New Books in Latin American Studies

In Building A Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (UNC Press, 2014), Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis Sonia Song-Ha Lee challenges two common misperceptions surrounding the Civil Rights Movement. The first is the presumption that Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans played marginal roles in the advancement of civil rights and social justice causes, and second, that the aims and methods of Latinos diverged from those of African Americans preventing the two groups from building interracial coalitions and cooperating in their pursuit of racial and socioeconomic justice. Focusing on the social and political context of postwar New York City, Dr. Lee describes the issues, people, and organizations that were central in establishing cross-racial coalitions between Puerto Rican and African American parents, students, and activists. Realizing their shared struggle against racism, poverty, and marginalization, Professor Lee argues that Puerto Ricans and African Americans developed an “overlapping” sense of ethno-racial identity in which notions of blackness and Latinidad were “intertwined and mutually reinforced” through social and political activism. 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 1850s, when the majority of the population of Colombia (known then as New Granada) embraced the emancipation of the remaining 17,000 people still enslaved, the lettered elite quickly tied emancipation to emerging ideas of universal citizenship in the Colombian republic. Yet there was no agreement over the rights that emancipatory citizenship would provide. Jason McGraw explores the political struggles over citizenship–and the recognition of that citizenship–in the six decades after emancipation in his book, The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship (UNC Press, 2014). Combining social, political, and intellectual history, McGraw carefully shows how lettered elites, who mostly succeeded in eliminating illiterate Colombians from formal politics, never managed to silence fully the rich vernacular politics of the working classes. In the process, The Work of Recognition argues for the centrality of Afro-Colombians, the Caribbean region, and the legacy of emancipation to Colombian national political struggles of the nineteenth century and the emergence of robust labor politics in the early twentieth. 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 the emancipation of slavery in the late nineteenth century, Afro-Brazilians moved to cities like Rio de Janeiro in search of employment. Because of the lack of opportunity and a shortage of resources, Brazilians set up their own housing arrangements on the hillsides above the city. These neighborhoods are known... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

As slavery came to an end in the Caribbean’s British colonies, officials and local reformers began to worry about how and whether they would convince their newly freed workforce to continue working. More specifically, they worried about underpopulation, and whether the formerly enslaved population was reproducing quickly enough. This was the source of instruments of surveillance such as the census, as well policies and institutions meant to ensure the continuing reproductive health of the populace. This is the point of departure for Juanita De Barros‘ terrific book Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery (UNC Press, 2014) as it explores the dynamics and the multiple actors involved, including poor women, Caribbean reformers, midwives, colonial officials and many others. De Barros offers an innovative way to understand the everyday lives of Caribbean women as she explores the debates and policies centered on sex, health and colonial policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

As demographic trends continue to mark the so-called “Latinization” of the U.S., pundits across various media outlets struggle to understand the economic, cultural, and political implications of this reality. In popular discourse, Latinoas/os are often referred to as a monolithic group in terms of cultural practices, voting patterns, and consumer preferences. Of course, Latinas/os are one of the most diverse ethnic groups in the U.S., comprising more than 14 nationalities (including indigenous groups) with variances in language, cultural practices, and political attitudes that mirror their geographic distribution. In Thirteen Ways of Looking At Latino Art (Duke University Press, 2014) the accomplished essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans enters into conversation with the distinguished philosopher Jorge J.E. Gracia around 13 pieces of Latina/o art in order to excavate the underpinnings of Latina/o identity and culture. Each work of art provides the impetus for lively exchanges between Stavans and Garcia over the purpose and politics of historical representation, artistic expression, ethno-racial identification, ethics, and religion. Written in an engaging dialogic form, the reader is permitted to listen in as Stavans and Gracia reflect (and at time disagree) over the meanings and significance of each art piece to the broader Latina/o experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Gregory E. O’Malley examines a crucial, but almost universally overlooked, aspect of the African slave trade in his new book Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2014). Although most work on the topic focuses on the “Middle Passage” – the shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean – O’Malley chronicles the “final passages” that many captives faced from the Caribbean to ports scattered throughout the Americas. A significant percentage of enslaved people faced these added voyages, which could often be more brutal and unhealthy than the Middle Passage. O’Malley traces the effect of the intercolonial trade on African captives, as well its influence on the creation of an enslaved culture in the Americas. He also examines in great detail how this intercolonial trade shaped the markets of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, which in turn dramatically affected diplomatic relations between European powers in the period. 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 (re)making of place has composed an essential aspect of Southern California history from the era of Spanish colonialism to the present. In Aztlan and Arcadia: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Creation of Place (NYU Press, 2014) Associate Professor of American Studies at Middlebury College Roberto Lint Sagarena examines the competing narratives of Anglo American conquest and ethnic Mexican reconquest following the U.S. War with Mexico in the mid-19th century. Employing a transnational lens that illuminates the commonalities between Spanish colonizers, Mexican criollos, Anglo American settlers, and ethnic Mexican Californians, Dr. Lint Sagarena argues that the ethno-nationalist histories of Aztlan and Arcadia share commonalities in logic, language, and symbolism that are rooted in religious culture and history. From Anglo American Hispanophilia to Chicana/o indigenismo, Professor Lint Sagarena sheds new light on the region’s long and conflicted history over its multi-ethnic past as well as the understanding by many of its inhabitants that “owning place requires owning history.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Jenny Shaw‘s recent book Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (University of Georgia Press, 2013) analyzes how social, religious, and ethnic categories operated in Barbados and the Leeward Islands. She documents the arrival of Irish migrants into the Caribbean who came in some cases involuntarily, and in other cases with dreams to make their own fortunes in the islands’ booming sugar trade. Their Catholicism and social standing long kept them from joining the ruling class. But, Shaw traces how the simultaneous arrival of enslaved Africans complicated those social standings, while also helping to simplify them at a later date. In the process, her study injects new life into the question of racial ideology in the British Americas, as well as the role and influence of religion in the Anglo-Caribbean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Mexican American religious healing – often called curanderismo – is a vital component of life in the US-Mexican borderlands. In his book Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo (New York University Press, 2014) – Brett Hendrickson tracks healers going back to the nineteenth century and even before. He argues that these healing practices were never only Mexican American nor were they a sign of an inability to develop modern bio-medicine. They have in fact been shaped in a transcultural context where ideas about metaphysical healing and the efficacy of gifted individuals circulated among Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Anglo-American settlers. Each population has contributed to the development and growing popularity of folk curanderismo. Brett Hendrickson is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. 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 transformative text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua referred to the U.S.-Mexico border region as “una herida abierta (an open wound) where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country–a border culture.” To Anzaldua the “open wound” or new culture of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands resulted from “the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (i.e., the imposition of the U.S.-Mexico border in the mid-19th century). Since the establishment of the U.S.-Mexico border, politicians, local officials, businessmen, and residents have competed over the definition, control, and memory of the region. In Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, Deborah R. Vargas deconstructs the dominant narrative tropes that have defined the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a hetero-normative and masculinist frontier space of Anglo American conquest juxtaposed against Tejano/Chicano efforts to resist Anglo dominance through the preservation of “authentic” Mexican culture. dIn her fascinating analysis of Tejana/Chicana singers and musicians, Dr. Vargas argues that the lives of these “dissonant divas” resist simple classification as either purveyors of Mexican culture or as accommodating and assimilating Anglo American cultural norms and values. Indeed, through her investigation of the intersection of race, place, gender, music, and memory in the Texas-Mexico borderlands, Professor Vargas provides a new lens into the identities and histories that emerge from the new cultural space Anzaldua referred to as the borderlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies