New Books In Latin American Studies

Tanya Harmer’s new biography, Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), explores how a young Chilean woman pursued her political commitments and navigated patriarchal strictures as a militant leftist. The daughter of Salvador Allende, Beatriz Allende was born in 1942 and came of age in a tumultuous period of Chilean history. As a young woman, she participated in youth and party politics in Chile but was also deeply connected to continental revolutionary struggles, particularly in Cuba. Though her politics diverged from her father’s, she was also a key adviser for Allende. After going into exile following the 1973 coup that brought down Allende’s government, Beatriz Allende built solidarity networks from Cuba, where she also was raising two children. Beatriz Allende took her own life in 1977. Harmer’s book traces how Beatriz’s political consciousness changed over time, paying particular attention to the ways in which gendered expectations of her

Donald F. Stevens offers us a portrait of early republican life in his new book, Mexico in the Time of Cholera, published in 2019 by the University of New Mexico Press. Although Stevens uses the 1833 Cholera epidemic that devastated independent Mexico as his his point of departure, this is not primarily a medical history. Beginning with the suggestion of a contemporary observer that the epidemic put Mexicans on their best, or at least most religiously fervent behavior, Stevens asks how we might be able to measure everyday piety during a time of transition and crisis. His answer comes from following archival trails within parish records, novels, and memoirs and offers readers a glimpse of intimate urban life. In so doing, his book brings to life the day to day practices of Mexicans from birth and naming practices to death and burial norms and shows a country coming to terms with its independence. Students and scholars alike will enjoy following vibrant historical figures like fifteen-year-old Concha, navigatin

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanati

Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia (University of Chicago Press, 2019) investigates the Colombian government’s campaign to turn Marxist guerrilla fighters in the FARC into consumer citizens. In this ethnography, Alexander L. Fattal explores the ways marketing became a tactic of counterinsurgency as a means of a humanitarian intervention, which has proven stunning and illusory. The work draws on archival research and extensive fieldwork with Colombian Ministry of Defense, former rebels, political exiles, and peace negotiators in Colombia, Sweden, and Cuba. Alex. Fattal is assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of California at San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present (UNC Press, 2020), traces the entwined histories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan migrants to Amazonian Bolivia during the twentieth century, exploring how each of these communities forged and contested the landscape of agrarian citizenship in the country. The lowlands around Santa Cruz became a focal point for high modernist development projects in Bolivia, and as Ben Nobbs-Thiessen argues, such a vision of development was appealing to a broad range of actors: both the left(ish) Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, in power from 1952-1964, as well as the (often) right wing military governments that succeeded it, were deeply concerned with developing Bolivia through colonization of of the lowlands. Starting in the 1970s, however, as the state started to pull back from the day to day operations of such projects, it opened up space for NGOs and what Nobbs-Thiessen calls, "faith-based development practi

In his book, Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba (UNC Press, 2019), Louis A. Pérez, Jr. explores how Cuba’s dependency on the sugar economy also made the island’s population dependent on food imports like rice. Despite efforts to diversify agricultural production and produce rice domestically, U.S. rice producers consistently resisted Cuban efforts to rid them of a primary market for American rice throughout the twentieth century. Struggles over rice production and consumption, Pérez argues, were a previously ignored but important factor in explaining Batista’s inability to rule in the 1950s. The Cuban revolutionaries also promoted self-sufficiency but were unable to produce a critical food staple like rice. To this day, Cuba continues to import rice, but mostly from Asia, because of the U.S. embargo. Yet Pérez notes, however, that U.S. rice interests still stake out Cuba and wait to pour their products into the Cuban market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/ad

In Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence and the Making of Contemporary Colombia (University of California Press 2017), Robert Karl explores how Colombians grappled with violence and peace during and after the period known as “La Violencia”—a period that many historians situate between 1946 and the mid 1960s. Questioning narratives that have portrayed Colombia as an inherently and permanently violent country, Karl shows the making of creole peace—an attempt at peace building that took place between 1958-1960, and followed no script or model. Though ultimately unsuccessful and forgotten by scholars and lay Colombians, this attempt of peace-building in the context of the Frente Nacional (National Front) is still worthy of remembrance. But Forgotten Peace goes beyond this, and historicizes how the temporal concept of “La Violencia,” as a way of delimiting a particular time period of Colombia’s history, came into being in the 1960s, and was the result of alienation from this nearly decade-long experiment with democra

In his book Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic (Stanford University Press 2016), Victor Uribe-Urán compares the cases of Spain, and the late-colonial societies of Mexico and Colombia, in a historical moment characterized by corporate patriarchy and enlightened punishment. Focusing on crimes of spousal murders, Uribe-Urán asks intriguing questions: who were the men and women that committed these crimes, and what were their reasons for doing so? How did the law, both royal and ecclesiastical, responded to such murders? In which instances did the monarch decide to forgive or show leniency, and when did justice opt for harsher punishment? In answering these questions, Uribe-Urán challenges some traditional notions of how honor is supposed to work in Iberian societies. Also, he contributes to a growing scholarship that demonstrates that far from being secluded in their homes, women in colonial Spanish America had active public lives. This book is a fascinating re

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as P

Margaret Randall’s new memoir, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary was published by Duke University Press in March 2020. Randall, born in New York City in 1936, lived in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua as an adult, where she was involved in both creative movements and political activism. Known as a writer and oral historian, Randall focuses in this memoir on recreating the communities and historical moments in which she lived. Randall especially emphasizes how her encounter with feminist thinking reshaped how she understood not only her own life, but also the Latin American revolutions she saw up from up close. In the interview, she speaks about her work founding and editing the bilingual literary journal El Corno Emplumado in 1960s Mexico, her experiences connecting with artists and revolutionaries in 1970s Cuba, and her perspective on the 1979 Sandinista revolution from her years living in Nicaragua. Randall talks about the nature of memory and shares some details of her everyday life in extraordin

Emerging out of a 2016 conference, Andra Chastain and Timothy Lorek have brought together Environmental History, Latin American Studies, and Science and Technology Studies in a single volume that reshapes scholarly understandings of Latin America’s Long Cold War. Rather than emphasize diplomatic, social or cultural histories of conflict, this volume emphasizes the roles of “experts” who cast themselves as apolitical technocrats just working on the ground. Chastain and Lorek’s book argues that experts and the networks in which they traveled significantly shaped geopolitical agendas, local cultures, and were in fact central to the history of the Cold War. The essays in Itineraries of Expertise: Science, Technology, and the Environment in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) focus on Chile, Mexico, Cuba, and Peru, in order to explore how knowledge circulated regionally as well as locally and globally. Essay topics vary from the space race to the Green Revolution, and from the Santiago Metro to Ub

Jacob Blanc’s Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil (Duke University Press, 2019) tells the story of the the Itaipu dam, a massive hydroelectric complex built on the Brazil-Paraguay border in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is structurally and conceptually ambitious, but so readable that it will fit well in both graduate and advanced undergraduate classrooms. Blanc uses this story of a single megaproject to open up new questions about dictatorship, democracy, and the environment in Brazil through the analytic of rural visibility. Since Itaipu was the largest dam in the world and a physical embodiment of the military’s geopolitical ambitions, rural protests against the dam became a referendum on a dictatorship itself in ways that made rural Brazilians important political actors. But, as Blanc argues, the dam project not only displaced forty thousand rural inhabitants, it made those inhabitants invisible as members of the national community. Blanc follows the stories of those displac

In her recently published book Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise (University of California Press 2020), Lina Britto tells the forgotten story of the first boom in illicit drugs in the Greater Magdalena region of Colombia. This unknown history, that started in the late 1960s though its origins can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century, is the bridge that explains a dramatic turning point in Colombian history: a moment where the country went from being a coffee republic to becoming a narcotics nation. Arguing against traditional explanations that have attributed the rise of illicit economies to either the absence of the state or the moral degeneration of US consumers and smugglers, Britto sees the bonanza marimbera as part of a history of nation-state formation, agrarian modernization, and interstate relations in the Americas. A history that weaves in oral history, political economy, cultural history, and diplomatic history is a must-read for those interested

Cassia Roth's new book A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil (Stanford University Press, 2020) examines women's reproductive health in relation to legal and medical policy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the onset of republicanism in 1889, women's reproductive capabilities―their ability to conceive and raise future citizens and laborers―became critical to the expansion of the new Brazilian state. Analyzing court cases, law, medical writings, and health data, Cassia Roth argues that the state's approach to women's health in the early twentieth century focused on criminalizing fertility control without improving services or outcomes for women. Ultimately, the increasingly interventionist state fostered a culture of condemnation around poor women's reproduction that extended beyond elite discourses into the popular imagination. By tracing how legal thought and medical knowledge became cemented into law and clinical

Reporters and scholars often focus on violence and victimization: “if it bleeds, it leads.” But unarmed civilians around the world often protect themselves against armed combatants using social processes to reduce the violence perpetrated against them. Oliver Kaplan’s case studies of Columbia – with extensions to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and the Philippines – demonstrates how, why, and when civilians effectively resist the influence of armed actors and limit violence. In our conversation about his new book Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Kaplan describes his interdisciplinary methodology that creatively combines fieldwork, statistics, and scholarship from sociology, psychology, history, and political science. Kaplan insists that civilians are not helpless victims but deployers of covert and overt nonviolence strategies that preserve and cultivate autonomy. He explains how local social organization and cohesion allows civilians to create strategies tha

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its diffe

Has can theatre confront racial inequality? In Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Performing Arts Workforce (Routledge, 2020), Tobie S. Stein, Professor Emerita in the Department of Theater, Brooklyn College, CUNY, analyses the longstanding failure of America’s theatre industry to address issues of diversity. Drawing on interviews with 70 practitioners, as well as a rich and detailed engagement with the structures of the theatre industry and cultural policy, the book makes clear the unequal opportunities and career paths that result from racial inequality. The book also draws on co-authors to reflect historical, institutional, and international perspectives, adding depth and breadth to an already excellently extensive account. It is an essential read across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in arts and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Chorographic Commission of Colombia, an ambitious geographical expedition, set out to define and map a nascent and still unstable republic. The commission’s purpose was to survey the land, its resources and people, and portray Colombia as a nation prone to the “wonders” of modernization. In Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Nancy P. Appelbaum reconstructs how elites, through visual and textual methodologies, envisioned the nation and its component parts. In particular, the books focuses on a dilemma that has characterized modern nation formation in Latin America and the world: how is it possible to build and represent a unified nation while simultaneously showcasing regional diversity and particularity? In the case of Colombia, how did Commissioners solved the tension between aspirational homogeneity and the regional heterogeneity found on the ground? As this fascinating inte

There is far more to a map than meets the eye. Such is the case in historian Alex Hidalgo’s Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2019), which focuses on the complex lives of dozens of Oaxacan maps created by Indigenous mapmakers. Tracing the legal, social, cultural, and political history of these maps, Hidalgo sheds new light on the purpose, production, and preservation of maps as well as the lives of Indigenous peoples and Spaniards alike involved in their production. The result is a vivid re-orientation of Oaxacan history that speaks to the historical power of collaboration, adaptation, and cartography. Trail of Footprints provides a deep dive into the production and use of maps, focusing specifically on the roles of patrons, painters, and notaries as well as the complex material dimension of mapmaking. Hidalgo lends equal attention to both the broader historical context of mapmaking and the smallest details of each cartographic creation, emphas

In Phenomenal Justice: Violence and Morality in Argentina (Rutgers University Press, 2020), Eva van Roekel grounds her research in phenomenological anthropology and the anthropology of emotion to offer readers a novel and compelling perspective on justice proceedings in the aftermath of historical crimes against humanity. Van Roekel approaches the question: how do survivors, victims, and perpetrators of political violence experience justice on their own terms? Focusing on the reopened trials in Argentina for crimes against humanity committed by the military junta that ruled from 1976 to 1983, Phenomenal Justice is a powerful ethnography that establishes a new theoretical basis that remains faithful to the uncertainties of justice and truth in the aftermath of human rights violations. Phenomenal Justice, thus, makes significant contributions to understanding justice beyond what is commonly referred to as transitional justice, and to better understanding of the military dictatorship in Argentina and its afterma