New Books in Latin American Studies

I had the pleasure of interviewing my mentor, Dr. Michael J. Bustamante on his first monograph, Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile which was published in March 2021 as part of the Envisioning Cuba series by the University of North Carolina Press. "For many Cubans, Fidel Castro's Revolution represented deliverance from a legacy of inequality and national disappointment. For others—especially those exiled in the United States—Cuba's turn to socialism made the prerevolutionary period look like paradise lost. In Cuban Memory Wars, Bustamante unsettles this familiar schism by excavating Cubans' contested memories of the Revolution's roots and results over its first twenty years. Cubans' battles over the past, he argues, not only defied simple political divisions; they also helped shape the course of Cuban history itself. As the Revolution unfolded, the struggle over historical memory was triangulated among revolutionary leaders in Havana, expatriate organizations in Miami, and average Cuban citizens. All Cubans leveraged the past in individual ways, but personal memories also collided with the Cuban state's efforts to institutionalize a singular version of the Revolution's story. Drawing on troves of archival materials, including visual media, Bustamante tracks the process of what he calls retrospective politics across the Florida Straits. In doing so, he drives Cuban history beyond the polarized vision seemingly set in stone today and raises the prospect of a more inclusive national narrative."Dr. Bustamante is the Bacardi Chair in Cuban and Cuban American Studies at the University of Miami and Associate Professor in the Department of History. He is also my mentor, which makes this conversation a special treat for me. He and I talked about the journey from dissertation to monograph, navigating the politics of the Cuban archive, and challenging our own assumptions and biases. It was an AMAZING conversation and a must-listen!Rozzmery Palenzuela Vicente is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Florida International University. Her dissertation examines the cultural and intellectual politics surrounding black motherhood in twentieth-century Cuba.Twitter: @RozzmeryPV 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 1804, King Charles IV of Spain enacted a royal order mandating the postmortem cesarean procedure in all of Spain's dominions. The Audiencia de Guatemala, way back in 1785, had already enacted a law mandating postmortem cesareans for all deceased pregnant women and even those suspected of being pregnant when they had passed away. Audiencias of other viceroyalties also enacted similar laws before 1804. What explains the emergence of the postmortem cesarean operation in colonial Latin America? What was the purpose of this procedure?Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire (Penn State Press, 2020), edited by Drs. Martha Few, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren tell us the story of the postmortem cesarean operation in the Spanish Empire during the eighteenth century, though the book builds a genealogy that situates this procedure in a longer history that begins in the medieval period (and even earlier!) and extends way up the twentieth century. Part of the Latin American Original series (LAO) of the Pennsylvania University Press, this book centers on the translation (made by Nina M. Scott) of a fascinating medicoreligious text: Pedro José de Arrese’s Physical, Canonical, Moral Principles . . . on the Baptism of Miscarried Fetuses and the Cesarean Operation on Women Who Die Pregnant.Additionally, the editors present us with shorter excerpts of a wide range of texts (other medical treatises, scientific and political journals, medical instructions) that also deal with the postmortem cesarean operation in the Spanish American world. Here we talk about transatlantic enlightenment cultures; different conceptions of life and death; the co-existence and co-production of religion and medical procedures; the changes that the cesarean operation went through in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and lastly, as usual, why this history matters to the present. A must for those listeners that want to learn more about the history of the body, medicine, and gender! Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Fields of Revolution: Agrarian Reform and Rural State Formation in Bolivia, 1935-1964, published in 2021 by the University of Pittsburgh Press is a ground-breaking study of Bolivia’s revolutionary experiment in peasant land redistribution during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1953, the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) began a process of moderate land reform that would become so sweeping it would compete with Mexico and Cuba for reshaping rural social relations in Latin America. In Field of Revolution, Soliz upends scholarly assumptions about where the MNR’s land reform policies came from, how transformative such policies were for the countryside, and how popular forces engaged with the state. Using case studies from three diverse regions in Bolivia’s highlands and valleys, Soliz explores the dialogue between competing understandings of agrarian reform that created a hyper localized and often quite radical process of agrarian change after 1953.Attentive to the interplay between state policy and local activism, Soliz shows how hacienda workers embraced the nationalist slogan of “land for those who work it” and used existing union structures to connect with revolutionary nationalist politicians. Meanwhile, indigenous communities proclaimed the need to return “land to its original owners” and sought to link the ruling party discourse on nationalism with their own long-standing demands for restitution. Landowners, for their part, embraced the principle of “land for those who improve it” to protect at least portions of their former properties from expropriation. While the MNR tried to coopt and control this process, ultimately, it was indigenous peasants and hacienda workers who drove the pace of revolutionary change in the countryside, controlling and consolidating power in rural space long after the fall of the revolutionary government.Engaging and incisive, this book is essential reading for scholars of rural and agrarian history, indigenous movements, revolutions, and would make a great addition to graduate and undergraduate classrooms alike.Carmen Soliz is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.Elena McGrath is 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

For over a century Mexico has been embroiled in a drug war dictated by the demands of their neighbor to the north. In The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade (W. W. Norton, 2021), Benjamin T. Smith offers a history of the trade and its effects upon the people of Mexico. As he reveals, at the start of the 20th century drugs such as marijuana and opium were largely on the margins of Mexican society, used mainly by soldiers, prisoners, and immigrants. The association of marijuana with a bohemian subculture in the early 1920s prompted the first punitive laws against it, while the use of opium by Chinese immigrants led Mexican officials to target the drug as a means to arrest the country’s Chinese population.Yet the drug trade thrived thanks to the growing demand for marijuana and heroin in the United States. In response, American officials pressured their Mexican counterparts to end drug production and distribution in their country, even to the point of ending the effort to provide heroin in a regulated way for the country’s relatively small population of heroin addicts. Yet these efforts often foundered on the economic factors involved, with many government officials protecting the trade either for personal profit or for the financial benefits the trade provided to their states. This trade only grew in the postwar era, as the explosion of drug use in the 1960s and the crackdown on the European heroin trade made Mexico an increasingly important supplier of narcotics to the United States. The vast profits to be made from this changed the nature of the trade from small-scale family-managed operations to much more complex organizations that increasingly employed violence to ensure their share of it. As Smith details, the consequences of this have proven enormously detrimental both to the Mexican state and to the Mexican people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

I sat down with Dr. Tiffany Sippial to talk about her latest book, Celia Sanchez Manduley: The Life and Legacy of a Cuban Revolutionary (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Celia Sanchez Manduley (1920-1980) is famous for her role in the Cuban revolution and being the "first female guerrilla of the Sierra Maestra." Sanchez joined the movement in her early thirties and went on to serve as a high-ranking government official and international ambassador. Since her death, Sanchez has been revered as a national icon, cultivated and guarded by the Cuban government. With almost unprecedented access to Sanchez's papers, including a personal diary, and firsthand interviews with family members, Tiffany A. Sippial presents the first critical study of a notoriously private and self-abnegating woman who yet exists as an enduring symbol of revolutionary ideals. Using the tools of feminist biography, cultural history, and the politics of memory, Sippial reveals the scope and depth of Sanchez's power and influence within the Cuban revolution, as well as her struggles with violence, her political development, and the sacrifices required by her status as a leader and "New Woman." Sippial reveals how Sanchez strategically crafted her own legacy within a history still dominated by bearded men in fatigues.Dr. Sippial walked me through her journey as a researcher and biographer of one of Cuba’s most revered figures. We discussed Sanchez’s early life and her emergence as a political figure in her own right, her relationship with Fidel Castro and other notable figures, her significance in Cuban national memory, and what we can learn about her story during a politically tense time. Very timely, and important conversation. Enjoy!Rozzmery Palenzuela Vicente is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Florida International University. Her dissertation examines the cultural and intellectual politics surrounding black motherhood in twentieth-century Cuba. Twitter: @RozzmeryPV 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 Dancing with the Revolution: Power, Politics, and Privilege in Cuba (UNC Press, 2021), Elizabeth B. Schwall aligns culture and politics by focusing on an art form that became a darling of the Cuban revolution: dance. In this history of staged performance in ballet, modern dance, and folkloric dance, Schwall analyzes how and why dance artists interacted with republican and, later, revolutionary politics. Drawing on written and visual archives, including intriguing exchanges between dancers and bureaucrats, Schwall argues that Cubans dancers used their bodies and ephemeral, nonverbal choreography to support and critique political regimes and cultural biases. As esteemed artists, Cuban dancers exercised considerable power and influence. They often used their art to posit more radical notions of social justice than political leaders were able or willing to implement. After 1959, while generally promoting revolutionary projects like mass education and internationalist solidarity, they also took risks by challenging racial prejudice, gender norms, and censorship, all of which could affect dancers personally. On a broader level, Schwall shows that dance, too often overlooked in histories of Latin America and the Caribbean, provides fresh perspectives on what it means for people, and nations, to move through the world.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 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

La Paz's Colonial Specters: Urbanization, Migration, and Indigenous Political Participation, 1900-52 (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores the urban history of one of Latin America’s most indigenous large cities in the first half of the twentieth century. Tracing the expansion of the “extramuro,” indigenous neighborhoods beyond the center of the city in these decades, Sierra brings to life the activists who transformed the city leading up to Bolivia’s National Revolution in 1952. Sierra begins by highlighting the racialized debates about space, modernization, and popular politics among elites that dominated Bolivia’s 1925 centenary celebrations and projects for urban development. Many elites hoped to relegate visible signs of indigeneity outside an imaginary line that divided the respectable, wealthy urban core from the mixed indigenous spaces of the urban periphery. However, as Sierra demonstrates, indigenous Bolivians were crucial to the functioning of urban life from the very heart of the old Spanish city to its rapidly expanding markets and outskirts. Therefore, lower class urbanites, indigenous and not, were able to insist upon an alternative vision of the city built upon neighborhood organizations, unions, and popular use of space long before the revolutionary days of urban street battles in April 1952. This book will be of interest to urban historians and Latin American historians alike. Its careful explorations of gender, race, class and the mechanisms that build urban belonging will make this book essential reading for anyone interested in social movements and popular politics. Finally, by tracing the understudied history of neighborhood associations in the early twentieth century, La Paz’s Colonial Specters provides an essential background for scholars seeking to understand the roots of contemporary neighborhood organizations that continue to dominate Bolivia’s popular politics to this day.Luis Sierra is Associate Professor of History at Thomas More University.Elena McGrath is 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

What makes some cities world class? Increasingly, that designation reflects the use of a toolkit of urban planning practices and policies that circulates around the globe. These strategies—establishing creative districts dedicated to technology and design, “greening” the streets, reinventing historic districts as tourist draws—were deployed to build a globally competitive Buenos Aires after its devastating 2001 economic crisis. In this richly drawn account, Jacob Lederman explores what those efforts teach us about fast-evolving changes in city planning practices and why so many local officials chase a nearly identical vision of world-class urbanism.Lederman explores the influence of Northern nongovernmental organizations and multilateral agencies on a prominent city of the global South. Using empirical data, keen observations, and interviews with people ranging from urban planners to street vendors he explores how transnational best practices actually affect the lives of city dwellers. His research also documents the forms of resistance enacted by everyday residents and the tendency of local institutions and social relations to undermine the top-down plans of officials. Most important, Lederman highlights the paradoxes of world-class urbanism: for instance, while the priorities identified by international agencies are expressed through nonmarket values such as sustainability, inclusion, and livability, local officials often use market-centric solutions to pursue them. Further, despite the progressive rhetoric used to describe urban planning goals, in most cases their result has been greater social, economic, and geographic stratification.Chasing World-Class Urbanism: Global Policy Versus Everyday Survival in Buenos Aires (U Minnesota Press, 2020) is a much-needed guide to the intersections of culture, ideology, and the realities of twenty-first-century life in a major Latin American city, one that illuminates the tension between technocratic aspirations and lived experience.Dr. Lederman is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Michigan-Flint and his research interests span Urban sociology, development and globalization, political economy.Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Psychoanalysis began as a politicized form of treatment for people from all walks of life. Yet in the United States, it has become divorced from these roots and transformed into a depoliticized treatment for the most well-to-do, according to my guests, Drs. Patricia Gherovici and Christopher Christian. Their edited book, Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious (Routledge, 2018), returns psychoanalysis to its social activist origins, with special emphasis on its urgency and usefulness for Latinx patients, including the poor. In our interview, we discuss the possibilities and necessity for bringing psychoanalysts to the barrios, as well as the unique offerings the barrio might have for psychoanalysis.Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Philadelphia and New York, an analytic supervisor, and a recipient of the 2020 Sigourney Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender variant communities. Her single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press: 2003) winner of the Gradiva Award and the Boyer Prize, Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge: 2010) and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference ​(Routledge: 2017).Christopher Christian, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New Haven, CT and co-editor of the book Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Conflict with Morris Eagle and David Wolitzky. He is also co-editor with Michael J. Diamond of the book The Second Century of Psychoanalysis: Evolving Perspectives on Therapeutic Action. He serves as dean of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (aka IPTAR), where he is also a supervising and training analyst. And he was co-executive producer of the documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio.Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse. 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 Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Theodore Cohen examines the ways in which different protagonists sought to incorporate Blackness into Mexican national identity. After the Revolution in 1910, a group of intellectuals, researchers, and cultural producers elaborated on the meanings of Blackness as an important component through which to unite Mexico as a democratic society. These figures focused on creating music, images, ethnographic accounts, and performances to render Blackness spatially, socially, culturally, and physically in the Mexican imagination. Yet, the book moves beyond national boundaries by tying Mexico to larger transnational networks of the African Diaspora. Overall, Finding Afro-Mexico moves beyond a narrative of Black disappearance or invisibility to illuminate the many figures who sought to unearth, articulate, and insist on the presence of Black people, history, and culture in Mexico and its national identity.Theodore W. Cohen is an Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Southern Illinois University.Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies