new book, The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops (Duke University Press, 2020) dives not only into the fate of Paraguay’s Pink Tide regime but also the global soy industry, agricultural politics, economic inequality, expert knowledge, and the impossibility of regulatory paths out of economic and ecological crises. Written in clear, engaging prose, this book weaves fresh insights on bureaucracy and biopolitics into stories about how soy governs and is governed in rural Par

In Food In Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal (Stanford University Press, 2020), Hanna Garth examines the processes of acquiring food and preparing meals in the midst of food shortages. Garth draws our attention to the social, cultural, and historical factors Cuban’s draw upon to define an appropriate or decent meal and the struggle they undergo to produce a decent meal. Often, studies of food security overlook the process of acquiring food, which Garth demonstrates as a critical locus for understanding food access. Garth focuses on a variety of households, families, and individuals in Santiago, Cuba at different class levels and household compositions in order to show the gendered, racial, economic, social, and moral dimensions of how Cubans navigate their food landscapes and attempt to create culturally appropriate meals.  In so doing, she argues for the centrality of how local people determine their food system to be adequate. The book would be of interest to the areas of anthropology, particularly medical

Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic language for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution. Plácido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. In Cuban Literature in the Age of Black Insurrection: Manzano, Plácido, and Afro-Latino Religion (University Press of Mississippi) Matthew J. Pettway examines how the portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwise conventional texts recur throughout early Cuban literature and became the basis for Manzano and Plácido’s antislavery philosophy. The portrayal of African-Atlantic religious ideas spurned the

Historians of Latin America have long appreciated the central role of mining and metallurgy in the region. The Spanish Empire in particular was created for and founded upon the mining and coining of silver ore from its colonies. Our knowledge about this vital industry, however, remains invariably tethered to the elite sources and perspectives that were preserved in the written record. In Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (UNC Press 2020), Allison Bigelow provides an important historiographical contribution by demonstrating how we can revisit these sources to trace the transmission of metallurgical knowledge from the colonized indigenous laborers who worked the ore to the metropolitan authors who codified practices and knowledge. Rather than European science diffusing to colonial outposts, Bigelow’s studies of gold, silver, copper, and iron illustrate that the technologies that sustained Iberian imperialism were amalgamations like

Claudia Rueda’s book Students of Revolution: Youth, Protest, and Coalition-Building in Somoza-Era Nicaragua (University of Texas Press, 2019) is a history of student organizing against dictatorship in twentieth-century Nicaragua. By mobilizing in support of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional and other anti-Somoza forces, students helped to build what Rueda calls “a culture of insurrection” that made armed revolutionary struggle seem imaginable and needed to Nicaraguans from many backgrounds. What made students such an effective political force in Nicaragua was that as valuable future professionals and idealized youth, students enjoyed great latitude to express dissent and counted upon widespread public sympathy when they faced state repression. Drawing from oral histories and rich archives of student movements, Rueda documents how student activism against authoritarianism developed from the 1930s to 1979 as university enrollment grew and diversified. Student tactics and ideological commitments shift

Mexico of five centuries ago was witness to one of the most momentous encounters between human societies, when a group of Spaniards led by Hernando Cortés joined forces with tens of thousands of Mesoamerican allies to topple the mighty Aztec Empire. It served as a template for the forging of much of Latin America and initiated the globalized world we inhabit today. The violent clash that culminated in the Aztec-Spanish war of 1519-21 and the new colonial order it created were millennia in the making, entwining the previously independent cultural developments of both sides of the Atlantic. Collision of Worlds: A Deep History of the Fall of Aztec Mexico and the Forging of New Spain (Oxford University Press, 2020) provides a deep history of this encounter, one that considers temporal depth in the richly layered cultures of Mexico and Spain, from their prehistories to the urban and imperial societies they built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Leading Mesoamerican archaeologist David M. Carballo offers

The Caribbean has figuratively and literally been entangled in processes of global integration earlier than other parts of the Americas. In Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC Press, 2016), Alejandra Bronfman offers a refreshing perspective to this well-trodden story. In this book, she traces the emergence and growth of telecommunications technologies in Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century. Bronfman examines the ways these new communication technologies often undermined rather than served as tools of domination for imperial forces—American or British. Most importantly, this book has us reconsider the role of sound and, specifically, radio broadcasting as central to political mobilization in ridding the region from empire. Alejandra Bronfman is Chair and Associate Professor, Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies, University of Albany. Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.  Learn more about your ad ch

Natalie Kimball is the author of An Open Secret: The History of Unwanted Pregnancy and Abortion in Modern Bolivia, out this year from Rutgers University Press. An Open Secret argues that, despite stigma and continued legal prohibitions, practices and attitudes surrounding abortion have changed in urban Bolivia since the 1950s. Kimball shows how women have pushed for and enacted changes in policy and services relating to unwanted pregnancy and abortion in Bolivia. In particular, they argue that since the 1980s, women have opened space for themselves to be able to terminate pregnancies with more options and more safety, even as abortion remains illegal. In order to tell this story, Kimball conducted over 100 interviews with women and maternal health practitioners in both La Paz and El Alto, and their stories offer a history not only of policy change, but of transformations in official and unofficial attitudes. An Open Secret tells these stories while remaining attuned to the specific contexts of urban Bolivia,

Analyzing a wide variety of late-nineteenth-century sources, Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910) (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020) argues that Argentine scientific projects of the era were not just racial encounters, but were also conditioned by sexual relationships in all their messy, physical reality. The writers studied here (an eclectic group of scientists, anthropologists, and novelists, including Estanislao Zeballos, Lucio and Eduarda Mansilla, Ramón Lista, and Florence Dixie reflect on Indigenous sexual practices, analyze the advisability and effects of interracial sex, and use the language of desire to narrate encounters with Indigenous peoples as they try to scientifically pinpoint Argentina's racial identity and future potential. Kerr's reach extends into history of science, literary studies, and history of anthropology, illuminating a scholarly time and place in which the lines betwixt were much blurrier, if they existed at all. Ashley Kerr is Assistant P

Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, has been ranked as one of the most violent cities in the world. In Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Robert Samet undertakes ethnography with crime journalists on their reporting practices to offer a compelling argument about the relationship between populist politics and the news. Samet participates with and observes a group of crime reporters as they traverse the city, investigating crimes, recording interviews with victims, and writing up their stories. Reporters commonly collected and publicized denuncias, victims’ accusations or denouncements of wrongdoing that can also include calls for justice. Samet details the substance and variation of such denuncias to demonstrate how the ubiquity and prevalence of these pronouncements articulate a popular will. This book contributes to studies of media and journalism, Latin American politics and society, and political anthropology in order to expand our understanding of the role of

Marriage after Migration: An Ethnography of Money, Romance, and Gender in Globalizing Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2019) tells the stories of five women in rural Mexico, each navigating the tricky terrain that is men’s international migration. With their husbands and sons working in the United States, will the women hold their families together? In the book, Nora Haenn draws on twenty-five years of experience in Calakmul, on Mexico’s southern border, to relate the pleasures and dangers driving labor migration. With their men abroad, women find new romance, unimagined wealth, and, for some, relief from constraining gender roles. But for these women migration’s dangers are just as real: a return to poverty, pressure to live up to impossible standards, emotional betrayal, divorce. When men return home with a drinking problem, wives can face life-threatening domestic violence. Marriage after Migration shows how globalization changes people but also how marginalized people, including indigenous people, drive g

Latin America and the Global Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) analyzes more than a dozen of Latin America’s forgotten encounters with Africa, Asia, and the Communist world, and by placing the region in meaningful dialogue with the wider Global South, this volume produces the first truly global history of contemporary Latin America. It uncovers a multitude of overlapping and sometimes conflicting iterations of Third Worldist movements in Latin America, and offers insights for better understanding the region’s past, as well as its possible futures, challenging us to consider how the Global Cold War continues to inform Latin America’s ongoing political struggles. Thomas C. Field Jr. is associate professor of global security and intelligence studies at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Stella Krepp is assistant professor of Iberian and Latin American history at Bern University. Vanni Pettinà is associate professor of Latin American international history at El Colegiode México. Ethan Besser

Alberto Harambour's new book Soberanías Fronterizas. Estados y capital en la colonización de Patagonia (Argentina y Chile, 1840s-1920s) (Universidad Austral de Chile, 2019) examines the explosion of foreign-owned sheep farming, the fitful expansion of Argentine and Chilean sovereignty, and the violence of primitive accumulation and genocide in southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Soberanías Fronterizas wrestles with the multiple and competing sovereignties articulated during the Age of Empire, Latin America’s export boom, and the dispossession of autonomous indigenous peoples through settler colonialism. It asks how, over the course of less than a century, this vast territory described by Europeans and outsiders as inhospitable, unknowable, and uninhabited, came to be a wildly profitable export enclave. Harambous uncovers how foreign (predominantly British) capital came into possession of millions of hectares of land for sheep raising, effectively establishing sovereign control at the expense of the indig

In his sixth thesis on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin wrote, “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.” Edgar Garcia is one such historian…and if you’re not yet convinced of Benjamin’s dictum, you should listen to this interview. In Signs of the America: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2019) Garcia sets sparks flying by inviting us to explore the literature and theory created by 20th and 21st century writers who deploy sign systems that, according to the creation myth of European hegemony, alphabetized thought supposedly superseded and destroyed. Akin to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic in ambition and originality, Signs of the Americas not only pries open a fascinating archive but also forces us to question the organizational principles that govern intellectual history and cultural criticism in

Romeo Guzman's and his colleague's East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte (Rutgers University Press, 2020) is an edited collection of thirty-one essays that trace the experience of a California community over three centuries, from eighteenth-century Spanish colonization to twenty-first century globalization. Employing traditional historical scholarship, oral history, creative nonfiction and original art, the book provides a radical new history of El Monte and South El Monte, showing how interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship can break new ground in public history. East of East tells stories that have been excluded from dominant historical narratives-stories that long survived only in the popular memory of residents, as well as narratives that have been almost completely buried and all but forgotten. Its cast of characters includes white vigilantes, Mexican anarchists, Japanese farmers, labour organizers, civil rights pioneers, and punk rockers, as well as the ordinary and unnamed youth who

In Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm (Rutgers University Press, 2019), Alison D. Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes draw on eight years of feminist participatory action research conducted with fifty-four Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Chuj, and Mam women to explore Mayan women’s agency in their search for truth, justice, and reparation for harm suffered during the genocidal violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan state at the height of the thirty-six-year armed conflict. The book discusses the complexities of navigating, negotiating, and interpreting informal and formal justice processes, as participated in and experienced by protagonists, women’s rights activists, lawyers, psychologists, Mayan rights activists, and researchers who have accompanied them as intermediaries. Jeff Bachman is a senior lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He is the author of the United States and Genocide: (Re)Defining the relationship and edito

In Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (University of New Mexico Press, 2018), Cristina Soriano examines the links between the spread of radical ideas, literacy, and the circulation of information in a society without a printing press. In doing so, Soriano shows the ways Caribbean revolutionary ideas flowed into the ports and coastal communities across colonial Venezuela. The Haitian Revolution was front and centre of these revolutionary ideas, which inspired many and terrified others. Through these information networks, creole, pardo, and even enslaved people engaged in ideas about republicanism, abolitionism, and racial egalitarianism. This book offers insight into the later chaotic and multidirectional process of the anti-colonial movement in early nineteenth-century Venezuela. Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2019), Ana María Reyes examines the ways Colombian artist Beatriz González and Argentine-born art critic Marta Traba railed against international forms of modernism and promoted low brow or even provincial forms of art in the period of the Colombian National Front’s coalition government (1958-1974). In doing so, Reyes situates art in a pivotal moment in Colombian history where efforts to end political violence through compromise and power-sharing also led to the ushering of modernizing projects promoted initially under President Alberto Lleras Camargo. Reyes shows that art became under the purview of elites seeking to project Colombia as a modern, internationalist nation. González, on the other hand, increasingly questioned and challenged elite efforts to present modernism as the epitome of high art and culture in Colombia. In doing so, Reyes wholeheartedly adopted her role as a provocateur as a way to resist U.S. cultu