New Books in Latin American Studies

Dr. Joseph U. Lenti’s Redeeming the Revolution: The State and Organized Labor in Post-Tlatelolco Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) focuses on state-labor relations in the decade directly following the massacre of peacefully protesting students in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the the Tlatelolco district of Mexico on October 2, 1968. The massacre was a turning point in twentieth-century Mexican social and political history, and as Lenti demonstrates, it pushed Mexican political leaders to re-assert their perceived role as the stewards of the ideals of the Mexican Revolution with Mexico’s working classes. The new revolutionary populist approach rekindled the old state-labor alliances that marked the post-revolutionary era, but masked new social chasms that had emerged in the era of the Cold War. Lenti’s work illustrates the limits of revolutionary rhetoric in the face of post-Tlatelolco social and political realities in Mexico.Julian Dodson is a Post-doctoral Teaching Fellow at Washington State University. His research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century Mexican history, specifically the period of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940.  Other interests include the history of the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S.-Mexico diplomatic relations, environmental, transnational, gender, and cultural history. Julian is the author of Fanáticos, Exiles, and Spies: Revolutionary Failures on the U.S-Mexico Border, 1923-1930. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019. Follow Julian on Twitter @JulianDodson4. 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 Non-Humans in Amerindian South America: Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals, and Songs (Berghahn, 2018), eleven researchers bring new ethnographies to bear on anthropological debates on ontology and the anthropocene. In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, the book’s editor Juan Javier Rivera Andía talks with host Jacob Doherty about the importance of ethnography for refreshing theoretical conversations, historicizing indigenous cosmologies in the centuries long waves of extractivism that have remade Amerindian worlds, and the persistence of more than human relationships in the face of violence and ecological crisis.Juan Javier Rivera Andía is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology of the Americas, the University of Bonn; his research examines rituals and oral tradition among indigenous groups of the Andes of South America, particularly Quechua-speaking people of central and Northern Peruvian highlands.Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, and, most recently, the co-editor of Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class 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

The 2018 election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has brought the issues of police violence, racial discrimination, and misogyny to the fore. Jaime Alves’s book the Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shows that, from the perspective of Black Brazilians, these forces have deep roots in the nation’s history. Alves makes a powerful contribution to urban anthropology, describing the spatial contours of “Brazilian Apartheid” in Sao Paulo, the role of police violence in the constitution of the city’s racial-spatial order, and the ways that national sovereignty is exercised on individual bodies. Richly ethnographic, The Anti-Black City explores these themes through an account of the lives and activism of black residents of Sao Paulo’s favelas. In this episode, Jaime Alves talks with Jacob Doherty about how his background shaped the research leading to the book, about the entanglement of neoliberal moral government through community and the deployment of police terror, and about his conceptual engagements with Afro-pessimist philosophy.Jaime Alves is assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York and a research affiliate at the Centro de Estudios Afrodiasporicos at Universidad Icesi, Colombia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin. His work has appeared in the Journal of Black Studies, Antipode, Journal of Latin American Studies, Identities, and Critical Sociology.Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, and, most recently, the co-editor Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class 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

This tightly argued social and intellectual history of the middle classes in Colombia makes a compelling case for the importance of both transnationalism and gender in the mid-century idea of middle-class-ness. A. Ricardo López-Pedreros' Makers of Democracy: A Transnational History of the Middle Classes in Colombia (Duke University Press, 2019) takes readers through the discursive and ideological creation of the middle classes as necessary to stave off both revolution and oligarchical tyranny in Colombia. As the second half of the book demonstrates, however, members of these middle classes did not always conform to those expectations. The results were tragic, and serve as a cautionary tale in this neoliberal age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Okezi Otovo’s Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945 (U Texas Press, 2016) explores the intersecting histories of race, gender, and class in modern Brazil. Between 1850 and 1945, the period covered in the book, Brazil experienced a range of profound socio-political transformations: from the end of the transatlantic slave trade (1850), to the wholesale abolition of slavery (1988), the demise of the monarchy followed by the rise of a republican system of government, and the ultimate inauguration of the Vargas dictatorship. Set in Bahia, the book considers the impact of these changes in the lives of black mothers and their children by following the rise of the maternalist movement in Brazil and its relationship to international discourses on race, public health reform, and national modernity. In addition to tracking changes to medical ideas about motherhood and children, Okezi Otovo gives agency to these black and brown mothers and considers both how they acted and were acted upon by physicians, public health reformers, and newly-formed welfare institutions. Progressive Mothers, Better Babies provides an important contribution to scholarship working at the intersections of race, class, gender, public health, and medical thought. It will be an important read to anyone seeking to grapple with the essential role assigned to mothers – specifically to black and brown, poor women – by physicians and public health reformers in a deeply patriarchal society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Tiffany Jasmin González speaks with Dr. Gabriela González about her award-winning book, Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability and Rights (Oxford University Press, 2018) to talk about the strategies transborder activists used to redeem la raza from body politic exclusion happening in the U.S. She finds that middle-class Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans modernized la raza by encouraging Mexican-origin people to take ethnic pride and unity seriously, and to find strategies to create community during a time when Mexico and U.S. pushed for modernization. Dr. González’s rich analysis of the Idar family, the Munguía family, Leonor Villegas de Magnón and the Mexican Revolution, Emma Tenayuca, and LULAC illustrates another story of activism in the early twentieth century. Turn your volume up and tune in to this episode to learn more.Tiffany Jasmin González is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at Texas A&M University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

On January 28, 1918, just outside of town of Porvenir, Texas, US Army servicemen, Texas Rangers, and civilians murdered 15 unarmed Mexican men and boys. This massacre was not an aberration, writes Monica Muñoz Martinez, the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University and former Andrew Carnegie Fellow. In The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Harvard University Press, 2018), Martinez argues that the rampant violence inflicted by Anglos against Mexican and Latinx people in Texas in the early twentieth century left a long legacy which reverberates into the twenty first century. The Injustice Never Leaves You is a book about the long term tragedy of racialized violence, and the efforts by victims and their ancestors to seek justice and to remember, often in the face of state-sponsored historical erasure. Winner of several prizes including the Lawrence Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians, The Injustice Never Leaves You is a testament to the power of history and an important statement in our current moment of American political crisis.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 From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2019), Casey Lurtz explains how the fertile yet isolated region of the Soconusco became integrated into global markets in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. Located in what is today the state of Chiapas, the Soconusco was a lightly-populated borderlands region where sovereignty was murky, for both Mexico and Guatemala claimed the district and residents moved freely across the scarcely-delineated boundary between national territories. There were other challenges to developing an export economy: the Soconusco faced labor scarcity, lacked institutional and material infrastructure, and was regularly destabilized by political violence. Nevertheless, it became the primary coffee-producing region in Mexico in this era. To trace how this occurred, Lurtz notes the role of politicians and entrepreneurial large landowners, Mexican and foreign, in developing coffee plantations (fincas), but her cast of characters goes beyond the political and economic elite. For the author, local smallholders and migrant laborers were equally central protagonists in the story of how the Soconusco became so productive. She argues that these often-overlooked actors were influential in shaping the region’s economy and its integration into international markets. The book’s chapters trace how both powerful and marginal figures in the district responded to each of the various impediments to development. Using rich local sources to reconstruct mapping and surveying efforts, ordinary transactions, and legal disputes, Lurtz connects this economic and social history to the political history of nineteenth-century Latin America. Much as political liberalism should be studied as both a set of ideas and a set of practices, the economic aspects of liberalism are also worth examining on the ground at a microhistorical level. Lurtz reveals how economic liberal ideas and structures were invoked and demanded by villagers, workers, and landowners in the Soconusco in order to advance their diverse agenda.Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and her dissertation was titled “Transnational Ambitions: Student Migrants and the Making of a National Future in Twentieth-Century Mexico.” She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). 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 secession of Texas from Mexico was a dry run for the slaveholder’s republic of the Confederate States of America, argues Andrew Torget in Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850(University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Torget, the University Distinguished Teaching Professor of history at the University of North Texas (and the Guinness World Record holder for longest history lesson), covers a pivotal swath of history in the American southwest. During the antebellum period, the Texas borderlands transitioned from Comanche, to Mexican, to Texan, to American territory. Slavery, Torget argues, was a crucial political and social institution each step of the way, and acted as a wedge which drove the United States apart and into Civil War. The region’s unique climate made plantation cotton cultivation profitable, and in turn shaped the history of an entire continent. Seeds of Empire won several awards in 2016, including the David J. Weber – Clements Center for Best Non-fiction Book on Southwestern America from the Western History Association.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

The dawn of the new millennium bore witness to an unprecedented transformation of the population in the Southeastern United States as evidenced by Dr. Jennifer A. Jones in her new book The Browning of the New South (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Jones, an Assistant Professor of Sociology as well as Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines the evolution of race relations in the face of rapid demographic change as Mexican immigrants move into the traditionally biracial American South. Employing a community-based ethnographic approach, Jones vividly illustrates shifting Southern race relations through the case study of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Browning of the New South contributes to the scholarship on immigration and racial formation by revealing the mechanisms that spur collaboration (rather than division) between Latino immigrants and African Americans in a process that Jones calls “minority linked fate.” Counter to a generally national conception of racial formation, Jones emphasizes its local nature, not simply based on preexisting racial hierarchies or phenotype but instead on personal experiences of discrimination, unique social pressures, and local political dynamics. Ultimately, this study of the newly triracial South has immense implications for the future of U.S. politics and our understanding of how race is made.Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies