New Books in Latin American Studies

Camilla Townsend, author of 'Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs', challenges long-held assumptions about the Aztecs, tells their story from their perspective, and debunks misconceptions about their beliefs. She discusses unique sources used to study the Aztecs and her approach of starting each chapter with a vignette about a single person to create a cohesive narrative. Townsend also mentions her ongoing project on the Lenape Indians in New York and her plans to return to studying the Aztecs in the future.

The devil is a defiant, nefarious figure, the emblem of evil, and harbinger of the damned. However, the festive devil—the devil that dances—turns the most hideous acts into playful transgressions. Edited by Milla Cozart Riggio, Angela Marino, and Paolo Vignolo, Festive Devils of the Americas (Seagull Books, 2015) presents a transnational and performance-centered approach to this fascinating, feared, and revered character of fiestas, street festivals, and carnivals in North, Central, and South America. As produced and performed in both rural and urban communities and among neighborhood groups and councils, festive devils challenge the principles of colonialism and nation-states reliant on the straight and narrow opposition between good and evil, black and white, and us and them.Learn more about festive devils here, and in the work of Rose Cano, who is currently studying how Peruvian devils manifest in Seattle, Washington. Of notable influence on this text is Leda Martins’ concept of spiral time, which you can learn more about in Martins’ chapter, “Performances of Spiral Time,” in Performing Religion in the Americas: Media, Politics, and Devotional Practices of the Twenty-First Century (Seagull Books, 2007).Milla Cozart Riggio is James J. Goodwin Professor of English Emerita at Trinity College. Angela Marino is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California Berkeley. Paolo Vignolo is Associate Professor of History at the National University of Colombia, Bogota.Other contributors to the book Festive Devils of the Americas include Miguel Rubio Zapata and Amiel Cayo, members of El Groupo Cultural Yuyachkani; the late Thomas Abercrombie; Miguel Gandert; Monica Rojas-Stewart; Max Harris; Zeca Ligiéro; Lowell Fiet; Rawle Gibbons; Raviji (Ravindranath Maharaj); David M. Guss; Rafael Salvatore; Benito Irady; Anita Gonzalez; Enrique R. Lamadrid; and Rachel Bowditch.The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics provided continual support (financial, intellectual, and personal), especially Diana Taylor, Director, and Marcial Godoy-Anativa. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui also advised the general Festive Devils project.Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. 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 meaning does a daily soccer game in a public Los Angeles park have for a group of Latino men and the ethnographer who studied them? In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. David Trouille, Assistant Professor of Sociology at James Madison University, about the ten years of fieldwork behind his new book Fútbol in the Park from the University of Chicago press. In a thoughtful self-reflexive conversation, David tells us how a neighborhood campaign against the players initially drew him to the community of Latino soccer players that are the subject of his book. He describes how he built relationships with the men over time on and off the field, and how the social space of the games created social ties that were essential to their ability to find work. While surrounding well-to-do mostly white communities accepted the men as workers in their homes, they simultaneously resisted their visible presence in the park. David tells us how this stigmatization, combined with national discourses constructing Latino men as “bad hombres” created dilemmas in how to write about his research. He explains how he made difficult decisions to only partially anonymize the men but not write about their immigration status, and ultimately describe the men as complex and real human beings, including writing about their drinking and occasional fighting.For more information about Ethnographic Marginalia, please click here.Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. 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

In Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico (Duke University Press, 2020), Vanessa Freije develops a new rich thesis about the role of the press in Mexican civil society. In this well researched monograph, Freije shows how journalists played a key role in producing scandalous spectacles that brought an otherwise authoritarian PRI to account. Simultaneously, each chapter explores the limitations and drawbacks of Mexican muckraking as bribery, violence, and social networks blunted the most dangerous challenges to the regime.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

How do ideologies of development shape the perceptions of security threats of US foreign policymakers and the political and military leaders of developing countries? What is the relationship between development, democracy, and military coups? How does US foreign aid affect political stability in recipient countries? These are some of the questions addressed in Thomas Field’s fantastic book From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era (Cornell UP, 2014).The book focuses on the relationship between the Kennedy administration and the Bolivian government headed by Victor Paz Estenssoro, a former hero of the Bolivian Revolution, as it attempted to generate economic development and built a centralized state in the vast, landlocked, geographically and ethnically diverse country. Field shows how US support for economic restructuring in the mining sector created clashes between the government and labor unions that undermined Paz’s legitimacy, and how Paz government’s reliance on the military to build infrastructure and execute development programs in the countryside -- a strategy that US policymakers supported wholeheartedly -- increased the political profile of the military and made a military coup increasingly likely. The book ends with Paz’s overthrow in a coup in 1964.Thomas Field Jr. is an Associate Professor of Global Security and Intelligence at Emory-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. He holds a Master’s degree from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a PhD in international history from the London School of Economics. Most recently, he co-edited a volume called Latin America’s Cold War, which examines how the Cold War international system interacted with regional and national political dynamics (and was also the subject of a New Books Network interview).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Diana Taylor's ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (Duke University Press, 2020) examines what it means to be presente in the context of protest, theatre, and everyday life. Taylor pays particular attention to the performativity of protest politics and the politics of performance art in the Americas, including case studies of the Zapatistas, post-dictatorship historical memory in Chile and Argentina, and the leftist pranksters The Yes Men. ¡Presente! is a wide-ranging and entertaining work of scholarship that looks at how performance and performance studies can become useful tools in the fight against neo-liberal capitalism and in the creation of new modes of living.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Professor Andrew Grant Wood’s new edited volume, The Business of Leisure: Tourism History in Latin America and the Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), explores the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of tourism in the region and its relationship to nationalism, imperialism, development, and many other themes. The volume also provides a new way of understanding the relationship between the United States and Latin America during the twentieth century, showing how Latin American and US elites used tourism to create lucrative business deals, shape domestic and international politics, and bolster exceptionalist national histories. On this episode of the podcast, I talk with Wood about the book, along with Anadelia Romo and Elizabeth Manley, two contributors to the volume.Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

This is a Special Series on Third World Nationalism.In the wake of a rise in nationalism around the world, and its general condemnation by liberals and the left, in addition to the rise of China and Russia, we have put together this series on Third World Nationalism to nuance the present discourse on nationalism, note its centrality to anti-imperial, anti-colonial politics around the world, the reconfiguration of global power, and its inextricability from mainstream politics in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.Today my guest is James Siekmeier, author of Latin American Nationalism: Identity in a Globalizing World (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).With ethnic and class-based national movements taking center stage in countries like Bolivia and Venezuela, nationalism has proven to be one of the most durable and important movements in Latin America. In understanding the history of these nationalisms, we can understand how Latin America relates to the rest of the world.As Latin America inserts itself into a rapidly globalizing world, understanding the changing nature of national identify and nationalism is key. By tracing the important historical origins of present-day Latin American nationalism, this book gives readers a thorough introduction to the subject. Only by understanding how nationalism came to be such an important social and political force, can we understand its significance today. In turn, understanding Latin American nationalism helps us understand how Latin America shapes, and is shaped by, a rapidly globalizing world.Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Acts of Repair: Justice, Truth, and the Politics of Memory in Argentina (Rutgers UP, 2020) explores how ordinary people grapple with political violence in Argentina, a nation home to survivors of multiple genocides and periods of violence, including the Holocaust, the political repression of the 1976-1983 dictatorship, and the 1994 AMIA bombing. Despite efforts for accountability, the terrain of justice has been uneven and, in many cases, impunity remains. How can citizens respond to such ongoing trauma? Within frameworks of transitional justice, what does this tell us about the possibility of recovery and repair? Turning to the lived experience of survivors and family members of victims of genocide and violence, Natasha Zaretsky argues for the ongoing significance of cultural memory as a response to trauma and injustice, as revealed through testimonies and public protests. Even if such repair may be inevitably liminal and incomplete, their acts seeking such repair also yield spaces for transformation and agency critical to personal and political recovery.Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. 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 Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamist Dissident, and Utopian Founder, 1878-1961 (Oxford University Press, 2020) provides the first full-length biography of a celebrated Latino Mormon leader in the U.S. and Mexico in the early twentieth century. Surprisingly little is known about Bautista's remarkable life, the scope of his work, or the development of his vision. Elisa Eastwood Pulido draws on his letters, books, pamphlets, and unpublished diaries to provide a lens through which to view the convergence of the evangelization efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mexican nationalism, and religious improvisation in the U.S. Mexico borderlands.A successful proselytizer of Mexicans for years, from 1922 onward Bautista came to view the paternalism of the Euro-American leadership of the Church as a barrier to ecclesiastical self-governance by indigenous Latter-day Saints. In 1924, he began his journey away from mainstream Mormonism. By 1946, he had established a completely Mexican-led polygamist utopia in Mexico on the slopes of the volcano Popocateptl, twenty-two kilometers southeast of Mexico City. Here, he preached an alternative Mormonism rooted in Mesoamerican history and culture. Based on his indigenous hermeneutic of Mormon scripture, Bautista proclaimed that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were a chosen race, destined to wrest both political and spiritual authority from the descendants of Euro-American colonists. This book provides an in-depth look at a man still regarded with cultural pride by those Mexican and Mexican American Mormons who remember him as an iconic and revolutionary figure.David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies