New Books in Latin American Studies

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 global environmental policies to roughly five hundred years of colonial histories that positioned the forests as places of refuge and resistance. It advocates that the fruits of these oppressive histories be reckoned with through processes of decolonization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

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 Tampere University, Finland. In 2013-14 she ran a project that focused on the question of missing and disappeared persons in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 2018-2022 she led a research project with a focus on disappearances in migratory contexts.Gerhild Perl is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Trier, Germany. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Journal of Intercultural Studies. Her doctoral dissertation on death during migration across the Spanish-Moroccan Sea was awarded the Maria Ioannis Baganha Award and the Dissertation Prize of the German Anthropological Association.Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found 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

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 connections across ethnic groups. Social adaptation and cultural convergence, Luis argues, defined Asian experiences in the Spanish Americas from the colonial invasions of the sixteenth century to the first cries for Mexican independence in the nineteenth.The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History (Harvard University Press, 2024) speaks to an important era in the construction of race, vividly unfolding what it meant to be “chino” in the early modern Spanish empire. In so doing, it demonstrates the significance of colonial Latin America to Asian diasporic history and reveals the fundamental role of transpacific connections to the development of colonial societies in the Americas.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

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 effective, propelling Nicaragua into the global limelight and allowing the revolutionaries to successfully challenge the United States' role in Central America.Eline van Ommen is Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Leeds.Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International 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 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 reparation and signals the pathways to justice and healing associated with Shoah and the Jewish experience. Lowy asks how individuals and institutions may overcome fear, indifference, and convenience to take a stand even under intense political duress, posing questions applicable to any nation emerging from state repression. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

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 constitution – suggest that Cuban antifascist efforts, though unable to turn the tide of the Spanish Civil War, did have an impact on Cuban domestic politics. In the interview, Lambe reflects on how her work is relevant to the Antifa movement of today.Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and she writes about elite migration, education, transnationalism, and youth in twentieth-century Mexico. She is also the author of a book on a binational program for Mexican migrant children. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

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 representatives instead of a mass of individuals. These insights are supported by well-triangulated data, including existing and original surveys, over 150 interviews with informal workers in Bolivia and Brazil, and ethnographic evidence collected from multiple cities. The book challenges assumptions about informal workers, offering an original contribution for scholars of informal economies, enforcement, civil society, and state building, as well as public policy practitioners.Dhouha Djerbi is a PhD candidate in political science at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

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 president before Perón so unambiguously rejected discrimination against Jews, Rein shows that many Jews secured more important posts in government in the 1940s and 1950s than in previous years, among them members of the Argentine Jewish Organization, which became a section of the ruling Peronist party. Deconstructing the myth of antisemitism during Perón's regime, Populism and Ethnicity looks deep into the heart of international memory for the truth behind Jewish-Argentine relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

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 francophone and anglophone Africa. Although scholars have noted similarities, this book is the first extensive comparative analysis of these traditions; it includes discussions of authors including Gabriel García Márquez, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Mármol, Esteban Echeverría, Ousmane Sembène, Chinua Achebe, Aminata Sow Fall, Henri Lopès, Sony Labou Tansi, and Ahmadou Kourouma. This juxtaposition illuminates the internal dynamics of the dictator novel as a literary genre. In so doing, Armillas-Tiseyra puts forward a comparative model relevant to scholars working across the Global South. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

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 look at the function and place of cultural heritage under socialist states.Pablo Alonso González is a Senior Researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (IPNA-CSIC). He is the author of several books, including Cultural Parks and National Heritage Areas: Assembling Cultural Heritage, Development and Spatial Planning.Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International 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