New Books in Latin American Studies

Jan 23 2025 861 ep. 59 mins 1.8k
New Books in Latin American Studies Podcast artwork

Interview with Scholars of Latin America about their New Books

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Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy (EF, JP)

Jan 23 2025 34 mins  
What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is imminently forthcoming from Cambridge UP

Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin. "Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum" (NYU Press, 2024)

Jan 20 2025 41 mins  
How the US asylum process fails to protect against claims of gender-based violence. Through eyewitness accounts of closed-court proceedings and powerful testimony from women who have sought asylum in the United States because of severe assaults and death threats by intimate partners and/or gang members, Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum (NYU Press,

Byron Ellsworth Hamann, "The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781–1844" (Getty, 2022)

Jan 18 2025 52 mins  
The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781–1844 (Getty, 2022) is an architectural history and media-archaeological study of changing theories and practices of government archives in Enlightenment Spain. It centers on an archive created in Seville for storing Spain's pre-1760 documents about the New World. To fill this new archi

Andrew Laird, "Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Jan 18 2025 43 mins  
Andrew Laird, of Brown University, discusses Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2024). In 1536, only fifteen years after the fall of the Aztec empire, Franciscan missionaries began teaching Latin, classical rhetoric, and Aristotelian philosophy to native youths in central Mexico. The remarkable linguistic and

Victor M. Valle, "The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands" (U New Mexico Press, 2023)

Jan 17 2025 81 mins  
Chile is more than just spice, writes Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and Cal Poly Ethnic Studies professor Victor Valle in The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands (U New Mexico Press, 2023). By tracing the meaning of chile as a plant and chile eating as an act. Valle shows how Indigenous cultivation and culinary practices troubled colonizers, sustained

Benjamin H. Bradlow, "Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Jan 13 2025 51 mins  
Why some cities are more effective than others at reducing inequalities in the built environment. For the first time in history, most people live in cities. One in seven are living in slums, the most excluded parts of cities, in which the basics of urban life—including adequate housing, accessible sanitation, and reliable transportation—are largely unavailable. Why are some cit

Andrew Gomez, "Constructing Cuban America: Race and Identity in Florida's Caribbean South, 1868–1945" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Jan 13 2025 46 mins  
How Black and white Cubans navigated issues of race, politics, and identity during the post-Civil War and early Jim Crow eras in South Florida. On July 4, 1876, during the centennial celebration of US independence, the city of Key West was different from other cities. In some of post–Civil War Florida, Black residents were hindered from participating in 4th of July festivities, b

Jorge Duany, "Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Jan 12 2025 85 mins  
In the second edition of Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford UP, 2024), Jorge Duany unravels the fascinating and turbulent past and present of an island that is politically and economically tied to the United States, yet culturally distinct. Acquired by the United States from Spain in 1898, Puerto Rico has a peculiar status among Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Edward Jones Corredera, "Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Jan 10 2025 48 mins  
What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Drawing on new archival sources, this book shows how Latin American nations have wrestled with the morality of indebtedness and insolvency since their foundation, and outlines how their history can shed new light on contemporary global dilemmas. With a focus on the early modern Spanish Empire

Alex Cuadros, "When We Sold God's Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon" (Grand Central Publishing, 2024)

Jan 08 2025 29 mins  
Growing up in a remote corner of the world’s largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita learned to hunt wild pigs and tapirs, and gathered Brazil nuts and açaí berries from centuries-old trees. The first highway pierced through in 1960. Ranchers, loggers, and prospectors invaded, and the kids lost their families to terrible new weapons and diseases. Pushed by the government to as