New Books in Latin American Studies

Rebecca Earle‘s recent book The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America (Cambridge University Press, 2012) investigates the importance of food during the first two centuries of Spanish imperialism in the Americas. She explores how food took a central place in conceptions of bodily health and composition, both in the Old and New Worlds. Not only did the Spanish come to see themselves as different from Amerindians due to the different foods that they both ate, but missionaries worried about the potential to convert native peoples in the colonial absence of theologically-mandated wheat bread and grape wine. This work adds an important layer of analysis to studies of early Spanish imperialism, as well as to the historical debate on colonial ideas about race and perceptions of bodily difference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Beyond what people say, what their voices sound like matters. Voice, as Ana Marcia Ochoa Gautier argues in this marvelous new book Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Colombia(Duke University Press, 2014), was embedded in 19th-century conversations and debates about the boundaries between nature and culture, between the civilized and barbaric, between inclusion or marginalization in a public civic sphere. Set in Colombia but relevant for much of Latin America and the Caribbean, the book draws on brilliant interpretations of the sonorous written archive to take up questions of sound, inscription and the epistemological and ontological status of voice. The book will prompt new formulations in both Sound Studies and Latin American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Riots, audiences on stage, fabulous costumes, gripping stories. That’s what theater was like in the Atlantic world in the age of slavery and colonialism. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon wonderful book New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849 (Duke University Press, 2014) vividly invokes a transatlantic network of performances and their publics, and argues for the making of a performative commons that worked out tensions among societies bent on simultaneously profiting from, and negating the existence of, enslaved Africans and indigenous people. They did this in part through a tradition of dramatizing those very tensions on stage. The book is full of stories of how the riotous multitude witnessed and interacted with those performances, as plays, actors, music, and costumes made their way around the colonial Atlantic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Edward Telles, a prominent sociologist and author, dives into the intricate dynamics of race, ethnicity, and color in Latin America. He discusses findings from his collaborative book, highlighting how skin color affects social and economic outcomes across Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. Telles examines the contrasting ideologies of mestizaje and multiculturalism, the intersectionality of race, class, and gender, and the complex realities of discrimination experienced by different populations. His insights reveal the evolving nature of racial identity amidst ongoing inequalities.

One of the fundamental functions of biography is the preservation of stories. But it also acts to resurrect the stories that may have fallen from view, reinvigorating the tales of people who, with the passage of time, have become merely names on plaques. In La Belle Creole:The Cuban Countess Who Captivated Havana, Madrid, and Paris (Chicago Review Press, 2014), Alina Garcia-Lapuerta aims to do just that: vividly drawing the story of Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, a woman who was tremendously famous during her lifetime but who has since fallen into relative obscurity, especially in America. Many Cubans and Cuban Americans will be familiar with her name, but many others will never have heard of her, a misfortune thatGarcia-Lapuerta’s work will hopefully correct. Just on the surface, there’s a compelling plot: a Cuban girl leaves home and meets with social triumph in Europe, where she is hostess of one of the most famous salons of her day. But its the theme of ex-patriotism, whichGarcia-Lapuerta (an ex-pat herself) elegantly weaves throughout, that is most striking. The longing to return to Cuba and, ultimately, to write about it. Anyone who’s ever lived abroad will recognize the tensions described when Mercedes visits her homeland only to leave it again, but this is a theme that doesn’t always make it into biographies- at least not biographies of people who didn’t live in Paris in the 1920s. It’s even less visible in books about the lives of 19th century figures and, therefore, all the more welcome and provocative here. Garcia-Lapuerta has done a tricky thing. She’s written a book about someone a lot of people will not have heard of, from a place to which a lot of Americans, at least, will not have been. And yet she makes both the Cuba of old and her heroine feel hauntingly familiar, breathtakingly real. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

During the 20th century, El Salvador suffered from one of the longest periods of military rule and political domination in the Americas, beginning with the 1931 coup against the democratically-elected Arturo Aurajo, and culminating in a bloody civil war that lasted from 1979 to 1992. In Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), Erik Ching examines the origins of this history of authoritarian governance in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. What he reveals is a seemingly paradoxical political system, in which frequent elections and high voter turnout and political engagement coexisted with frequent coups and a near-total lack of actual democratic influence on governance. This system led to a peculiar national understand of “democracy” that colored the behavior of El Salvador’s military rulers. Marshaling a wide range of documents, including electoral records, political correspondence, and press articles, Ching presents pre-1931 Salvadorian politics as controlled by networks of political patronage that controlled voting at the local level. Rather than disenfranchising poor and indigenous citizens, these networks provided them a limited degree of political influence. Ching argues that the incorporation of poor and indigenous Salvadorians into regional and eventually national political networks was a key factor in some of the most distinctive features and events in the country’s early-20th Century history: the actions of the paramilitary Liga Roja, composed largely of peasants; the 1932 uprising of indigenous farmers, which he locates partly in response to a sense of electoral disenfranchisement; and the actions of the post 1931 military regime, which brutally surpressed the 1932 uprising, but went on to promote land reform and other measures to keep the peasantry in the political fold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Charles F. Walker‘s book The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Harvard University Press, 2014) charts the rise, fall, and legacy of a massive uprising in colonial Peru.  Indigenous societies in the Andes labored under heavy taxes, tributes, and discrimination imposed by the Spanish imperial state.  Walker’s monograph follows the rebellion of a multiethnic group of indigenous, mestizo, and creole subjects, led by José Gabriel Tupac Amaru in 1780.  Along with his wife Micaela Bastidas, Amaru’s leadership posed a serious challenge to Viceroyalty of Peru.  Although ultimately unsuccessful, Amaru’s rebellion inspired and gave strength to other uprisings in the Andes.  With an engaging narrative of the rebellion’s progress, Walker provides a vivid explanation of one of the largest and most important colonial rebellions in the eighteenth-century Americas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Dengue fever is on the rise globally. Since it is transmitted by mosquitoes which reside and reproduce in human environments, eradication efforts involve households and the people who keep them clean as well as moral and persuasive campaigns of surveillance and invigilation. In his new book Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health and the Politics of Entanglement (University of California Press, 2014), Alex Nading follows the trails of garbage collectors and recyclers, local health care workers, and the mosquitoes themselves in this fascinating ethnography of Nicaragua’s Ciudad Sandino’s efforts to deal with dengue fever. He argues that these efforts are better understood as a series of entanglements and attachments that bring human and more than human actors together in intimate relationships. Nading’s book offers readers new ways to think about the relationships among the state and local actors as mediated through a series of objects: houses, viruses, immune systems, insects, and allocation budgets. This is a story about stories, and how they matter to health and urban environments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Scott Mainwaring and Anibal Perez-Linan are the authors of Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Mainwaring is the Eugene and Helen Conley Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Perez-Linan is an associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh. Why do authoritarian regimes survive or fall? Mainwaring and Perez-Linan’s answer that question with a comprehensive examination of decades of data on Latin America (1945-2005). They argue that normative pressures from domestic actors provide the most statistically significant answer. The book investigates the quantitative findings further with case study examinations of transitions from authoritarian regimes in Argentina and El Salvador. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Lyman Johnson‘s book Workshop of Revolution: Plebian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776-1810 (Duke University Press, 2011) analyzes the economic, political, and social lives of working people in Argentina’s colonial capital.  Johnson traces the economic challenges facing plebian workers in Buenos Aires, including competition from foreign goods, the arrival of enslaved Africans into the city’s economy, difficulties in labor organization, and transformations in colonial governance.  It provides a vibrant explanation of the factors that helped to create an organized working class on the eve of Latin America’s independence movements.  In many ways, his study provides a much-needed introduction to the social and economic factors that eventually resulted in Argentinian revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies