New Books in Latin American Studies

In the late 1500s, the mines of Potosí –a mountain in southern Bolivia — produced 60% of the world’s silver. It was a place of great wealth and terrible suffering. It is also a place, Jorge Canizares-Esguerra argues, that challenges the very idea of the Scientific Revolution. Canizares-Esguerra discusses Potosí and how its peoples and technologies shaped 16th century science. He is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been honored by awards from the American Historical Association and the History of Science Society. Canizares-Esguerra is the author of (among other books) of Nature, Empire, And Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford University Press, 2006).Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Recent debates over the building of a border wall on the U.S.-Mexico divide have raised logistical and ethical issues, leaving the historical record of border building uninvoked. A recent book, written by UT Austin professor Dr. C.J. Alvarez, offers an over one-hundred-year history that extends to before the building of a border wall in 1990. Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide (UT Press, 2019) recounts the history of how both US and Mexican government agencies surveyed, organized, and operationalized land and water from 1848 until 2009. By centering the relationship between government agencies and border policing, Alvarez clearly shows how construction and manipulation of the border space’s natural features maintained the political and geographical form of the nation-state, how it reproduced the notion of the border space as something needing to be controlled and dominated, and how it transformed the border space into one of economic possibility and growth.The history of construction and hydraulic engineering on the divide is largely about the opposing forces of border building to keep certain people and things out, and border building to let certain things in. Alvarez lays bare this tension between tactical infrastructure and trade infrastructure both as forces that have organized border life. During the 1960s and 70s, “the ports of entry began to embody the ever-deepening contradictions embedded in policies designed to accelerate sanctioned economic exchange on the one hand while seeking to decelerate black market commerce on the other,” Alvarez writes (143). By the turn of the 21st century, Alvarez argues, most of the police construction on the border was designed to manage the negative effects of previous building projects and policies. In regards to the completion of the 2009 border fence, Alvarez writes, “It was overbuilding designed to compensate for an unsustainable immigration system, unsustainable ‘drug wars,’ and an unsustainable politics of scapegoating noncitizens. Far more successful at achieving its stated goals, however, was the infrastructure of cross-border commerce” (222).Dr. Alvarez utilizes extensive government records from the binational agency International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC)/ Comisión Internacional de Límites y Aguas (CILA), records from Army Corps of Engineers, the INS, and the prodigious W.D. Smithers photograph collection from the Harry Ransom Center. The number of photographs included in the manuscript shows the vastness of the US-Mexico divide's natural landscape, shows how agencies attempted to make sense of such vastness, and shows what they constructed. Border Land, Border Water is a must-read for historians of the US-Mexico divide, environmental historians, and anyone interested in better understanding from a historical perspective current calls construction on the border.Dr. Alvarez, “Chihuahuan Desert History” School for Advanced Research Colloquium TalkJonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz and on their personal website www.historiancortez.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Immigration is one of the most complex issues of our time in the United States and around the world. Enforcing immigration law in the U.S. involves a mix of courts and executive agencies with lots of opportunities for confusion, miscommunication, and changes in approach from administration to administration. While these things are nothing new, they take on a new dimension when the lives of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers are at stake.Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar and Founding Director of the Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Penn State Law in University Park, is an expert in immigration law and joins us this week to discuss how discretion, checks and balances, and the rule of law figure into immigration enforcement — particularly in the Trump administration. Her new book, Banned: Immigration Enforcement in the Time of Trump (New York University Press, 2019), includes interviews with former immigration officials and people impacted by the Trump administration’s immigration policies.Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station. 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 Benjamin Breen's The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), we are transported back to a time when there was no such thing as "recreational" and "medicinal" drugs. People ate Egyptian mummies. Tobacco apparently cured cancer. And the book has many more fascinating stories. Focusing in on the Portuguese colonies in Brazil and Angola and on the imperial capital of Lisbon, Breen deftly explores the process by which novel drugs were located, commodified, and consumed. And Breen demonstrates that drugs have been entwined with science and empire from the very beginning. Just like today.Benjamin Breen is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Maroons—enslaved Africans who escaped and formed autonomous communities—dominated Dominica’s hilly interior for centuries. Dominica’s unusual history of a relatively brief period of colonization and few sugar plantations shaped a history of Maroon life very different from the more familiar experiences of Jamaican Maroons. Here they were able to exploit differences among Europeans and elude slavery to a much greater extent. With meticulous attention to detail, Lennox Honychurch's new book In the Forests of Freedom: The Fighting Maroons of Dominica (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) tells the fascinating stories of these communities and offers accounts of both heroism and tragedy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Joshua Simon’s The Ideology of the Creole Revolution: Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, compares the political thought of three Creole revolutionary leaders: Alexander Hamilton, Simón Bolívar and Lucas Alamán. By doing so, Simon brings together the intellectual histories of the US American Revolution and the Spanish American Revolutions of Mexico, and Gran Colombia (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panamá). Unlike previous scholars, Simon finds a set of striking commonalities that unites the histories of the Americas as a whole. In particular, he argues, the institutional context in which American independence movements unfolded profoundly shaped and influenced the ideologies that these intellectual leaders expounded. Although these Creole men were influenced by very different intellectual traditions, they embraced a contradictory ideology that incorporated anti-imperialist and imperialist positions at the same time. This “anti-imperial imperialism” shaped Creoles justifications to political autonomy vis-à-vis European imperial powers, the constitutional mechanisms they designed in their recently independent countries, and ultimately, the imperial policies that they put in place against indigenous and Afro-descendent population. From this new approach emerges a puzzle that Simon discusses at the end of our interview and that has important repercussions for the present: if the Americas were so similar at the moment of independence, why did the United States achieve greater economic prosperity and more stable political institutions while Latin America did not?Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD student 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

From pre-contact, to first-contact, to colonization and beyond, Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba (University of Florida Press, 2018) by Luis Martínez-Fernández is an easy-to-read, yet incredibly fascinating and informative book on the history of early Cuba. In this interview, Martínez-Fernández talks about his Latin American upbringing, the history of pre-contact Cuba, the historical context of Western Europe in 1492, the deep connection between sugar production and slavery, and so much more. Key to the New World manages to effortlessly combine multiple elements of Cuban history, people, cultures, and stories with an objective tone and appealing style. As we continue to learn more about the truths of the “discovery” of the Americas, Martínez-Fernández’s book is an essential read toward a further understanding of those truths.Dr. Luis Martínez-Fernández is a professor of history at the University of Central Florida. Born in Havana, Cuba and raised in Lima, Peru and San Juan, Puerto Rico, he holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in History from the University of Puerto Rico and a Ph.D. in History from Duke University. He is recognized as one of the most prolific and influential scholars in the field of Caribbean Studies. He is the author of numerous publications and his new book, Key to the New World, is the winner of the 2018 Florida Book Awards' Bronze Medal for Nonfiction.Colin Mustful is the author of four historical novels about Minnesota’s settlement and Native history. He holds an MA in history and an MFA in creative writing. He is the founder and editor of a small independent press called History Through Fiction. You can learn more about Colin and his work at colinmustful.com. 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 happens to families and communities after immigration raids? William D. Lopez answers this question and more in his new book Separated: Family & Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019). Using ethnographic methods and interviews to deep dive into the aftermath of a local immigration raid, Lopez provides the stories of community members affected by the event and how their lives are changed forever after. The book provides a robust background of information regarding policy issues relevant to the current immigration climate, like the REAL ID act, as well as experiences from a myriad of perspectives. Lopez also draws on lessons from the Black Lives Matter movement and provides a rich discussion of his positionality (called "reflexivity" in research methods). Overall, this book provides a powerful testimony to events happening in our communities and neighborhoods and is written to a wide audience.This book would align well with graduate level courses on policy, families, race and ethnicity, and/or immigration, but would also be accessible to undergraduates. Anyone interested in these topics, inside and outside of higher education, should check this book out.Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University Michigan. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Donna Guy’s 2016 book Creating Charismatic Bonds in Argentina: Letters to Juan and Eva Perón (University of New Mexico Press) is a history of Peronist populism that puts everyday people at the center of her exploration. Using letters written by Argentine citizens to the Perón couple between 1946 and 1955, Guy offers a nuanced approach to understand charisma, that ineffable quality said to bind popular actors to leadership. She shows that the bonds between popular groups and the Perón couple did more than turn out voters to elections. Ordinary Argentines, at the request of Juan Perón, shaped policies by making suggestions for Five-Year Plans, communicating their visions of national uplift directly to the president. Many letters discussed in her work come from impoverished Argentines living in the countryside or recent migrants to Buenos Aires, groups more marginalized than the members of organized labor and other sectors known for their Peronist loyalty. Guy makes clear that the charisma of Juan Perón is inextricable from the charisma of his wife Eva, bringing the insights of gender history to understand the couple as a dual political force.Many Argentines, especially women, directed their requests and suggestions to her, and her responses helped build the popularity both Juan and Eva Perón. Although writing letters to political leadership is a longstanding practice among popular groups in Latin America, Guy notes the particularities of correspondence to the president and First Lady in the mid-twentieth century. Citizens’ consumption of modern media, such as the radio, shaped the content of their written letters. Furthermore, given high levels of basic literacy throughout Argentina, most of the people sending letters were able to pen their own missives without the help of notaries or other intermediaries. This facilitated the sense that the Perón couple could be directly accessed by the people, making the emotional connection to their addressees all the more deeply felt. In the podcast, Guy discusses the archival sources that form the heart of this book, once assumed to be lost, and she provides context on inequality and modernization in Argentina. This book shows that charismatic bonds were shaped as much by the Argentine people as by their leadership, and her close reading of hundreds of letters offers a window into how ordinary Argentines built the charismatic reputation of the Perón couple that has long outlasted their lifetimes.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 migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. 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

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven 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