New Books in Latin American Studies

Moments before his death at the hands of Spanish colonial officials on November 15, 1781, Aymaran leader Túpac Katari assured his apostles as well as his adversaries that he would “return as millions.” As promised, Katari’s presence in Bolivia did not end with his life. In the centuries since his historic siege of La Paz, Katari has returned often, and remains a cornerstone of the five-hundred-year-long rebellion to reclaim and restore an Indigenous world that long predated the formation of Bolivia. Such a rebellion is the topic of Benjamin Dangl’s latest book, The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia (AK Press, 2019), a deep dive into the historical roots and contemporary relevancy of Indigenous-led movements in modern Bolivia.Drawing on fifteen years of journalistic experience in Bolivia, Dangl demonstrates the ways that Aymara, Quechua, and Guaraní intellectuals, activists, and communities use history as a means of resistance. Dangl shows how the Indigenous campesino union, the Andean Oral History Workshop, caciques apoderados, and other Indigenous activists seized historical knowledge and symbolism as their own, reminding the world of their role as agents of historical change. Over the last several decades, such efforts have led to monumental shifts in Bolivian politics that have permanently transformed the past, present, and future of the country.Benjamin Dangl teaches journalism at the University of Vermont where he is Lecturer of Public Communication in the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics. As a specialist of Bolivian politics, Dangl provides New Books listeners with insightful commentary on the historical context and immediate impact of the recent coup that removed Indigenous president Evo Morales from power.Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. 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 his new book, How “Indians” Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory (University of Arizona Press, 2019), Dr. Gonzalo Lamana carefully investigates the writings of Indigenous intellectuals of the Andean region during Spanish colonialism. By delving into and reinterpreting the work of Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, Lamana effectively articulates the development of critical race theory from its outset in colonial Latin America. By sharing these centuries old texts, Lamana gives important context to today's social climate while reinvigorating voices from the past. As Lamana points out, “Indians” lived in an upside down world - a world of lies that Indigenous intellectuals were unable to expose. Through the work of Lamana and others, that lie is finally being exposed.Gonzalo Lamana is an associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. His teaching and research explores themes of subalternity and indigeneity, race and theology, and meaning-making in the colonial period through a comparative, cross-area and time study of colonial and postcolonial dynamics. Some of his previous publications include Domination without Dominance. Inca-Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru and Pensamiento colonial crítico.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

In her new book Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops (Routledge, 2019), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier looks up at the sky, and from there she begins her stories about wifi, pigeons, cacti, the lottery and congas. This dense and surprising ethnography considers the everyday lives of Cubans as they navigate, invent, and strategize ways to sustain what is most important to them. The book offers a new account of what has been called the Special Period in Cuba, and it does so through powerful storytelling. The emphasis here is on the ambiguous role of the state, the condition of infrastructures, and the nature of belief and faith and the ongoing transnational connections beyond Cuba. With compelling prose and evocative artwork, this book makes essential intellectual and aesthetic contributions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Latin America – especially colonial Latin America – is not particularly known for futurism. For popular audiences, the region’s history likely evokes images of book burning, the Inquisition, and other symbols of orthodoxy and fatalism. Specialists too tend to associate Latin America with a deep sense of historicism: the weight of memory – conquest, genocide, state violence – deeply marks the region’s politics and culture. On the other hand, in traditional historical narratives, a cognitive orientation towards the future is the province of northern Europe, the scientific revolution, liberalism, capitalism – in a word, modernity.In The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico (Yale University Press, 2018), however, Matthew O’Hara uncovers a vast array of social practices in colonial Mexico that force us to reconsider who owns the future. Noted intellectuals were not the only ones planning ahead; instead, common people managed overlapping temporalities as they negotiated personal finance, heavenly salvation, health, and the climate. In addition to detailing the subjectivities such structures and practices produced, O’Hara also traces a long arc of change over three centuries of Spanish rule.  Improvised financial mechanisms, revised modes of discerning natural truths, and personalized notions of spiritual self-improvement transformed the colonial experience of time. But rather than tracking these to European philosophes, O’Hara finds them emerging from the fabric of colonial experience and developing into a unique temporality in which tradition and change were mutually constructive. For any readers interested in time and temporality, The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico will give you much to think with.Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.  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 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