New Books in Latin American Studies

In the 1970s, the Mexican government acted to alleviate rural unemployment by supporting the migration of able-bodied men. Millions crossed into the United States to find work that would help them survive as well as sustain their families in Mexico. They took low-level positions that few Americans wanted and sent money back to communities that depended on their support. But as U.S. authorities pursued more aggressive anti-immigrant measures, migrants found themselves caught between the economic interests of competing governments. The fruits of their labor were needed in both places, and yet neither country made them feel welcome. Ana Raquel Minian explores this unique chapter in the history of Mexican migration. Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018) draws on private letters, songs, and oral testimony to recreate the experience of circular migration, which reshaped communities in the United States and Mexico. While migrants could earn for themselves and their families in the U.S., they needed to return to Mexico to reconnect with their homes periodically. Despite crossing the border many times, they managed to belong to communities on both sides of it. Ironically, the U.S. immigration crackdown of the mid-1980s disrupted these flows, forcing many migrants to remain north of the border permanently for fear of not being able to return to work. For them, the United States became known as the jaula de oro—the cage of gold. Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement.   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 early-modern Atlantic World was a chaotic place over which European empires frequently had little control. In her new book American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Molly Warsh uses the pearl trade to explain the complications around imperial economies and imaginations.  She looks at human fascination with the jewel, the challenges of fishing for the oysters that contained it, and the near impossibility of regulating it for an early-modern state.  Caribbean fisheries took center stage in Iberian attempts to grow rich off of pearls, but indigenous and African labor, alongside colonial subterfuge made the trade a problematic one for imperial regimes.  American Baroque tells a global story about the pearl’s influence across multiple locations, and the ways that early empires struggled to hold their grip. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Water politics have long figured prominently in Mexico, and scholars have addressed such critical topics as irrigation, dam and canal building, and resource management, but few have examined how everyday people think about and use the waters in the daily lives. Casey Walsh‘s Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico (University of California Press, 2018) fills this hole by with a compelling history of bathing, the use of mineral and hot springs, and water politics in central Mexico from Aztec rule to the 21st century.  Through Spanish colonialism, state efforts to police bathing, and capitalist initiatives to appropriate aqueous commons, healing waters have become increasingly commodified and entrapped in infrastructure.  However, as Walsh demonstrates with close attention to popular understandings of health and water, and the efforts of subaltern communities to maintain access and rights to local resources, water continues to be open to alternative, intimate interpretations of its value, powers, and uses.  Rather than a uniform, abstract resource, water is also a plural, heterogeneous substance; appreciating this heterogeneity may help address the water crises of the 21st century. Virtuous Waters is freely available in electronic format here. Lance C. Thurner is a doctoral candidate in History at Rutgers University, where he has recently defended his dissertation on race, medicine, and scientific exploration in 18th-century Mexico. 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 book, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008), Pekka Hämäläinen refutes the traditional story that Indians were bit players or unfortunate victims of the white man’s conquest of the American West. Old maps that divided America into Spanish, French, and British territories, Hämäläinen argues, are “fictions” insofar as they entirely miss great indigenous contenders of military, economic, and political power. Such a one were the Comanches who fought, traded, and cooperated—often simultaneously—with European and Native American rivals, and rose to be a dominating power in the Great Plains for almost 200 years. The Comanche Empire brings a riveting narrative in a dialectical spirit to the fields of American, American Indian, Spanish and Mexican Imperial, and Borderlands histories. Professor Hämäläinen is Rhodes Professor at the University of Oxford, specializing in early and nineteenth-century North American history especially in indigenous, colonial, imperial, borderlands, and environmental history—all topics that invite comparative discussion and a global view. His first book was When Disease Makes History: Epidemics and Great Historical Turning Points (2006); The Comanche Empire is his second book; he is currently working on a history of the Lakota-Sioux that will be published next year. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City 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

With so much political effort placed into forcing a wall between the US and Mexico, Andrew Selee’s new book shows how the ties that bind the two countries together are much stronger. Selee has been on the podcast before with his book, What Should Think Tanks Do?: A Strategic Guide to Policy Impact (Stanford, 2018). His latest book, Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together (PublicAffairs, 2018), focuses on the variety of ways Mexico and the US have been working together, on everything from air transportation to border security to innovation. The dozens of stories about cooperation suggest a bi-lateral relationship that has been growing stronger and deeper over the last several decades. At the end of our conversation, Selee addresses the current border issues and whether changes in US policy will harm the burgeoning relationship between the two countries. Selee is President of the Migration Policy Institute, he had been Vice President of the Woodrow Wilson Center and director of its Mexico Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

More than just a civil war, the Mexican Revolution in 1910 triggered hostilities along the border between Mexico and the United States. In particular, the decade following the revolution saw a dramatic rise in the lynching of ethnic Mexicans in Texas. Nicholas Villanueva Jr.‘s new book The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands (University of New Mexico Press, 2017) argues that ethnic and racial tension brought on by the fighting in the borderland made Anglo-Texans feel justified in their violent actions against Mexicans. They were able to use the legal system to their advantage, and their actions often went unpunished. Villanueva’s work further differentiates the borderland lynching of ethnic Mexicans from the Southern lynching of African Americans by asserting that the former was about citizenship and sovereignty, as many victims’ families had resources to investigate the crimes and thereby place the incidents on an international stage. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. 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 Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism, and Crisis in Argentina (University of Wales Press, 2018), Ignacio Aguiló studies the sociocultural impact caused by the failure of the IMF economic measures in Argentina of 2001-2002. Through the lens of cultural production (films, novels, short stories, artwork and music), the author explores two of the country’s so-called exceptionalisms: whiteness and economic success. These myths, heavily endorsed by the military dictatorship during the 1970s and early 1980s, created a sense of homogeneity and uniqueness that came into question at the time of the crisis. All of the cultural products studied by the author show different aspects of what was actually a crisis in the exceptionality myths that linked race with progress. Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University, NYC campus. 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 Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico (University of California Press, 2018), Nicole Von Germeten explains the most important changes, in both ideas and practices, over three centuries of commercial sex in New Spain. By using literature and extensive archival records, the author explores the gradual criminalization of places and people involved in transactional sex from the 16th to early 19th centuries. By avoiding the anachronistic introduction of terminology, debates, and depictions of current debates in regards to sex work, this book shows the complexities of sexual exchanges in the way they were accepted, rejected, and contested at the time. This broad historical perspective allows the reader, for instance, to understand the origins and causes of the stigma that words like prostitute/prostitution acquired during the 18th century, paving the way for debates that would take place in the following centuries, not only in Mexico, but in other parts of the world. Profit and Passion is an important contribution not only to the history of sexuality but also to ongoing debates in regards to sex work. Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University, NYC campus.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

When Pope Francis visited the United States in 2015, he canonized the eighteenth-century Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, rekindling the smoldering controversy that surrounds this historical figure—both a holy man with zeal for the Gospel and an imperial agent with little concern for the indigenous culture he was supplanting. Serra is also a secular figure, a “founding father” of California, who established missions and presidios with names like San Diego, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco, that would become the backbone of the civic infrastructure of a territory that was first Spanish, then Mexican, then briefly independent, and finally part of the United States. Serra’s likeness stands in the National Statuary Hall in the US Capitol Building, the only Hispanic out of the 100 historical figures enshrined therein. On the podcast today, Steven Hackel speaks about his recent book, Junípero Serra: California’s Founding Father (Hill and Wang, 2014), a remarkable investigation into the cultural context of Serra’s world and lifelong formation—for it was only at the age of 59 that he first set foot in Alta California—and and his subsequent evangelization. Professor Hackel also discusses the politics of Serra’s recent canonization and his place in American memory. Dr. Hackel is Professor of History at the University of California at Riverside; he studies the Spanish Borderlands, colonial California, and California Indians, especially the effects of colonialism and disease upon the Indians and their responses to them. He is the author of two books on the subject; he is also editor of the Early California Population Project and director of the Early California Cultural Atlas; in addition, he is co-curator of the Huntington Library’s exhibition, “Junípero Serra and the Legacy of the California Missions.” Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City 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

It would be difficult to argue against Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn as the most bold and audacious chapter in the history of cybernetics.  In the early 70’s, at the invitation of leftist president, Salvador Allende, the “father of management cybernetics” (as Norbert Wiener christened Beer) attempted nothing less than the development and implementation of a cybernetic governance system for Chile’s nationalized economy.  For decades, we have relied solely on the writings of Beer and his associates for accounts of this amazing techno-political adventure but, thanks to Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, from the MIT press (originally published in 2011 and out in softcover in 2014), we now have a deeply researched scholarly investigation of this extraordinary historical moment in which Beer’s cybernetic Viable System Model was positioned as a tool to enable radical socialist transformation while remaining within Chile’s constitutional democratic framework.  Medina deftly guides us through this astonishing odyssey as the utopian visionary Beer and his brilliant and inspired team of local collaborators, facing an invisible US led economic and technological blockade, craft a real-time communications network stretching the entire length of Chile out of two mainframe computers and a warehouse full of unused telex machines and which proves its mettle in response to a wildly disruptive US funded national truck drivers strike.  Along the way, we meet a colorful cast of characters including doctor turned Marxist lightning rod, Salvador Allende, wily young political operator and future Silicon valley innovator, Fernando Flores, and of course, the wildly charismatic business guru turned leftist, new age quasi-mystic, Stafford Beer; all wrestling with the struggle to keep their emancipatory egalitarian project of distributed decision making and control from tipping over into centralized technocracy as the entire Chilean socialist project teeters towards its brutal and tragic ending.  Seamlessly blending compelling storytelling and astute technological, political, and cultural analysis, Medina’s book stands as a penetrating look at an under-theorized political experiment and a detailed summary of its still hotly debated legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies