New Books in Latin American Studies

Megan Threlkeld is an associate professor of history at Denison University. Her book Pan-American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) provides a rich transnational examination of the years following World War I and American women activists who saw themselves global leaders in promoting women’s rights and international peace. U.S. internationalists such as Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Doris Stevens sought to build friendships with Mexican women, including educator Margarita Robles de Mendoza and feminist Elena Torres. They established new organizations, sponsored conferences and rallied for peaceful relations between the two countries at a time of tense or broken diplomatic ties. The efforts at an apolitical “human internationalism” were complicated by differences in ideologies, and cross-cultural misunderstanding that took for granted that Mexican women wanted the same political rights as U.S. women. To U.S. women, Mexican nationalism appeared as an obstacle while the revolutionary spirit of Mexico inspired its female citizens to focused on wide-ranging social reform and international economic justice. Despite failures internationalism endured through women’s political involvement in the Peace with Mexico campaign, and the establishment of the Inter-American Commission on Women. Pan American Women exposes the ideological and racist views that brought failure to building an inter-American movement for peace and equality and illuminates the role of U.S. feminism and women’s activism in forwarding imperialism abroad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Although the designation now applies to American citizens of Mexican ethnicity writ large, the term Mexican American (hyphenated or not) also refers to the rising generation of ethnic Mexicans born and raised in the U.S. that came into adulthood during the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War years. In a new biography, George I. Sanchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (Yale University Press, 2015) Professor of History at Texas A&M University Carlos Kevin Blanton provides the first in-depth study of one of the Mexican American generation’s most prolific intellectuals and activists. Born into humble circumstances in rural New Mexico in 1906, George I. Sanchez became a tireless and tremendously influential academic, policy advisor, and activist who devoted his career to battling poverty and discrimination against Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest. Whether engaged in teaching as a professor of education at the University of Texas, a researcher for numerous governmental and non-profit foundations, or as a leader and collaborator of civil rights organizations like LULAC, AGIF, ACLU, and the NAACP, Sanchez was a racial integrationist ahead of his time. In this thorough and empathetic portrait of one of the mid-twentiethcentury’s most innovative educators and activists, Professor Blanton challenges previous interpretations of the Mexican American Generation’s sense of identity, as well as their contributions to civil rights reform and Cold War liberalism. 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 the Haitian Revolution abolished slavery in Haiti and established its independence from France, it affected surrounding colonies in profound and unexpected ways. Ada Ferrer‘s new book Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2015) centers on the tension between the abolition of slavery in Haiti and the coterminous intensification of slavery in nearby Cuba. Even as Cuban and Spanish officials worked to contain information circulating about the successful slave revolt just across the water, they also seized the opportunity to bring thousands of enslaved people to Cuba to expand their sugar-producing capacity. In the midst of this, people, information, ships and objects circulated within a Caribbean space in which slavery, anti-slavery, imperialism and sovereignty mirrored one another in paradoxical ways. Freedom’s Mirror immerses readers in this moment with stories of unlikely alliances, fear, greed and idealism. It is a beautifully written and really impressive example of history that shifts among sweeping geopolitical processes and gripping stories of individuals and their struggles in this transformative era. 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 mid-1950s, Venezuela’s military government razed a massive slum settlement in the heart of Caracas and replaced it with what was at the time one of Latin America’s largest public housing projects. When the dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez was overthrown on January 23, 1958, however, thousands of people rushed to occupy the uninhabited portions of the project, taking it over and renaming the resulting neighborhood for the date of the fall of the regime: the 23 de Enero. The neighborhood that emerged stood at the geographic and in some cases political center of Venezuela’s transition to democracy over the decades that followed. This unruly, often contradictory transition is detailed the newly released Barrio Rising: Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela (University of California Press, 2015) by Alejandro Velasco, Assistant Professor at the Gallatin School at New York University. The book traces how the residents of the 23 de Enero came to fashion an expansive understanding of democracy–both radical and electoral–from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, and examines how that understanding still resonates today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Due in large part to sensationalist representations in contemporary media and politics, the U.S.-Mexico border is popularly understood as a space of illegal activity defined by threats of foreign intrusion including: undocumented migration, drug trafficking, and national security risks. Viewed through the late-20th and early-21st century prisms of drug wars, immigration restriction, terrorism, surveillance, and resurgent American nationalism, the border itself appears to be a definitive boundary between dichotomous societies, nations, and people. Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University Geraldo L. Cadava challenges this view in his book Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Harvard University Press, 2013). Focusing on the Arizona-Sonora segment of the U.S.-Mexico border during the mid-to-late 20th century, Cadava narrates the interlocked histories of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and whites as regional boosters (i.e., politicians and businessmen on both sides of the border) envisioned the formation of a Sunbelt Borderland extending from the urbanizing centers of Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona to the industrializing locales of Nogales, Hermosillo, and Guaymas, Mexico. Engaging the findings of scholars that have focused on the hardening of the U.S.-Mexico border through restrictionist federal immigration policies and the increased policing of the boundary itself during the first half of the 20th century, Cadava argues that recent borderlands history is “defined less by the international line itself and more by the range of economic, political, social, and cultural relationships that transcended the line.” What emerges is a rich history of transnational communication and movement throughout the region by a host of complex figures including businessmen, politicians, consumers, students, artists, and undocumented laborers; resulting in the development of a “regional culture forged through the institutions and traditions of the U.S.-Mexico 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

Historically, Venezuela is known as one of the most stable Latin American nations of the twentieth century. The subsequent discovery of oil transformed Venezuela into a petrostate. Yet wealth inequality dramatically increased. Against this economic and social disparity, Hugo Chavez rose to power, becoming one of a number of dynamic Latin American politicians. But what legacy did Chavez leave behind after his death in 2013, and how has his successor, Nicholas Madruo, fared in continuing the Bolivarian Revolution? Rory Carroll is a journalist with The Guardian and spent a number of years in Venezuela. His book, Comandante: Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela (Penguin Books, 2013), recounts his time in Latin America. Speaking to Venezuelans on both side of the political spectrum, from farmers to ex-politicians and government insiders, Carroll discovers that opinions of Chavez’s presidency are sharply divided. However, many agree that Hugo fundamentally changed the destiny and vision of Venezuela. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Kevin O’Neill‘s fascinating book Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala (University of California Press, 2015) traces the efforts of multi-million dollar programs aimed at state security through gang prevention in Guatemala. O’Neill is most interested in the ways that Christianity and ideas about piety, salvation, redemption, and transformation guide and shape a variety of programs in prisons, rehabilitation centers, and, perhaps surprisingly, reality television and call centers. This is a finely hewn multi-sited ethnography as well as a moving account of the life of a single former gang member. At its core is a tension between the critique of programs that range from the absurd to the tragic, and a recognition that without those programs, former gang members in Guatemala would be relegated to the barest of bare lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Cesar Chavez founded a labor union. Launched a movement. And inspired a generation. Two Decades after his death, Chavez remains the most significant Latino figure in U.S. history.” So reads the inside flap ofMiriam Pawel’s new biography The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (Bloomsbury Press, 2014). However, while many are acquainted with the iconography of Chavez as the leader of the Farmworker Movement that took on California’s powerful grape industry during the mid-to-late 1960s, much less is known about Chavez himself and his personal and organizational background prior to the formation of the National Farm Workers Association (the precursor to the United Farm Workers or UFW) or the internal dynamics and struggles between Chavez and his top brass. With great detail and empathy, Pawel provides a complex portrait of Chavez as a visionary and tireless organizer whose humility, strategic brilliance, and improbable success was matched only by his own arrogance, tactical blunders, and embarrassing defeats. We hope you enjoy listening to our fascinating conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Brazilian society is rife with inequality. In her brilliant new book The Color of Modernity: Sao Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2015), Barbara Weinstein argues that one of the sources of enduring inequality is the historical production of the region of Sao Paulo as Brazil’s engine of modernity, and of whiteness. Maintaining that discourses of difference informed political decisions that in turn delineated regional inequalities, her book gleans a discursive trail from a variety of sources and archives. It makes a powerful case for understanding region as a deeply politicized historical artifact rather than defined by natural boundaries. The book centers on the Constitutionalist uprising of 1932 in Sao Paulo as well as its memorialization in subsequent years, and draws from a wide variety of sources including memoirs, press, music, photography, graphic design, exhibits and staged spectacles. Despite the participation of people of African descent and women, narratives elaborating on and commemorating the uprising upheld the notion of a white, male protagonists defending the status of São Paulo as Brazil’s most modern and progressive region. This narrative took hold and, as a variety of constituencies found it compelling, became intrinsic to expressions of Brazilian nationalism, even as it existed in tension with declarations of racial democracy. Weinstein writes with precision and clarity that make this important book a pleasure to read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Since September 2014, much of Mexico has been gripped by the story of the Ayotzinapa kidnappings – the mass abduction of 43 rural schoolteachers in Iguala in the state of Guerrero. The tragic disappearance of the students has raised questions about the origins, nature, and methods of terror that have seized the nation. Alexander Avina’s new book, Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside (Oxford University Press, 2014), details the origins and memories of state violence during the peasant movement in Guerrero in the 1960s and 1970s. While the nation has long been heralded for its economic growth and political stability in the mid-twentieth century–the so-called Mexican Miracle– Avina reveals the deep, but overlooked, forms of everyday violence waged by the state at the local level. Using declassified military and intelligence records with oral histories of peasants, this work examines the mobilization of two peasant groups from Guerrero know as the Party of the Poor (PLDP) and the National Revolutionary Civic Association (ACNR). Behind leaders from the normales rurales (rural schools), such as Genaro Vazquez and Lucio Cabanas, Guerrero’s peasants challenged the structural violence and methods of domination of national party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), to advocate for inclusion into the democratic process, greater access to markets, and land reform. They looked to the principles of the Mexican Revolution as they organized through direct civic participation, democratic action, and guerrilla resistance. Beyond simply chronicling this overlooked period in the nation’s past, Avina illustrates that the revolutionary struggles of the peasant movement continues to be fought in the historical memory of the people of Guerrero today. This is a tremendously important work and, somewhat tragically, a timely one as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies