Best of
Latin-American-History

2017

Travels with Rachel: In Search of South America


George Mahood - 2017
     Join George and Rachel on their hilarious journey through the wilds of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, as they climb volcanoes, fish for piranhas, trek through the Amazon rainforest, take death-defying bus rides, sample some of the continent’s strangest delicacies, and try to get to Machu Picchu. Armed only with a basic knowledge of Spanish, small backpacks, and bags of enthusiasm, they set off together on what promised to be a life-changing adventure.

Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class


Justin Akers Chacón - 2017
    Chacón clearly and sympathetically documents the ways that migratory workers carried with them radical political ideologies, new organizational models, and shared class experience, as they crossed the border into southwestern barrios during the first three decades of the twentieth-century.Justin Akers Chacón previous work includes No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border (with Mike Davis).

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985


Cecilia Fajardo-HillMonica Mayer - 2017
    Amidst the tumult and revolution that characterized the latter half of the 20th century in Latin America and the US, women artists were staking their claim in nearly every field. This wide ranging volume examines the work of more than 100 female artists with nearly 300 works in the fields of painting, sculpture, photography, video, performance art, and other experimental media. A series of thematic essays, arranged by country, address the cultural and political contexts in which these radical artists worked, while other essays address key issues such as feminism, art history, and the political body. Drawing its design and feel from the radical underground pamphlets, catalogs, and posters of the era, this is the first examination of a highly influential period in 20th-century art history.

Pistaco: A Tale of Love in the Andes


Lynn F Monahan - 2017
    In the high sierra of the Andes mountains he meets a young school teacher fleeing from some demons of her own. They both come to love and respect the campesinos they meet in a pueblo on the edge of civilization, and soon find themselves entrapped between a harsh military junta and Shining Path guerrillas who threaten mayhem across the mountain countryside.

Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics (Latinx Pop Culture)


Frederick Luis Aldama - 2017
    It is as if finding the Latinx presence in the DC and Marvel worlds requires activation of superheroic powers.Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics blasts open barriers with a swift kick. It explores deeply and systematically the storyworld spaces inhabited by brown superheroes in mainstream comic book storyworlds: print comic books, animation, TV, and film. It makes visible and lets loose the otherwise occluded and shackled. Leaving nothing to chance, it sheds light on how creators (authors, artists, animators, and directors) make storyworlds that feature Latinos/as, distinguishing between those that we can and should evaluate as well done and those we can and should evaluate as not well done.The foremost expert on Latinx comics, Frederick Luis Aldama guides us through the full archive of all the Latinx superheros in comics since the 1940s. Aldama takes us where the superheroes live—the barrios, the hospitals, the school rooms, the farm fields—and he not only shows us a view to the Latinx content, sometimes deeply embedded, but also provokes critical inquiry into the way storytelling formats distill and reconstruct real Latinos/as.Thoroughly entertaining but seriously undertaken, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics allows us to truly see how superhero comic book storyworlds are willfully created in ways that make new our perception, thoughts, and feelings.

Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire


Matthew Robb - 2017
    With a multiethnic population of perhaps one hundred thousand, at its peak in 400 CE, it was the cultural, political, economic, and religious center of ancient Mesoamerica. A devastating fire in the city center led to a rapid decline after the middle of the sixth century, but Teotihuacan was never completely abandoned or forgotten; the Aztecs revered the city and its monuments, giving many of them the names we still use today.  Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire examines new discoveries from the three main pyramids at the site—the Sun Pyramid, the Moon Pyramid, and, at the center of the Ciudadela complex, the Feathered Serpent Pyramid—which have fundamentally changed our understanding of the city’s history. With illustrations of the major objects from Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropología and from the museums and storage facilities of the Zona de Monumentos Arqueológicos de Teotihuacan, along with selected works from US and European collections, the catalogue examines these cultural artifacts to understand the roles that offerings of objects and programs of monumental sculpture and murals throughout the city played in the lives of Teotihuacan’s citizens.    Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.   Exhibition dates: de Young, San Francisco, September 30, 2017–February 11, 2018 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), March 25–September 3, 2018 Phoenix Art Museum: October 6, 2018–January 27, 2019

Slavery and Silence: Latin America and the U.S. Slave Debate


Paul D Naish - 2017
    To talk about slavery was to explore--or deny--its obvious shortcomings, its inhumanity, its contradictions. To celebrate it required explaining away the nation's proclaimed belief in equality and its public promise of rights for all, while to condemn it was to insult people who might be related by ties of blood, friendship, or business, and perhaps even to threaten the very economy and political stability of the nation.For this reason, Paul D. Naish argues, Americans displaced their most provocative criticisms and darkest fears about the institution onto Latin America. Naish bolsters this seemingly counterintuitive argument with a compelling focus on realms of public expression that have drawn sparse attention in previous scholarship on this era. In novels, diaries, correspondence, and scientific writings, he contends, the heat and bluster of the political arena was muted, and discussions of slavery staged in these venues often turned their attention south of the Rio Grande.At once familiar and foreign, Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, and the independent republics of Spanish America provided rhetorical landscapes about which everyday citizens could speak, through both outright comparisons or implicit metaphors, what might otherwise be unsayable when talking about slavery at home. At a time of ominous sectional fracture, Americans of many persuasions--Northerners and Southerners, Whigs and Democrats, scholars secure in their libraries and settlers vulnerable on the Mexican frontier--found unity in their disparagement of Latin America. This displacement of anxiety helped create a superficial feeling of nationalism as the country careened toward disunity of the most violent, politically charged, and consequential sort.

Spanish Dollars and Sister Republics: The Money That Made Mexico and the United States


Tatiana Seijas - 2017
    

The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico


Lisa Sousa - 2017
    In this expansive account, Lisa Sousa focuses on four native groups in highland Mexico—the Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Mixe—and traces cross-cultural similarities and differences in the roles and status attributed to women in prehispanic and colonial Mesoamerica.Sousa intricately renders the full complexity of women's life experiences in the household and community, from the significance of their names, age, and social standing, to their identities, ethnicities, family, dress, work, roles, sexuality, acts of resistance, and relationships with men and other women. Drawing on a rich collection of archival, textual, and pictorial sources, she traces the shifts in women's economic, political, and social standing to evaluate the influence of Spanish ideologies on native attitudes and practices around sex and gender in the first several generations after contact. Though catastrophic depopulation, economic pressures, and the imposition of Christianity slowly eroded indigenous women's status following the Spanish conquest, Sousa argues that gender relations nevertheless remained more complementary than patriarchal, with women maintaining a unique position across the first two centuries of colonial rule.

Insurgent Marcos: The Political-Philosophical Formation of the Zapatista Subcommander


Nick Henck - 2017
    Concretely, what the book proposes is that in his youth Marcos was especially influenced by his reading of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Nicos Poulantzas, and that certain core components of their thinking helped to form, and indeed continued to inform, the Subcommander's political philosophy.