New Books In Latin American Studies

Richard Candida Smith’s new book Improvised Continent: Pan-American and Cultural Exchange (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), offers a richly detailed cultural history of pan-Americanism and how it was propagated among elites and popular audiences. Elihu Root, a major architect of U.S. international power, and a vision of liberal global governance were the initial drivers for pan-Americanism. Carrying the vision were civic leaders, philanthropists, artists, writers and publishers acting as cultural ambassadors with different political, cultural, and personal agendas often at odds with official policy. In fostering a utopian vision of hemispheric solidarity, both U.S. and Latin American cultural leaders were faced with overcoming preconceived ideas and misconceptions of the other, but World War II and the Cold War increasingly turned a project of mutual cultural exchange into an accelerated U.S. propaganda campaign that resulted in political intervention in Latin America. U.S. domestic policies cam

In Mexico’s Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women (SUNY Press, 2017), Christine Arce rightfully stresses that these two figures have greatly influenced Mexico’s national identity, arts, and popular culture. However, their personal names and presences have remained hardly recognized by the state and in the historical narratives. Through a skillful and deep archival research, Arce brings to the readers attention not only the legacy of these women, the spaces they inhabited, and their impact during different moments in history the colonial era, the Mexican revolution, the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1930s-1950s but also the complex relations they had with the government. The critical narrative of Arce challenges the nobodiness, [el ninguneo] that these women had underwent for a very long time. Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University, NYC campus.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.f

What role has the World Bank played in influencing health sector reform in Latin America? In her new book, Banking on Health: The World Bank and Health Sector Reform in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Shiri Noy explores this question and more using mixed methods, including interviews, quantitative analysis, and review of policy documents and archives. The book starts off by providing readers a history of the World Bank and its role in health reform. Even though it may seem as if the World Bank would have a similar solution across countries, Noy finds that involvement and plans are more variable due to the systems already in place within these countries. Noy then moves on to an analysis of health expenditures, finding surprising results that further drove her research project and curiosity. The book then explores three countries in turn: Argentina, Peru, and Costa Rica. This book provides rich analysis of a complex social issue and set of systems, sending the reader away with both empirical and theor

In Freedom From Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2017), Daniel Fridman explores what it means to be an economic subject in what different people call the new economy, the post-industrial economy, or neoliberal capitalism. Fridman begins his investigation by looking into a best-selling book in what he calls financial self-help, an ascendant genre of self-help that tries to teach its readers how they should think about the economy today and what their goals and ethics ought to be as actors in that new economy. Using ethnographic and interview methods, Fridman gets to know the people who practice the advice of these books, participating in their various seminars and fascinating financially-focused board-game meet-ups. Fridman unpacks the core ideas that animate this world and shows that, far from being an isolated ideology, the worldview posited by financial self-help can teach us a lot about how people are remaking themselves as economic actors

Paraguay’s intervention in a crisis between Uruguay and Brazil in November 1864 began the bloodiest and most destructive conflict in South American history. Thomas Whigham begins his book The Road to Armageddon: Paraguay versus the Triple Alliance, 1866-1870 (University of Calgary Press, 2017), the second volume of his epic two-volume history of the war, with the allied powers of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay having driven Paraguayan forces out of Argentina and preparing their invasion of Paraguay. While heavily outnumbered by their enemies, Whigham credits the Paraguayan population with a cohesion and endurance that defied Brazilian, Argentinian, and Uruguayan expectations of a swift victory. Despite the formidable defenses constructed by his men, however, the Paraguayan leader, Francisco Solano Lopez, repeatedly ordered attacks in the Alliance forces that debilitated the Paraguayan ranks. By 1868 the Alliance captured the Paraguayan capital Asuncion, yet the conflict dragged on for another year and a

In Keywords for Latina/o Studies (NYU Press, 2017) editors Deborah Vargas, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes engage many of the fields top scholars in a critical and generative dialogue surrounding the primary concepts and themes that shape the dynamic and interdisciplinary field of Latina/o Studies. Through sixty-three short but informative essays, Keywords for Latina/o Studies provides a common vocabulary for a field that has been in a constant state of evolution since its establishment half a century ago. Being careful not to overly circumscribe the field’s boundaries, the essays within this anthology exemplify the breadth and liveliness of the ideas, debates, and questions that drive the production of transnational, comparative, and intersectional scholarship surrounding the peoples and communities commonly referred to as Latina/o. Accessible and engaging, this collection is an essential primer and reference for anyone interested in the field of Latina/o studies. David-James Go

In her recent book Death in the City: Suicide and the Social Imaginary in Modern Mexico (University of California Press, 2017), Kathryn A. Sloan explores ideas and discourses surrounding the suicide of men and women in Mexico City. Against the backdrop of modernity and transnational intellectual exchanges at the turn of the twentieth century, Sloan situates a vast array of Mexican social actors as world citizens who approached death with the same complexity as people in other parts of the world. Throughout a variety of fascinating sources and cases, Sloan explores a myriad of cultural understandings of people who took their own lives, and portrays the meticulous care taken by those who planned suicide over their bodies, as well as the cold forensic rooms and their detailed reports. She writes of how ideas about death, moral panic, and science intertwined in different written and visual arenas. The press, official statistics, and medical reports explored suicide as a social illness that was undermining one of

In The National Body in Mexican Literature: Collective Challenges to Biopolitical Control (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), Rebecca Janzen explores the complex interaction between the national body created by the rhetoric of the 1910 Mexican revolution and those bodies that did not find a space in the new national project. Through the literary fictional work of Jose Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos, and Vicente Lenero, the book explores the contradictions of the state through the literary representations of people that lived at the margins of its ideology. Drawing on feminist and disability studies, Janzen explores unusual bodies—peasants, prostitutes, indigenous people, and garbage sorters, among others—and their intense relationship of control, resistance, and power with the government and its bureaucracy. In these literary works, illness, body fluids, or bodies reduced to their basic functions demonstrate the inconsistencies of a national project that failed to fulfill promises such as agra

In his new book, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880-1940 (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Jason Oliver Chang (University of Connecticut) traces the evolution of the Chinese in Mexico from “disposable laborers” (motores de sangre, or “engines of blood”) to “killable subjects” to “pernicious defilers.” Applying an Asian Americanist critique to the political and intellectual history of modern Mexico, Chang revises conventional explanations of the relationship between mestizo national identity and anti-Chinese racism by showing that the former did not lead to the latter. Rather, antichinismo shaped the development of that identity through its emphases on gender and sexuality, eugenics, public health, and other modes of social control in pursuit of “self-colonization.” Throughout the book, Chang remains attentive to regional and class differences in the penetration of this ideology, and also shows how Chinese migrants organized among themsel

When the nations of Latin America fought for their independence in the early 19th century, they commissioned privateers stationed in the United States to attack Spanish skipping. In Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early Republic (University of Georgia Press, 2015), David Head examines the activities of these privateers within the context of the contemporary Atlantic world. As Head explains, these privateers, most of whom were American citizens, existed in a complex environment of international politics, diplomacy, and economic activity. Operating in violation of U.S. law, they evaded the authorities in a variety of ways, from clandestine operations in the Louisiana bayous to deceptive claims to port authorities in Baltimore. While U.S. officials were often frustrated in their efforts to enforce the law, Head finds that civil claims were often pursued by the attacked merchants with greater success. It was only with the end of the wars, though, that the ac

Monica Ricketts’ new book Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) presents readers with the connected histories of military cadres and intellectuals in Peru and Spain c. 1770-1830. The book advances the argument that a Crown-sponsored change in the idea of “merit” in the Spanish Empire made possible the rise to power of new military cadres and the renewal of the Hispanic republic of letters. Ricketts argues that these changes had important consequences as these two cohorts of individuals battled over who had the merits to rule the Empire during the captivity of Spanish king Ferdinand VII under Napoleon, and after independence in Peru. Such shift in the conception of merit accounted for the rise of men like Agustin Gamarra and Andres de Santa Cruz, two of the most prominent leaders of independent Peru, to high military rank in the Spanish imperial armies first, and in the revolutionary ones later. The quest for

Jeffrey H. Cohen, a professor at The Ohio State University, has managed a rare feat: placing anthropology classics like Argonauts of the Western Pacific in the context of eating grasshoppers. His impressively readable Eating Soup without a Spoon: Anthropological Theory and Method in the Real World (University of Texas Press, 2015) is a retrospective on his first foray into the field, but it does a fair bit more than that. While recounting his own experiences in Oaxaca, Mexico, Cohen provides insight into how theory can be applied to the real world. The book transitions between high-level analysis of social relations in his adopted community and the harsh truths of working with human beings in less-than-comfortable settings. The result is a fun and interesting read, well-suited to undergraduate courses on introductory anthropology and field methods. Jared Miracle is an anthropologist and folklorist whose research areas include violence, education, and digital culture. He is the author of Now with Kung Fu Grip

Ricardo D. Salvatore‘s new book, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900-1945 (Duke University Press, 2016) offers an alternative narrative on the origins of Latin American Studies in the United States. Salvatore claims that during the first half of the twentieth century scholars defined the contours of Latin American studies. Scholars did so both in the context of the ‘dollar diplomacy’ and the ‘good neighbor’ policy towards the region. Salvatore argues that, in contrast to the military interventions in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, the approach toward South America was defined by scholarly “disciplinary interventions.” Salvatore follows the life and work of five field-defining scholars who approached the South-American “terra incognita” from the vantage point of the hegemonic hemispheric power. An archaeologist (Hiram Bingham), a historian (Clarence Haring), a political scientist (Leo S. Rowe), a sociologist (Edward A. R

Tore C. Olsson‘s Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton University Press, 2017) tells a remarkable and under-appreciated story. It’s about how, in the 1930s and 40s, a group of reformers in the US and in Mexico undertook projects to transform the rural worlds of their respective countries in the name of social justice and agrarian productivity. Olsson demonstrates how closely the histories of Mexico and the American South in particular paralleled one another, and how parallel histories yielded parallel problems, including mass rural poverty, landlessness, and economic deprivation. Whether in Mississippi or Michoacan, Tennessee or Tabasco, the rural masses saw few tangible benefits in the economic miracle heralded by boosters in Atlanta and Mexico City, Professor Olsson writes. And so in that decade historians sometimes like to call the long 1930s, Mexican and US reformers crossed the border again and again, to share models and ideas, and to unde

In Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith (Indiana University Press, 2016), Ronnie Perelis, Chief Rabbi Dr. Isaac Abraham and Jelena (Rachel) Alcalay Chair and Associate Professor of Sephardic Studies at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies of Yeshiva University, looks at three autobiographical texts by New World crypto-Jews. Perelis presents the fascinating stories of three men who were caught within the matrix of inquisitorial persecution, expanding global trade, and the network of crypto-Jewish activity. There is no other book quite like this sensitive, fascinating and penetrating look at identity, family and community. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.auLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age dominated by humanity. This ethnography is the first to directly engage the Anthropocene, tackling its problems and paradoxes from the vantage point of the world’s largest tropical rainforest. Drawing from extensive ethnographic research, Nicholas C. Kawa‘s Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, Forests (University of Texas Press, 2016) examines how pre-Columbian Amerindians and contemporary rural Amazonians have shaped their environment, describing in vivid detail their use and management of the region’s soils, plants, and forests. At the same time, Kawa highlights the ways in which the Amazonian environment resists human manipulation and control–a vital reminder in this time of perceived human dominance. Written in engaging, accessible prose, Amazonia in the Anthropocene offers an innovative contribution to debates about

In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere – the Argentinean statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave, abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick Douglass – both published their first works. Each would become the most famous and enduring texts in what were both prolific careers, and they ensured Sarmiento and Douglass’ position as leading figures in the canon of Latin American and U.S. African-American political thought, respectively. But despite the fact that both deal directly with key political and philosophical questions in the Americas, Douglass and Sarmiento, like African-American and Latin American thought more generally, are never read alongside each other. Still, as Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford University Press, 2017) contends, looking at the two together allows one to chart a hemispheric intellectual geography of race that challenges political theory’s preoccupation

Jocelyn Olcott is an associate professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her book International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-raising Event in History (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines the genesis of the UN’s 1975 International Women’s Year (IWY) and the two-week conference of NGOs and government officials held in Mexico City. From the planning to the gathering itself there were conflicts regarding what were the significant women’s issues among the worlds geopolitical divides. Cold War competition colored how delegates, often from the same nation, differed in their expectations. Women from third-world nations expressing concern with the status of subsistence labor, gender violence and racism clashed with women from first-world nation’s concern with marketplace and sexual rights. Conservative, liberal, and radical groups competed for attention and the opportunity to influence the official World Plan of Action. In identif

Where is the Caribbean? In An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Duke University Press, 2017) Ernesto Bassi makes the case for a transimperial space shaped by ships’ journeys and sailors’ imaginings. Defiance of exclusive trading restrictions and aspirations to create revolutionary alliances were instrumental, as were pragmatic commercial decisions and naming practices of emerging nations. 18th and 19th century actors produced a Caribbean space in this context, and then, in some places, engaged in deliberate forgetting. This book combines meticulous research with an innovative conceptual framework and wonderfully detailed glimpses into this period.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Harvard University Press 2013) Dr. Raul Coronado provides an intellectual history of the Spanish America’s decentered from the dominant narrative of Enlightenment, revolution, and independence stemming from Protestant Europe and British America. Examining pamphlets, broadsheets, manuscripts, and newspapers, Coronado situates the emergence of Spanish American revolutionary thought at the moment of rupture, when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain and deposed King Fernando VII in 1808. It was at this moment, Coronado argues, when subjects of the Spanish Crown were thrust into the modern era with the task of envisioning and producing an alternative to the ancien regime. With an engaging and sweeping narrative that transports readers across time and space, Coronado explores the central actors and ideas that intersected in and developed out of the Spanish American borderlands to lead independence movements throughout Latin America during the