New Books in Latin American Studies

In Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Techno-Borderlands (Princeton UP, 2023), Héctor Beltrán examines Mexican and Latinx coders’ personal strategies of self-making as they navigate a transnational economy of tech work. Beltrán shows how these hackers apply concepts from the code worlds to their lived experiences, deploying batches, loose coupling, iterative processing (looping), hacking, prototyping, and full-stack development in their daily social interactions—at home, in the workplace, on the dating scene, and in their understanding of the economy, culture, and geopolitics. Merging ethnographic analysis with systems thinking, he draws on his eight years of research in México and the United States—during which he participated in and observed hackathons, hacker schools, and tech entrepreneurship conferences—to unpack the conundrums faced by workers in a tech economy that stretches from villages in rural México to Silicon Valley.Beltrán chronicles the tension between the transformative promise of hacking—the idea that coding will reconfigure the boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, and gender—and the reality of a neoliberal capitalist economy divided and structured by the US/México border. Young hackers, many of whom approach coding in a spirit of playfulness and exploration, are encouraged to appropriate the discourses of flexibility and self-management even as they remain outside formal employment. Beltrán explores the ways that “innovative culture” is seen as central in curing México’s social ills, showing that when innovation is linked to technological development, other kinds of development are neglected. Beltrán’s highly original, wide-ranging analysis uniquely connects technology studies, the anthropology of capitalism, and Latinx and Latin American studies.Mentioned in this episode, among others: Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books. Hong, G. K., & Ferguson, R. A. (Eds.). (2011). Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Duke University Press. Coleman, E. G. (2012). Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton University Press. Héctor Beltrán is Class of 1957 Career Development Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MIT, where he teaches “Cultures of Computing,” “Hacking from the South,” and “Latin American Migrations.”Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at the Ohio State University. 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 the summer of 2016, Disney introduced its first Latina princess, Elena of Avalor. Elena, Princess of the Periphery: Disney’s Flexible Latina Girl (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Diana Leon-Boys explores this Disney property using multiple case studies to understand its approach to girlhood and Latinidad. Following the circuit of culture model, Dr. Leon-Boys teases out moments of complex negotiations by Disney, producers, and audiences as they navigate Elena’s circulation. Case studies highlight how a flexible Latinidad is deployed through corporate materials, social media pages, theme park experiences, and the television series to create a princess who is both marginal to Disney’s normative vision of princesshood and central to Disney’s claims of diversification.This multi-layered analysis of Disney’s mediated Latina girlhood interrogates the complex relationship between the U.S.’s largest ethnic minority and a global conglomerate that stands in for the U.S. on the global stage.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

The Study of Photography in Latin America: Critical Insights and Methodological Approaches (University of New Mexico Press, 2023) provides an insider's perspective to the study of photography. Nathanial Gardner provides readers with a carefully structured introduction that lays out his unique methodology for this book, which features over eighty photographs and the insights from sixteen prominent Latin American photography scholars and historians, including Boris Kossoy, John Marz, and Ana Mauad. The work reflects the advances of the study of photography throughout Latin America with certain emphasis on Brazil and Mexico. The author further underlines the role of important institutions and builds context by discussing influential theories and key texts that currently guide the discipline. The Study of Photography in Latin America is critical to all who want to expand their current knowledge of the subject and engage with its experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Recognition Politics: Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lorenza B. Fontana is a pioneering work that explores a new wave of widely overlooked conflicts that have emerged across the Andean region, coinciding with the implementation of internationally acclaimed indigenous rights. Why are groups that have peacefully cohabited for decades suddenly engaging in hostile and, at times, violent behaviours? What is the link between these conflicts and changes in collective self-identification, claim-making, and rent-seeking dynamics? And how, in turn, are these changes driven by broader institutional, legal and policy reforms?By shifting the focus to the 'post-recognition,' this unique study sets the agenda for a new generation of research on the practical consequences of the employment of ethnic-based rights. To develop the core argument on the links between recognition reforms and 'recognition conflicts', Lorenza Fontana draws on extensive empirical material and case studies from three Andean countries – Bolivia, Colombia and Peru – which have been global forerunners in the implementation of recognition politics.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago's people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today.In this masterful work of scholarship, Meléndez-Badillo sheds light on the vibrant cultures of the archipelago in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus and captures the full sweep of Puerto Rico's turbulent history in the centuries that followed, from the first indigenous insurrection against colonial rule in 1511--led by the powerful chieftain Agüeybaná II--to the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1952. He deftly portrays the contemporary period and the intertwined though unequal histories of the archipelago and the continental United States.Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton UP, 2024) is an engaging, sometimes personal, and consistently surprising history of colonialism, revolt, and the creation of a national identity, offering new perspectives not only on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean but on the United States and the Atlantic world more broadly.Available in Spanish from our partners at Grupo Planeta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Sixteenth-century Spain was small, poor, disunited and sparsely populated. Yet the Spaniards and their allies built the largest empire the world had ever seen. How did they achieve this?In How the Spanish Empire Was Built: a 400-year History (Reaktion, 2024) Dr. Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Dr. Manuel Lucena Giraldo argue that Spain’s engineers were critical to this venture. The Spanish invested in infrastructure to the advantage of local power brokers, enhancing the abilities of incumbent elites to grow wealthy on trade and widening the arc of Spanish influence.Bringing to life stories of engineers, prospectors, soldiers and priests, the authors paint a vivid portrait of Spanish America in the age of conquest. This is a dazzling new history of the Spanish Empire, and a new understanding of empire itself, as a venture marked as much by collaboration as oppression.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States, anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte boldly embarked on a journey in the opposite direction—following the guns from dealers in Arizona and Texas to crime scenes in Mexico.An expert work of narrative nonfiction, Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence across the Border (University of California Press, 2024) provides a rare, intimate look into the world of firearms trafficking and urges us to understand the effects of lax US gun laws abroad. Jusionyte masterfully weaves together the gripping stories of people who live and work with guns north and south of the border: a Mexican businessman who smuggles guns for protection, a teenage girl turned trained assassin, two US federal agents trying to stop gun traffickers, and a journalist who risks his life to report on organized crime. Based on years of fieldwork, Exit Wounds expands current debates about guns in America, grappling with US complicity in violence on both sides of the border.Ieva Jusionyte is an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University. A former paramedic and Harvard Radcliffe and Fulbright fellow, she is the author of the award-winning Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border.Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). 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 The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History (Routledge, 2015), Jeremy Black presents a compact yet comprehensive survey of slavery and its impact on the world, primarily centered on the Atlantic trade. Opening with a clear discussion of the problems of defining slavery, the book goes on to investigate the Atlantic slave trade from its origins to abolition, including comparisons to other systems of slavery outside the Atlantic region and the persistence of modern-day slavery. Crucially, the book does not ask readers to abandon their emotional ties to the subject, but puts events in context so that it becomes clear how such an institution not only arose, but flourished.Black shows that slavery and the slave trade were not merely add-ons to the development of Western civilization, but intimately linked to it. In a vital and accessible narrative, The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History enables students to understand this terrible element of human history and how it shaped the modern world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Bringing into dialogue the fields of social history, Andean ethnography, and postcolonial theory, The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024) by Dr. Brooke Larson maps the moral dilemmas and political stakes involved in the protracted struggle over Indian literacy and schooling in the Bolivian Andes.Dr. Larson traces Bolivia’s major state efforts to educate its unruly Indigenous masses at key junctures in the twentieth century. While much scholarship has focused on “the Indian boarding school” and other Western schemes of racial assimilation, Dr. Larson interweaves state-centred and imperial episodes of Indigenous education reform with vivid ethnographies of Aymara peasant protagonists and their extraordinary pro-school initiatives. Exploring the field of vernacular literacy practices and peasant political activism, she examines the transformation of the rural “alphabet school” from an instrument of the civilising state into a tool of Aymara cultural power, collective representation, and rebel activism. From the metaphorical threshold of the rural school, Dr. Larson rethinks the politics of race and indigeneity, nation and empire, in postcolonial Bolivia and beyond.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Gustavo Guzmán's Attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jews: From Acceptable Undesirables to Respected Businessmen (Brill, 2022) is the first book in English to discuss the changing attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jewish immigrants and the State of Israel from the 1930s onwards. Jewish Chileans have ascended rapidly from the status of undesirable immigrants to middle and upper-middle class, facing less obstacles than their Argentine coreligionists. Particular emphasis is given to the failed struggle to extradite war criminal Walther Rauff and to the years of the military dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet. By the 1970s, Israel seemed a strong pro-Western barrier to the expansion of communism and Islamic fundamentalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies