New Books in Latin American Studies

Many scholars assert that Mexico’s complex racial hierarchy, inherited from Spanish colonialism, became obsolete by the turn of the nineteenth century as class-based distinctions became more prominent and a largely mestizo population emerged. But the residues of the colonial caste system did not simply dissolve after Mexico gained independence. Rather, Ana Sabau argues, ever-present fears of racial uprising among elites and authorities led to persistent governmental techniques and ideologies designed to separate and control people based on their perceived racial status, as well as to the implementation of projects for development in fringe areas of the country. Riot and Rebellion in Mexico: the Making of a Race War Paradigm (University of Texas Press, 2022) traces this race-based narrative through three historical flashpoints: the Bajío riots, the Haitian Revolution, and the Yucatan’s caste war. Sabau shows how rebellions were treated as racially motivated events rather than political acts and how the racialization of popular and indigenous sectors coincided with the construction of “whiteness” in Mexico. Drawing on diverse primary sources, Sabau demonstrates how the race war paradigm was mobilized in foreign and domestic affairs and reveals the foundations of a racial state and racially stratified society that persist today.Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th 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

Edited by Ellie D. Hernandez, Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., and Magda García, Transmovimientos: Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Space (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) focuses on queer, trans, and gender nonconforming communities of immigrants and social dissidents who reflect on and write about diaspora and migratory movements while navigating geographical and embodied spaces across gendered and racialized contexts. It forms a nuanced conversation between scholarship and social activism that speaks in concrete ways about diasporic and migratory LGBTQ communities who suffer from immoral immigration policies and political discourses that produce untenable living situations. It received the silver medal in the Best LGBTQ Themed book category at the 2022 International Latino Book Prize.Dr. Ellie D. Hernandez is an Associate Professor in the department of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara where she teaches and writes extensively on Chicanx literature and culture, citizenship, transnational Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural production, and Latinx LGBTQ Studies. She is also the author of Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture and co-editor of The UnMaking of Latina/o Citizenship: Culture, Politics, and Aesthetics.Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Leah Cargin (Ph.D student, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Elizabeth Quay Hutchison (Professor, University of New Mexico) about Hutchison’s recent book, Workers Like All the Rest of Them: Domestic Service and the Rights of Labor in Twentieth-Century Chile (Duke University Press, 2021).In this episode, Leah Cargin invites Elizabeth Hutchison to consider the long-term influences that have shaped her personal and professional interests in Latin American history and gender history, and to reflect on how these commitments led to this recent book. Hutchison introduces us to a few of the cooks, nannies, gardeners, and housekeepers who mobilized for recognition as workers in twentieth-century Chile, including Doña Elba Bravo and Aída Moreno Valenzuela. Rooted in oral histories with leaders and allies of the domestic service workers’ movement, Hutchison analyzes how changing constructions of domestic service labor impacted women’s work in this underpaid and under-regulated sector over the course of the twentieth century. The ‘living archive’ of activists’ testimony, in combination with congressional and associational records, enables Hutchison to narrate large-scale social and political change in Chile, centering the perspective of women domestic workers, and showcasing the alliances they forged with leadership in the Catholic Church, left-wing political organizations, and feminist organizations. Throughout this conversation, Hutchison observes the obligations and rewards of politically- and socially-engaged scholarship. 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 High-Risk Feminism in Colombia: Women's Mobilization in Violent Contexts (Rutgers University Press, 2022), Dr. Julia Zulver documents the experiences of grassroots women’s organizations that united to demand gender justice during and in the aftermath of Colombia’s armed conflict. In doing so, she illustrates a little-studied phenomenon: women whose experiences with violence catalyze them to mobilize and resist as feminists, even in the face of grave danger. Despite a well-established tradition of studying women in war, we tend to focus on their roles as mothers or carers, as peacemakers, or sometimes as revolutionaries.This book explains the gendered underpinnings of why women engage in feminist mobilization, even when this takes place in a ‘domain of losses’ that exposes them to high levels of risk. It follows four women’s organizations who break with traditional gender norms and defy armed groups’ social and territorial control, exposing them to retributive punishment. Dr. Zulver provides rich evidence to document how women are able to surmount the barriers to mobilization when they frame their actions in terms of resistance, rather than fear.High-Risk Feminism in Colombia has also been translated and released in Spanish! Dr. Zulver discusses the book in Spanish here.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

In Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke University Press, 2022), Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force. Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, García Peña argues that Black Latinidad is a social, cultural, and political formation—rather than solely a site of identity—through which we can understand both oppression and resistance. She takes up the intellectual and political genealogy of Black Latinidad in the works of Frederick Douglass, Gregorio Luperón, and Arthur Schomburg. She also considers the lives of Black Latina women living in the diaspora, such as Black Dominicana guerrillas who migrated throughout the diaspora after the 1965 civil war and Black immigrant and second-generation women like Mercedes Frías and Milagros Guzmán organizing in Italy with other oppressed communities. In demonstrating that analyses of Black Latinidad must include Latinx people and cultures throughout the diaspora, García Peña shows how the vaivén—or, coming and going—at the heart of migrant life reveals that the nation is not a sufficient rubric from which to understand human lived experiences.Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On 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

Bought & Sold: Scotland, Jamaica and Slavery (Luath Press, 2022) by Kate Phillips traces the story of how and why thousands of Scots made money from buying and selling humans... a story we need to own. We need to admit that many Scots were enthusiastic participants in slavery.Union with England gave Scotland access to both trade and settlement in Jamaica, Britain’s richest colony and its major slave trading hub. Tens of thousands from Scotland lived and worked there. The abolition campaign and slave revolts threatened Scottish plantation owners, merchants, traders, bankers and insurance brokers who made their fortunes from slave-farmed sugar in Jamaica and fought hard to preserve the system of slavery. Archives and parliamentary papers in both countries reveal these transatlantic Scots in their own words and allow us to access the lives of their captives.Scotland and Jamaica were closely entwined for over one hundred years. Bought & Sold traces this shared story from its early beginnings in the 1700s to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and reflects on the meaning of those years for both nations today.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

With much existing research on migration focusing on the Global North—like Europe and the US—Pugh’s The Invisibility Bargain: Governance Networks and Migrant Human Security (Oxford UP, 2021) shifts the focus to the Global South, which hosts 86% of refugees. With particular attention to Ecuador and other parts of Latin America, The Invisibility Bargain approaches questions of governance, human security, and international politics with an eye towards how both state and non-state actors enforce an “invisibility bargain,” wherein migrants must stay politically and socially invisible in order to remain welcome. Drawing on over 170 interviews, 15 months of fieldwork, and discourse analysis of over 400 presidential speeches and 800 Ecuadorian news stories, The Invisibility Bargain will be of great interest to those in Latin American Studies, Migration Studies, Sociolegal Studies, and Political Science.Dr. Jeffrey Pugh is Associate Professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, & Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is also the executive director of the Center for Mediation, Peace, and Resolution of Conflict (CEMPROC).Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, where they research the how UK asylum tribunals consider claims of belief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Paul Adler's No Globalization Without Representation: U.S. Activists and World Inequality (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) is a history of the hardworking but understudied public interest progressives who waged a war from within the system against neoliberal globalization during the last decades of the twentieth century. At a time of Cold War polarization and increasing rejection of social and economic rights as motivating discourses by the left and the right, these activists mobilized around a project of fairness and economic equality. Faced with an increasingly globalized economy and political system, US-based public interest progressives built new models for transnational activism in coalition with activist groups around the globe. From boycotting Nestlé in the 1970s to lobbying against NAFTA to the "Battle of Seattle" protests against the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, No Globalization Without Representation is the story of how consumer and environmental activists became significant players in U.S. and world politics at the end of the twentieth century.Of interest to scholars of transnational activism, neoliberalism, and public policy, this book offers important insights into the political struggles that helped shape the conflicts and political visions of the twenty-first century.Paul Adler is Assistant Professor of History at Colorado College.Elena McGrath is an Assistant Professor of History at Union College 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 Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border (Cambridge UP, 2021), Frederico Freitas uncovers the crucial role played by conservation in the region’s territorial development by exploring how Brazil and Argentina used national parks to nationalize borderlands. In the 1930s, Brazil and Argentina created some of their first national parks around the massive Iguazu Falls, shared by the two countries. The parks were designed as tools to attract migrants from their densely populated Atlantic seaboards to a sparsely inhabited borderland. In the 1970s, a change in paradigm led the military regimes in Brazil and Argentina to violently evict settlers from their national parks, highlighting the complicated relationship between authoritarianism and conservation in the Southern Cone. By tracking almost one hundred years of national park history in Latin America’s largest countries, Nationalizing Nature shows how conservation policy promoted national programs of frontier development and border control.The book received an honorable mention in the Bryce Wood Book Award (Latin American Studies Association) as an outstanding book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in English, and an honorable mention in the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Prize (Latin American Studies Association’s Brazil Section) for the best book in the social sciences on Brazil.Elena McGrath is an Assistant Professor of History at Union College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Beginning in the 1970s Chicana and Chicano organizers turned to community radio broadcasting to educate, entertain, and uplift Mexican American listeners across the United States. In rural areas, radio emerged as the most effective medium for reaching relatively isolated communities such as migrant farmworkers. And in Washington’s Yakima Valley, where the media landscape was dominated by perspectives favorable to agribusiness, community radio for and about farmworkers became a life-sustaining tool. Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley (U Washington Press, 2022) unearths the remarkable history of one of the United States’ first full-time Spanish-language community radio stations, Radio KDNA, which began broadcasting in the Yakima Valley in 1979. Extensive interviews reveal the work of Chicana and Chicano producers, on-air announcers, station managers, technical directors, and listeners who contributed to the station’s success. Monica De La Torre weaves these oral histories together with a range of visual and audio artifacts, including radio programs, program guides, and photographs to situate KDNA within the larger network of Chicano community-based broadcasting and social movement activism. Feminista Frequencies highlights the development of a public broadcasting model that centered Chicana radio producers and documents the central role of women in developing this infrastructure in the Yakima Valley. De La Torre shows how KDNA revolutionized community radio programming, adding new depth to the history of the Chicano movement, women’s activism, and media histories.Brad Wright is a historian of Latin America specializing in postrevolutionary Mexico. He teach world history at Kennesaw State University currently. PhD in Public History with specialization in oral history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies