New Books In Latin American Studies

Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marc Edelman illuminates the transnational agrarian movements that are remaking rural society and the world's food and agriculture systems. Dr. Edelman explains how peasant movements are staking their claims from farmers' fields to massive protests around the world, shaping heated debates over peasants' rights and the very category of "peasant" within the agrarian organisations and in the United Nations. Dr. Edelman chronicles the rise of these movements, their objectives, and their alliances with environmental, human rights, women's, and food justice groups. The book scrutinises high-profile activists and the forgotten genealogies and policy implications of foundational analytical frameworks like "moral economy," and concepts, such as "food sovereignty" and "civil society." Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century charts the struggle of agrarian movements in the face of

In Only a Few Blocks to Cuba: Cold War Refugee Policy, the Cuban Diaspora, and the Transformations of Miami (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Mauricio Castro shows how the U.S. government came to view Cuban migration to Miami as a strategic asset during the Cold War, in the process investing heavily in the city's development and shaping its future as a global metropolis. When Cuban refugees fleeing Communist revolution began to arrive in Miami in 1959, the city was faced with a humanitarian crisis it was ill-equipped to handle and sought to have the federal government solve what local politicians clearly viewed as a Cold War geopolitical problem. In response, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and their successors, provided an unprecedented level of federal largesse and freedom of transit to these refugees.  The changes to the city this investment wrought were as impactful and permanent as they were unintended. What was meant to be a short-term geopolitical stratagem instead became a new reality in South

For decades now, we’ve all heard the refrain – we are in a war against obesity, with perhaps the most important battle being fought over the health of our children. What better place could there be to defeat the enemy of obesity than our schools, where children are fed and educated and educated about being fed on a daily basis? But how did we come to see health promotion in schools as the key solution to solving the problem of obesity? And is obesity really at the root of our problems to begin with?  Intertwining policy analysis and ethnography, José Tenorio’s School Food Politics in Mexico: The Corporatization of Obesity and Healthy Eating Policies (Routledge, 2023) examines how, and why now, the promotion of healthy lifestyles has been positioned as an ideal ‘solution’ to obesity and how this shapes the preparation, sale and consumption of food in schools in Mexico. This book situates obesity as a structural problem enabled by market-driven policy change, problematizing the focus on individual behavior chan

Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature (Routledge, 2023) offers unique insights into the role of the translator in today’s globalized world, exploring Latin American literature featuring translators and interpreters as protagonists in which prevailing understandings of the act of translation are challenged and upended. It looks to the fictional turn as a fruitful source of critical inquiry in translation studies, showcasing the potential for recent Latin American novels and short stories in Spanish to shed light on the complex dynamics and conditions under which translators perform their task.  Kripper unpacks how the study of these works reveals translation not as an activity with communication as its end goal but rather as a mediating and mediated process shaped by translators’ unique manipulations and motivations and the historical and cultural contexts in which they work. In exploring the fictional representations of translators, the book also outlines pedagogical

When did Christianity become cool? How did an Australian church conquer the world and expand into Brazil, a country with its own crop of powerful megachurches?  In her exciting new book, Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the Fashioning of Cosmopolitan Identities (Oxford UP, 2023), anthropologist Cristina Rocha analyses the creation of a transnational Pentecostal field between Brazil and Australia, two countries that have been peripheral in the history of Pentecostalism but which more recently have been at the forefront of new forms of global Pentecostalism. She shows how new and reconfigured forms Christianity in both the Global North and South are increasingly digitally mediated, engaged with youth and popular cultures, and involve new forms of consumption, branding and identity.  The Australian megachurch Hillsong has expanded globally through a Cool Christianity style which embraces pop music, digital media, spectacle, branding, and celebrity culture. Rocha follows young Brazilians from their budding Hillson

Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems? As Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the US as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the US

Authorities in postrevolutionary Cuba worked to establish a binary society in which citizens were either patriots or traitors. This all-or-nothing approach reflected in the familiar slogan “patria o muerte” (fatherland or death) has recently been challenged in protests that have adopted the theme song “patria y vida” (fatherland and life), a collaboration by exiles that, predictably, has been banned in Cuba itself.  In Patriots & Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) Lillian Guerra excavates the rise of a Soviet-advised Communist culture controlled by state institutions and the creation of a multidimensional system of state security whose functions embedded themselves into daily activities and individual consciousness and reinforced these binaries. But despite public performance of patriotism, the life experience of many Cubans was somewhere in between. Guerra explores these in-between spaces and looks at Cuban citizens’ complicity with authoritarianism, leaders’ exp

Paramilitaries, crime, and tens of thousands of disappeared persons—the so-called war on drugs has perpetuated violence in Latin America, at times precisely in regions of economic growth. Legal and illegal economy are difficult to distinguish. A failure of state institutions to provide security for its citizens does not sufficiently explain this. Selective Security in the War on Drugs: The Coloniality of State Power in Colombia and Mexico (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) analyzes authoritarian neoliberalism in the war on drugs in Colombia and Mexico. It interprets the “security projects” of the 2000s—when the security provided by the state became ever more selective—as embedded in processes of land appropriation, transformed property relations, and global capital accumulation. By zooming in on security practices in Colombia and Mexico in that decade and juxtaposing the two contexts, this book offers a detailed analysis of the role of the state in violence. To what extent and for whom

Hemispheric foreign policy has waxed and waned since the Mexican War, and the Cold War presented both extraordinary promises and dangerous threats to U.S.-Latin American cooperation.  In Hemispheric Alliances: Liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America (UNC Press, 2022), Andrew J. Kirkendall examines the strengths and weaknesses of new models for U.S.-Latin American relations created by liberal Democrats who came to the fore during the Kennedy Administration and retained significant influence until the Reagan era. Rather than exerting ironfisted power in Latin America, liberal Democrats urged Washington to be a moral rather than a militaristic leader in hemispheric affairs. Decolonization, President Eisenhower's missteps in Latin America, and the Cuban Revolution all played key roles in the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress, which liberal Democrats hailed as a new cornerstone for U.S.-Latin American foreign policy. During the Vietnam War era, liberal Democrats began to incorporate human rights

Memories and Representations of Terror: Working Through Genocide (Routledge, 2024) explores how memories and representations shape our understanding of historical events, particularly the ways in which societies create narratives about genocide and its aftermath, using Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976–1983) and its contested legacy as a case study. Feierstein examines how memories and representations of genocide are the terrain in which both the strategic objectives of genocide and the possibilities of challenging those objectives are contested. These memories and representations provide the foundation upon which critical judgments about the past are constructed and offer the potential for assuming responsibility and working through the consequences of genocide.  This book proposes that terror continues to hijack the actions and identities of surviving societies via a process of the construction of memories and social representations of the lived experience in a final stage of genocide Feierstein

Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield (U California Press, 2024) questions the effectiveness of market-based policies that govern forests in the interest of mitigating climate change. Yolanda Ariadne Collins interrogates the most ambitious global plan to incentivize people away from deforesting activities: the United Nations-endorsed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative. Forests of Refuge explores REDD+ in Guyana and neighboring Suriname, two highly forested countries in the Amazonian Guiana Shield with low deforestation rates. Yet REDD+ implementation there has been fraught with challenges. Adopting a multisited ethnographic approach, Forests of Refuge takes readers into the halls of policymaking, into conservation development organizations, and into forest-dependent communities most affected by environmental policies and exploitative colonial histories. This book situates these challenges in the inattentiveness of g

All over the world, people disappear from their families, communities and the state’s bureaucratic gaze, as victims of oppressive regimes or while migrating along clandestine routes. An Anthropology of Disappearance: Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing (Berghahn Books, 2023) brings together scholars who engage ethnographically with such disappearances in various cultural, social and political contexts. This volume takes an anthropological perspective on questions about human life and death, absence and presence, rituals and mourning, liminality and structures, citizenship and personhood as well as agency and power. The chapters explore the political dimension of disappearances and address methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges of researching disappearances and the disappeared. The combination of disappearance through political violence, crime, voluntary disappearance and migration makes this book a unique combination. Laura Huttunen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the T

Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons enjoyed a near-complete monopoly on transpacific trade between Spain’s Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish trading ships also facilitated the earliest migrations and displacements of Asian peoples to the Americas. Hailing from Gujarat, Nagasaki, and many places in between, both free and enslaved Asians boarded the galleons and made the treacherous transpacific journey each year. Once in Mexico, they became “chinos” within the New Spanish caste system. Dr. Diego Javier Luis chronicles this first sustained wave of Asian mobility to the early Americas. Uncovering how and why Asian peoples crossed the Pacific, he sheds new light on the daily lives of those who disembarked at Acapulco. There, the term “chino” officially racialized diverse ethnolinguistic populations into a single caste, vulnerable to New Spanish policies of colonial control. Yet Asians resisted these strictures, often by forging new connect

Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2023) tells the story of the Sandinistas' innovative diplomatic campaign, which captured the imaginations of people around the globe and transformed Nicaraguan history at the tail end of the Cold War. The Sandinistas' diplomacy went far beyond elite politics, as thousands of musicians, politicians, teachers, activists, priests, feminists, and journalists flocked to the country to experience the revolution firsthand. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, Eline van Ommen reveals the role that Western Europe played in Nicaragua's revolutionary diplomacy. Blending grassroots organizing and formal foreign policy, pragmatic guerrillas, creative diplomats, and ambitious activists from Europe and the Americas were able to create an international environment in which the Sandinista Revolution could survive despite the odds. Nicaragua Must Survive argues that this diplomacy was remarkably

In the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants and refugees sought to rebuild their lives in Chile. Despite their personal histories of marginalization in Europe, many of these people or their descendants did not take a stand against the 1973 military coup, nor the political persecution that followed. Chilean Jews' collective failure to repudiate systematic human rights violations and their tacit support for the military dictatorship reflected a complicated moral calculus that weighed expediency over ethical considerations and ignored individual acts of moral courage. Maxine Lowy draws upon hundreds of first-person testimonials and archival resources to explore Chilean Jewish identity in the wake of Pinochet's coup, exposing the complex and sometimes contradictory development of collective traumatic memory and political sensibilities in an oppressive new context. Latent Memory: Human Rights and Jewish Identity in Chile (U Wisconsin Press, 2022) points to processes of community gestures of moral

Ariel Mae Lambe’s new book No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) is a history of transnational Cuban activists who mobilized in the mid-1930s to fight fascism both in Cuba and beyond. A wide variety of civic and political groups, including Communists, anarchists, Freemasons, and Afro-Cubans, mobilized to support the Spanish Republican cause, which they connected to their efforts at home to fight persisting colonial structures and strongman politics. Lambe emphasizes the human side of antifascist activism through biographical studies of both well-known and overlooked Cuban figures. Her book shows that the 1930s, often dismissed as an apolitical period in Cuban history, were in fact characterized by vibrant efforts to raise funds, send combat troops, and provide other kinds of aid to Spanish Republicans. Lambe argues that important changes on the island in 1940 – the holding of free elections and the promulgation of a progressive consti

Informal workers make up over two billion workers or about 50 percent of the global workforce, and yet scholarly understandings of informal workers’ political and civil society participation remain limited. In Why Informal Workers Organize? Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State (Oxford University Press, 2022), Calla Hummel finds that informal workers organize in nearly every country for which data exists, but to varying degrees. Why do informal workers organize in some places more than others? Hummel finds that informal workers organize where state officials encourage them to. Grounded in robust theory that builds on and advances canon literature on collective action problems, Hummel argues that when officials intervene with incentives in the form of cash, licenses, and access to the bureaucracy, they lower the barriers that keep people from organizing on their own. Once informal workers take these incentives and start organizations, officials can bargain over regulation and enforcement with repres

Juan Perón's decade-long regime, from 1946 to 1955, is often presented as Nazi-fascist and antisemitic - claims that are strongly rooted in Argentina's collective unconscious and popular culture. Challenging this widely held view, Raanan Rein asserts that there was greater Jewish support for Perón than previously believed, and that fewer antisemitic incidents took place in Argentina during Perón's rule than during any other period in the twentieth century.  Recovering the silenced voices of Jewish Argentines who supported Peronism from the beginning, Populism and Ethnicity: Peronism and the Jews of Argentina (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020) is a historical, sociological, and political analysis that describes the many positive changes experienced by the Jewish community as a direct result of Perón's presidencies. Perón and his wife Eva gave numerous speeches denouncing antisemitism, and Perón's Argentina was the first Latin American country to open an embassy in the newly established State of Israel.  Arguing that no

Where there are dictators, there are novels about dictators. But "dictator novels" do not simply respond to the reality of dictatorship. As this genre has developed and cohered, it has acquired a self-generating force distinct from its historical referents. The dictator novel has become a space in which writers consider the difficulties of national consolidation, explore the role of external and global forces in sustaining dictatorship, and even interrogate the political functions of writing itself. Literary representations of the dictator, therefore, provide ground for a self-conscious and self-critical theorization of the relationship between writing and politics itself. Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra's book The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South (Northwestern UP, 2019) positions novels about dictators as a vital genre in the literatures of the Global South. Primarily identified with Latin America, the dictator novel also has underacknowledged importance in the postcolonial literatures of fra

Cuban Cultural Heritage: A Rebel Past for a Revolutionary Nation (UP of Florida, 2018) explores the role that cultural heritage and museums played in the construction of a national identity in postcolonial Cuba. Starting with independence from Spain in 1898 and moving through Cuban-American rapprochement in 2014, Pablo Alonso González illustrates how political and ideological shifts have influenced ideas about heritage and how, in turn, heritage has been used by different social actors to reiterate their status, spread new ideologies, and consolidate political regimes. Unveiling the connections between heritage, power, and ideology, Alonso González delves into the intricacies of Cuban history, covering key issues such as Cuba's cultural and political relationships with Spain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and so-called Third World countries; the complexities of Cuba's status as a postcolonial state; and the potential future paths of the Revolution in the years to come. This volume offers a detailed loo