New Books in Latin American Studies

The North American Free Trade Agreement—or NAFTA, as we Americans call it—is very much in the news of late, primarily because President Trump has decided to make good on what he famously called “the single worst trade deal” that the United States has ever approved. Trump’s assessment, like so many of his statements, isn’t quite the fact he’d like it to be. In study after study, economists have found that NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy ranges from relatively insignificant to mildly beneficial. So as the media follows the negotiations and the talking-heads talk, we once again find ourselves in the welter of not knowing what to believe. What we need—what it seems we always need of late—is someone we can trust to clarify the situation, someone who basis their analysis on facts, on research, on evidence, someone who cares not only about the truth of the matter, but who also has a moral compass we can admire. Today I interview Alyshia Gálvez, author of the new book Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico (University of California Press, 2018). She is this person. She approaches NAFTA with a wide and precise lens, examining not only the economics of the agreement, but also its impact on public health, social welfare, agricultural practices, migration patterns, government policy and so many other considerations that get overlooked when the focus gets narrowed to economics. She looks across the border and at the border itself, so we can understand how the lives of the Mexican people have changed in the twenty years since NAFTA began. Gálvez shows us that NAFTA is indeed a terrible deal, but in all of the ways that Trump doesn’t and seemingly can’t. She offers us an analysis guided by rigor, insight, thoroughness, and, above all, compassion for the lives of very people that NAFTA has destroyed. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.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 Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins (Duke University Press, 2017), David García reminds us that how culture is understood and interpreted not only reflects the political and social discourses of the day, but also shapes those discussions. Drawing on figures as diverse as academics like Melville Herskovitz, performers such as Duke Ellington, and those like dancer/anthropologist Katherine Dunham who filled multiple roles, García lays bare the ways that people in the Americas from the 1930s until the 1950s understood the African origins of black music and dance. He is particularly interested in how the discourse about African retentions in black diasporic culture intensified cultural, political, and social dichotomies: primal vs. civilized, science vs. magic, black vs. white, and most importantly, modernity vs. primitivity. García argues these concepts were defined in terms of each other through the discourse he analyzes, with the politically dominant groups reinforcing positive connotations with the ideas they identified with themselves. Proceeding in broadly chronological order, García begins with a critique of the intellectual foundations of the discipline that we now call ethnomusicology and explores how the approaches taken to African retentions in black music and dance by some of the field’s prominent figures were fundamentally influenced by scientific principles and Freudian psychology. Moving from academia to performance, García expands his argument by considering the rhetoric around black music and dance in the United States, the Caribbean, and Mexico as well as analyzing individual works and performances by Katherine Dunham, Asadata Dafora, Modupe Paris, Duke Ellington, and others. The book ends with a close reading of the cultural and political implications of the mambo, which was a transnational dance phenomenon in the early 1950s. Listening for Africa provides a dense, theoretically rigorous accounting of how the forces that shaped the production and analysis of black music and dance in the mid twentieth century also reinforced political and cultural oppression. David F. García is an Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research on black and Latin music in the United States has been published in MUSICultures, Journal of the Society for American Music and other journals. His first monograph, Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music received a Certificate of Merit from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 2014 and is also a Visiting Scholar at the Cristobal Díaz Ayala Collection of Cuban and Latin American Popular Music by the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Cuba’s grassroots revolution prevailed on America’s doorstep in 1959, fueling intense interest within the multiracial American Left even as it provoked a backlash from the U.S. political establishment. In this groundbreaking book, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), historian Teishan A. Latner contends that in the era of decolonization, the Vietnam War, and Black Power, Cuba claimed center stage for a generation of Americans who looked to the insurgent Third World for inspiration and political theory. As Americans studied the island’s achievements in education, health care, and economic redistribution, Cubans in turn looked to U.S. leftists as collaborators in the global battle against inequality and allies in the nation’s Cold War struggle with Washington. By forging ties with organizations such as the Venceremos Brigade, the Black Panther Party, and the Cuban American students of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and by providing political asylum to activists such as Assata Shakur, Cuba became a durable global influence on the U.S. Left. Drawing from extensive archival and oral history research and declassified FBI and CIA documents, this is the first multi-decade examination of the encounter between the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. Left after 1959. By analyzing Cuba’s multifaceted impact on American radicalism, Latner contributes to a growing body of scholarship that has globalized the study of U.S. social justice movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Histories of banking and finance aren’t particularly well-known for being riveting, adventurous reads: they tend to be technical at the expense of being strongly narrative-driven. Peter James Hudson’s Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (University of Chicago Press, 2017) defies this stereotype. An examination of private lending in the Caribbean by North American bankers between the 1890s and the 1930s, Hudson tells a colorful, albeit at-times disturbing tale of a few American bankers who were able to operate virtually without restriction or regulation. Acting almost as freebooters, they dreamt up new practices to try out on Latin American governments, usually not to their benefit, while reinforcing many North American attitudes and stereotypes about Latin Americans, most of all racially. The result of this imperial lending was traumatic for Caribbean and Latin American governments. For much of this period, bankers enjoyed the official backing of the U.S. government, allowing them to operate with immunity and total security. Through President Taft’s policy of “Dollar Diplomacy,” they were able to operate as an arm of U.S. foreign policy. By making funds available to repressive governments, they helped to cement their place in power at the expense of their subjects, while the amount owed by these governments soon left them under the de facto control of banks and by extension the U.S. government. Ultimately, much of this system came crashing down with the Great Depression, which helped to expose these lending practices as dangerous and ill-regulated. Nevertheless, the effect on the region outlived these practices. Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.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 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