New Books in Mexican Studies

Apr 03 2025 292 ep. 58 mins 105
New Books in Mexican Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with scholars of Mexico about their new book

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Ieva Jusionyte on American Guns in Mexico: Exit Wounds (EF, JP)

Apr 03 2025 59 mins  
John and Elizabeth had the chance to talk with Ieva Jusionyte, anthropologist, journalist, emergency medical technician. Her award-winning books include Exit Wounds, which uses anthropological and journalistic methods to follow guns purchased in the United States through organized crime scenes in Mexico, and their legal, social and personal repercussions. Ieva described researching

Political Entertainment in a Post-Authoritarian Democracy

Apr 01 2025 62 mins  
Welcome to the Global Media & Communication podcast series, a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic sch

Walls, Warnings, and the War on Fentanyl: Peter Andreas on Trump’s Border Politics

Mar 31 2025 35 mins  
In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University and author of Border Games: The Politics of Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, 3rd edition (Cornell UP, 2022) and The Illicit Global Economy (Oxford UP, 2025), joins RBI Director John Torpey to unpack the myths and realities of border control, illicit trade, and t

Vanessa Freije, "Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico" (Duke UP, 2020)

Mar 30 2025 65 mins  
In Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico (Duke UP, 2020), Vanessa Freije explores the causes and consequences of political scandals in Mexico from the 1960s through the 1980s. Tracing the process by which Mexico City reporters denounced official wrongdoing, she shows that by the 1980s political scandals were a common feature of the nation

James Tejani, "A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America" (Norton, 2024)

Mar 20 2025 56 mins  
The Port of Los Angeles is all around us. Objects we use on a daily basis pass through it: furniture, apparel, electronics, automobiles, and much more. The busiest container port in the Western hemisphere, it claims one-sixth of all US ocean shipping. Yet despite its centrality to our world, the port and the story of its making have been neglected in histories of the United States.

Lina-Maria Murillo, "Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands" (UNC Press, 2025)

Mar 09 2025 71 mins  
The first birth control clinic in El Paso, Texas, opened in 1937. Since then, Mexican-origin women living in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez have confronted various interest groups determined to control their reproductive lives, including a heavily funded international population control campaign led by Planned Parenthood Federation of America as well as the Catholi

Rebecca Janzen, "Unlawful Violence: Mexican Law and Cultural Production" (Vanderbilt UP, 2022)

Mar 05 2025 59 mins  
Violence has only increased in Mexico since 2000: 23,000 murders were recorded in 2016, and 29,168 in 2017. The abundance of laws and constitutional amendments that have cropped up in response are mirrored in Mexico's fragmented cultural production of the same period. Contemporary Mexican literature grapples with this splintered reality through non-linear stories from multiple pers

Vera Tiesler, "Ancient Maya Teeth: Dental Modification, Cosmology, and Social Identity in Mesoamerica" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Mar 05 2025 47 mins  
Dental modification was common across ancient societies, but perhaps none were more avid practitioners than the Maya. They filed their teeth flat or pointy, polished and drilled them, and crafted decorative inlays of jade and pyrite. Unusually, Maya of all social classes, ages, and professions engaged in dental modification. What did it mean to them? Ancient Maya Teeth: Dental Modi

Martín Alberto Gonzalez, "Why You Always So Political?: The Experiences and Resiliencies of Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx Students in Higher Education" (Viva Oxnard, 2023)

Feb 08 2025 78 mins  
As of 2018, only about one in ten Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx (MMAX) students graduate with a college degree. Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant observations, pláticas, document analyses, and literature on race, space, and racism in higher education, Why you always so political?: The Experiences and Resiliencies of Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx Students in Higher Ed

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