New Books in Latin American Studies

Daniel A. Rodriguez's history of a newly independent Cuba shaking off the U.S. occupation, The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), focuses on the intersection of public health and politics in Havana. While medical policies were often used to further American colonial power, in Cuba, Rodriguez argues, they evolved into important expressions of anticolonial nationalism as Cuba struggled to establish itself as a modern state. A younger generation of Cuban medical reformers, including physicians, patients, and officials, imagined disease as a kind of remnant of colonial rule. These new medical nationalists, as Rodriguez calls them, looked to medical science to guide Cuba toward what they envisioned as a healthy and independent future. Rodriguez describes how medicine and new public health projects infused republican Cuba's statecraft, powerfully shaping the lives of Havana's residents. He underscores how various stakeholders, including women and people of color, demanded robust government investment in quality medical care for all Cubans, a central national value that continues today. On a broader level, Rodriguez proposes that Latin America, at least as much as the United States and Europe, was an engine for the articulation of citizens' rights, including the right to health care, in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

As the birthplace of maize and a celebrated culinary destination, Mexico stands at the crossroads of gastronomic richness and stark social disparities. In México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality (University of Arizona Press, 2025), Dr. Enrique C. Ochoa unveils the historical and contemporary forces behind Mexico’s polarized food systems.México Between Feast and Famine provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico’s food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Dr. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico’s mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of food production but also interrogates the social and cultural impacts.As debates around food sovereignty, globalization, and sustainable development intensify globally, México Between Feast and Famine provides a timely analysis that counters conventional narratives about Mexican cuisine. Even as it looks back, this work looks to the future, where more equitable and sustainable food systems prioritize social justice and community well-being.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In late nineteenth-century Latin America, governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and protect borders but also to define the physical contours of their respective nations. Chilean and Argentine authorities in particular attempted to transform northern Patagonia, a space they perceived as "desert," through a myriad of nationalizing policies, from military campaigns to hotels. But beyond the urban governing halls of Chile and Argentina, explorers, migrants, local authorities, bandits, and visitors also made sense of the nation by inhabiting the physical space of the northern Patagonian Andes. They surveyed passes, opened roads, claimed land titles or leases, traveled miles to the nearest police station, rode miles on horseback to escape the police, and hiked the landscape.In Landscaping Patagonia: Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) Dr. María de los Ángeles Picone tells the story of how people living, governing, and traveling through northern Patagonia sought to construct versions of Chile and Argentina based on their ideas about and experiences in geographical space in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By repositioning the analytical focus from Santiago and Buenos Aires to northern Patagonia, Picone reveals how a wide array of actors, with varying degrees of political, economic, and social power, assigned distinctive—and sometimes conflicting—meanings to space and national identity.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Today I’m speaking with Asad L. Asad, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton UP, 2023). A highly relevant book, Engage and Evade documents the interactions between undocumented people and the agents and institutions of government. One might expect undocumented people to avoid the IRS, but as Asad demonstrates, many engage with government institutions in the hopes that positive interactions and compliance might help their immigration cases down the road. Published in 2023, immigration policy and treatment of undocumented people by the government has shifted dramatically in a short time. I’m grateful today to be able to speak with Asad about this thoughtful book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

John and Elizabeth had the chance to talk with Ieva Jusionyte, anthropologist, journalist, emergency medical technician. Her award-winning books include Exit Wounds, which uses anthropological and journalistic methods to follow guns purchased in the United States through organized crime scenes in Mexico, and their legal, social and personal repercussions.Ieva described researching the topic, balancing structural understandings of how guns become entangled with people on both sides of the border with an emphasis on individual stories. The three also talked about how language captures and fails to capture violence, the ways violence and the fear of violence organize space, and the importance of a humble, responsive, and empathetic approach to speaking with people touched by gun violence.Mentioned in this episode: Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985) Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence (1991) Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (2004) Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009) tr. by Lisa Dillman, see RTB episode 48 "Transform, not Transfer: Lisa Dillman on Translation Deborah Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, 2019 Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985) Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (1998) and the "state of exception" Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and the "zone" Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (2023) Recallable Books/FilmsIeva suggested E.P Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act (1975) for its thoughtful framing of state violence and its incredible detail, and also Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (2000), for the ways in which the book's structure enacts its argument.Elizabeth went with the documentary by Raul Paz Pastrana, Border South (2019), which also weaves together the stories of those affected, including the anthropologist Jason De León, in ways that account for the multidimensionality of human experience.John prasied the contested Northern Irish spaces of Anna Burns' novel Milkman (2018)Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Welcome to the Global Media & Communication podcast series, a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.Today, our host Juan Llamas-Rodriguez interviews Martín Echeverría about his book Political Entertainment in a Post Authoritarian Democracy: Humor in the Mexican Media (Routledge, 2024), co-written with Frida Rodelo.In this episode you will hear about: The affordances and limitations of YouTube for the political media ecosystem The role of memes in generating political interest among politically disinterested groups How people’s distrust of news organizations impact the communication environment for political news How restrictions on political speech have shifted in Mexico in the last few decades Guest Biography:Martín Echeverría is the Head of the Center for Studies in Political Communication at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico. He holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from the University of Seville, Spain, and serves as Co-Chair of the Political Communication Section of the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). His research, which focuses on the mediatization of politics, media systems, and the reception and political effects of media, has been published in leading journals such as The International Journal of Press/Politics, International Journal of Communication, Journalism Studies, and top Latin American outlets. He is the author and editor of several books, including Media and Politics in Post-Authoritarian Mexico: The Continuing Struggle for Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and Political Entertainment in a Post-Authoritarian Democracy (Routledge, 2023), the latter receiving the AEJMC 2024 Knudson Award for the best book on Latin American media in the United States.Host Biography:Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is a researcher and educator interested in how media theories allow us to critically analyze social phenomena on a global scale. He works as assistant professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and associate director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the US-Mexico Underground (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and Y Tu Mamá También: A Queer Film Classic (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025), and editor of Media Travels: Toward an Atlas of Global Media (Amherst College Press, 2025).Credits Interview by: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez Produced by: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez  Edited by: Anna Gamarnik Keywords: authoritarianism, memes, Mexico, political communication, political satire, YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico (Duke UP, 2020), Vanessa Freije explores the causes and consequences of political scandals in Mexico from the 1960s through the 1980s. Tracing the process by which Mexico City reporters denounced official wrongdoing, she shows that by the 1980s political scandals were a common feature of the national media diet. News stories of state embezzlement, torture, police violence, and electoral fraud provided collective opportunities to voice dissent and offered an important, though unpredictable and inequitable, mechanism for political representation. The publicity of wrongdoing also disrupted top-down attempts by the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional to manage public discourse, exposing divisions within the party and forcing government officials to grapple with popular discontent. While critical reporters denounced corruption, they also withheld many secrets from public discussion, sometimes out of concern for their safety. Freije highlights the tensions-between free speech and censorship, representation and exclusion, and transparency and secrecy-that defined the Mexican public sphere in the late twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

From the late 1940s to the mid 1960s, Peru’s rapid industrialization and anti-communist authoritarianism coincided with the rise of mass-produced cookbooks, the first televised cooking shows, glossy lifestyle magazines, and imported domestic appliances and foodstuffs. Amy Cox Hall’s The Taste of Nostalgia (U Texas Press, 2025) uses taste as a thematic and analytic thread to examine the ways that women, race, and the kitchen were foundational to Peruvian longings for modernity, both during the Cold War and today.Drawing on interviews, personal stories, media images, and archival and ethnographic research, Cox Hall considers how elite, European-descended women and the urban home were central to Peru’s modernizing project and finds that all women who labored within the deeply racialized and gendered world of food helped set the stage for a Peruvian food nationalism that is now global in the twenty-first century. Cox Hall skillfully connects how the sometimes-unsavory tastes of the past are served again in today’s profitable and pervasive gastronostalgia that helps sell Peru and its cuisine both at home and abroad.Dr. Amy Cox Hall is Associate Dean of the Bard Prison Initiative at Bard College, and a writer and cultural anthropologist who specializes in Peru and the U.S. with research focused on science, race, photography, national heritage, and most recently, food. She is the author of Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography and the Making of Machu Picchu (published by University of Texas Press in 2017),editor of The Camera as Actor: Photography and the Embodiment of Technology (published by Routledge in 2020), and A Taste of Nostalgia: Women, Race, and Culinary Longing in Peru (published by UT Press in 2024).Dr. Scott Catey is CEO of The Catey Group, LLC. and Executive Publisher of Rising Justice Publishing, a full-service multimedia publishing enterprise. Visit https://scottcatey.com/ for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

A panoramic new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand.The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality.In The Age of Revolutions (Basic Books, 2024), historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown-from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun-he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story. The first revolutionary generation, fired by radical ideas, struggled to slip the hierarchical bonds of the old order. Their failures moulded a second generation, more adept at mass organizing but with an illiberal tint. The sweeping political transformations they accomplished after 1800 engrained forms of inequality and racial hierarchy in modern politics that remain with us today.A breath taking history spanning three continents, The Age of Revolutions uncovers how the period's grand political transformations emerged across oceans and, slowly and unevenly, over generations.Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a professor of history at the University of Southern California. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Nation, and the Los Angeles Times.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

As Brazil moves toward trying former president Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a coup against democracy, the United States grapples with constitutional challenges from the new administration as well. Are these two cases of democratic backsliding comparable? In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey speaks with José Maurício Domingues, Professor of Social and Political Science at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, about the resilience of democratic institutions, the role of the judiciary, and the evolving strategies of authoritarian leaders. Domingues unpacks the historical and institutional factors that shaped Bolsonaro’s failed power grab and contrasts them with Trump’s approach to executive power. What can these cases tell us about the future of democracy in both countries? Tune in for a deep dive into the politics of resistance, accountability, and the shifting nature of authoritarianism in the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies