New Books in Latin American Studies

Lorena Oropeza, Professor of History at the University of California at Davis, sheds new light on one of Chicano history’s most notorious figures in her new book, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement(University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Oropeza intervenes in the conventional historical scholarship on protest politics through her biography of Reies López Tijerina, a land grant activist and founder of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Alliance of Land Grants). Tijerina was a living testament to the fact that individuals of Mexican descent were part and parcel of the monumental political changes in the United States during the 1960s and the challenge to the established racial order. But Tijerina was more than just another radical advocate of armed protest, he was also uniquely shaped by his extreme religious beliefs and his particular understanding of justice rooted in the restoration of land rights. As the author argues, Tijerina was the harbinger of an anti-colonial rhetoric that helped reframe Mexican American civil rights. Perhaps most importantly, Oropeza centers the experiences and treatment of women in Tijerina’s life as a lens with which to view his world and activism. Drawing from her experience as a former journalist and now academic historian, Oropeza investigates the lives of Tijerina’s wives and daughters through oral history in order to reveal that “the subordination of women was fundamental to his ideal community.” In the end, Reies López Tijerina was a man of intense conviction who sought to achieve his goals at any cost – often at the expense of those that once loved him most.Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Elena Jackson Albarrán’s book Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) explores the changing politics of childhood during the period 1920-1940, in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. That conflict, a civil war which brought down an authoritarian regime, came with new political ideas about social justice that would elevate workers and peasants as quintessential revolutionary citizens. In the context of state formation and nation-building efforts, children became a key target population for revolutionary government programs to forge future citizens. Though interest in childrearing and health had been growing since the nineteenth century, in the 1920s and 1930s, the new state invested in children as never before and paid careful attention to the opinions of the nation’s youngest generation. The chapters examine state programs for art education, radio, and puppet theater as well as youth’s highly publicized incursion into civic life as spokespeople and representatives, both nationally and internationally. Drawing from an unusually-rich body of sources that attest to the importance ascribed to children in this era, Albarrán emphasizes how children received cultural messages and political ideas handed down by adults and found ways to make revolutionary scripts their own. The author notes that programming for children did not offer a universal vision of the Mexican child: rather, state officials crafted different opportunities for urban and rural populations, and some forms of participation were accessible only to children with a certain level of resources. Children pointed out these inequities, negotiating for the more inclusive horizon of opportunities that revolutionary tenets seemed to promise. Thus, Albarrán shows that children contributed to the contentious construction of ideas about the Mexican nation as critical interlocutors and as active citizens.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 inequality, privilege, 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

Nora Jaffary’s Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 (University of North Carolina Press. 2016), tracks how medical ideas, practices, and policies surrounding reproduction changed between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries in Mexico. Perhaps the most important change analyzed in the book, and discussed extensively in the interview, is the increased interest of the state in controlling childbirth and contraception. Whereas the colonial state was mostly interested in controlling reproduction primarily of Spanish women of the elite, in the republican era—specially in the late nineteenth century—the state expanded its scope in order to reach broader and more popular sectors of women. Abortion and infanticide, treated jointly in the book for people did not draw a distinction between them, came under the purview of communities and the state. We learn that family members, lovers and neighbors started denouncing women more frequently, and that criminal trials rose.According to Jaffary such change is explained by the emergence of a discourse of sexual honor and virtue that became imperative for a wider sector of women, one that linked reproduction and the creation of a healthy citizenry to the construction of the national state. However, and in spite of the state’s claim in controlling reproduction, this is not a story of an all-powerful state that defined the life and choices of women, nor is this a history of the march of modern medicine (whether that is a good thing or a bad one) in which the state endorsed learned medicine and banished midwives and popular practitioners. As we will learn, this is a much more convoluted story; in spite of the growing interest of the state in reproduction, cases of abortion and infanticide were widely tolerated as were popular healing practitioners, and criminal trials rarely ended in conviction. Judges treated women cautiously and with justice. Moreover, as Jaffary convincingly demonstrates, this unknown history of childbirth and contraception reveals a world of medical pluralism and medical mestizaje—concepts that refer to the somewhat peaceful co-existence, or even collaboration, between a wide range of medical practitioners. In this wonderful book, Jaffary invites us to think about Latin American history in its own terms, to question histories that posit a lineal or teleological progress, and to see that the past, as much as the present, builds its own concepts and ideas that shape how the body is seen, lived, and experienced.Lisette Varon-Carvajal is a graduate student in history at Rutger’s University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

After emerging victorious from their revolution against the British Empire, many North Americans associated commercial freedom with independence and republicanism. Optimistic about the liberation movements sweeping Latin America, they were particularly eager to disrupt the Portuguese Empire. Anticipating the establishment of a Brazilian republic that they assumed would give them commercial preference, they aimed to aid Brazilian independence through contraband, plunder, and revolution. In contrast to the British Empire's reaction to the American Revolution, Lisbon officials liberalized imperial trade when revolutionary fervor threatened the Portuguese Empire in the 1780s and 1790s. In 1808, to save the empire from Napoleon's army, the Portuguese court relocated to Rio de Janeiro and opened Brazilian ports to foreign commerce. By 1822, the year Brazil declared independence, it had become the undisputed center of U.S. trade with the Portuguese Empire. However, by that point, Brazilians tended to associate freer trade with the consolidation of monarchical power and imperial strength, and, by the end of the 1820s, it was clear that Brazilians would retain a monarchy despite their independence.Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), delineates the differences between the British and Portuguese empires as they struggled with revolutionary tumult. It reveals how those differences led to turbulent transnational exchanges between the United States and Brazil as merchants, smugglers, rogue officials, slave traders, and pirates sought to trade outside legal confines. Tyson Reeder, an editor with the Papers of James Madison and Affiliated Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia, argues that although U.S. traders had forged their commerce with Brazil convinced that they could secure republican trade partners there, they were instead forced to reconcile their vision of the Americas as a haven for republics with the reality of a monarchy residing in the hemisphere. He shows that as twilight fell on the Age of Revolution, Brazil and the United States became fellow slave powers rather than fellow republics.Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Claudia Leal’s Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia (University of Arizona Press, 2018), narrates the unknown history of the transition from slavery to freedom in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia. Not only does Leal centers a region long neglected in histories of Colombia—and more generally in histories of slavery and manumission in Latin America—but she also asks us to use this case to understand the centrality of the environment in any historical account. According to Leal, the particularities of the environment of the Pacific lowlands in Colombia explains the formation of a black peasantry that was able to attain high levels of freedom and autonomy. Here we hear about the importance of rainforests, of minerals, of vegetable ivory, and we learn that through extractive practices black Colombians were able to carve and maintain degrees of freedom perhaps only comparable to the maroons of Surinam.This history, however, does not start in 1851 with the total abolition of slavery in Colombia, for Leal goes back to the colonial period in order to explain why a political economy of extraction was established in the first place. In fact, Leal tracks how blacks appropriated an environment that originally didn’t belong to them, how they negotiated with whites their access to resources and power, and how even in moments in which mining companies challenged their autonomy, they nonetheless found ways to maintain their hard-won freedom. Paradoxically, even if blacks of the Pacific lowlands fulfilled one of the main values of the republican order of the Colombian national state (freedom!), they were not recognized as contributors to the national project. Quite to the contrary, white elites equated them to an environment deemed unhealthy, and allegedly suitable only for savages. The pacific lowlands, and its recently created cities of Tumaco and Quibdó, were thus built as racialized landscapes; geographies plagued by ideologies of racism and biological determinism. Whites’ project to control and “civilize” the territory was ultimately a failed one, for black culture crept into cities and forests. Eventually, with the advent of the 1991 Colombian constitution, black ethnicity became a part and asset of the nation as Colombia entered the era of multiculturalism.Lisette Varon-Carvajal is a graduate student in history at Rutger’s University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Miroslava Chávez-García is the author of Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2018. Migrant Longing is a history of migration, courtship, and identity across the U.S.-Mexican border, documenting the intimate lives of ordinary migrants and immigrants. Drawing on a rare collection of more than 300 letters from her own family, Chávez-García recounts the stories of migration, immigration, and survival across the borderlands region of the southern border.Miroslava Chávez-García is Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She studies immigration and the borderlands, Chicana/o history, juvenile justice, U.S. women of color, and 19th-century California.Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. 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 the third of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene.  Also listen to my individual interviews with Howe and Boyer about their separate volumes, Ecologics and Energopolitics. In this interview, I talk to both authors together about their experiences with collaborative research and writing, and about the wider significance of their scholarship.Ecologics and Energopolitics follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy.  Jointly, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters.  The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced.  Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands. 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.  He can be reached at lancet@rutgers.edu. 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 the second of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene.  Also listen to my interview with Howe about her volume, Ecologics, as well as my interview with both authors together about collaborative research and the wider implications of their work.Dominic Boyer’s Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019) and its partner volume, Ecologics, by Cymene Howe, follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy.  Jointly, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters.  The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced.In Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind development in Mexico to think through how the energy and environmental crises of global warming require new approaches to political theory.  Following the windmills upstream from farmers’ fields to regional and national capitals and overseas to international investors and green energy corporations, Boyer provides a unique, full picture of the participants, negotiations, and conflicts involved.  In doing so, he arrives at a compelling description of how new energic infrastructures are reshaping political experience.Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.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.  He can be reached at lancet@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Bianca Premo’s award-winning book The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, makes a powerful yet seemingly simple claim: during the eighteenth century, illiterate ordinary litigants in colonial Spanish America created enlightened ideas and practices by suing their social superiors in higher numbers and with novel claims. By focusing on civil suits undertaken by women, indigenous groups, and the enslaved, Premo demonstrates a gradual shift from a justice-oriented system—focused on extralegal outcomes and casuistic jurisprudence—to a Enlightened law-oriented system—where ordinary litigants based their claims on natural rights, merit, and freedom. Such a transformation expanded through varied and diverse geographies; from metropolitan cities such as Mexico City and Lima, to rural indigenous regions of Oaxaca, and smaller, ethnically diverse, provincial cities such as Trujillo in Peru. As listeners will hear, The Enlightenment on Trial not only challenges traditional histories that have placed the origin of the Enlightenment solely in Western Europe, and in the minds of a few and select group of European men, but it also asks us to situate Latin America in a global conversation— one in which the ideas of ordinary citizens are the matter of intellectual history, and where our commonalities as humans are more important than our differences. This last point, as professor Premo reminds us at the end of the conversation, is an important lesson for our present, a moment in which arguments about radical alterity are used as a basis for exclusion. Instead, for Premo, it is important to highlight the histories that we share, the stories in which we all partake, and that we all need to recover from historical erasure.Lisette Varon-Carvjal is a graduate student in history at Rutger's University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Chocolate – nothing is more irresistible for a decadent treat or a rich drink to warm you on a cold winter’s evening.  In eighteenth-century Venezuela, cacao became a life source for the colony. Neglected by the Spanish fleet system, Venezuelan colonists struggled to obtain European foods and goods. But, they found a solution in trading the highly coveted luxury good, cacao, for the necessities of life with contrabandists from the Dutch, English, and French Caribbean.  Establishing an intricate contraband network, an intricate contraband network, Venezuelans normalized their subversions to imperial law. Today, we’re pleased to welcome Jesse Cromwell to discuss his new book, The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela (published in 2018 by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press). This incredibly well researched and beautifully written book explores how smuggling in the Spanish Atlantic became more than an economic transaction or imperial worry.  Persistent local need elevated smuggling to a communal ethos and Venezuelans defended their commercial autonomy through passive measures as well as violent protests when the Spanish state enacted the Bourbon reforms in the eighteenth century. Exchanges over smuggling between the Spanish empire and its colonial subjects formed a key part of empire making and maintenance in the eighteenth century.Dr. Julia M. Gossard is assistant professor of history and distinguished assistant professor of honor’s education at Utah State University. A historian of 18th-century France, Julia is finishing her manuscript, Coercing Children, that examines children as important actors in social reform, state-building, and imperial projects across the early modern French world. Dr. Gossard is active on Twitter. To learn more about her teaching, research, and experience in digital humanities, visit her website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies