Latin American Studies Book List · 
Latin American Studies titles sorted by release date (or by book title):
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When Sugar Ruled
Economy and Society in Northwestern Argentina, Tucumán, 1876–1916
Two tropical commodities—coffee and sugar—dominated Latin American export economies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When Sugar Ruled: Economy and Society in Northwestern Argentina, Tucumán, 1876–1916 presents a distinctive case that does not quite fit into the pattern of many Latin American sugar economies.…
Available March 2010 (est.)
Blood and Capital
The Paramilitarization of Colombia
In Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, Jasmin Hristov examines the complexities, dynamics, and contradictions of present-day armed conflict in Colombia. She conducts an in-depth inquiry into the restructuring of the state’s coercive apparatus and the phenomenon of paramilitarism by looking at its military, political, and legal dimensions.…
The Carnivalesque Defunto
Death and the Dead in Modern Brazilian Literature
The Carnivalesque Defunto explores the representations of death and the dead in Brazil’s collective and literary imagination. The recurring stereotype of Brazil as the land of samba, soccer, and sandy beaches overlooks a more complex cultural heritage in which, since colonial times, a relationship of proximity and reciprocity has been cultivated between the living and the dead.…
Madness in Buenos Aires
Patients, Psychiatrists and the Argentine State, 1880–1983
Madness in Buenos Aires examines the interactions between psychiatrists, patients and their families, and the national state in modern Argentina. This book offers a fresh interpretation of the Argentine state’s relationship to modernity and social change during the twentieth century, while also examining the often contentious place of psychiatry in modern Argentina.…
Women and Slavery, Volume One
Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic
Edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller
The literature on women enslaved around the world has grown rapidly in the last ten years, evidencing strong interest in the subject across a range of academic disciplines. Until Women and Slavery, no single collection has focused on female slaves who—as these two volumes reveal—probably constituted the considerable majority of those enslaved in Africa, Asia, and Europe over several millennia and who accounted for a greater proportion of the enslaved in the Americas than is customarily acknowledged.…
Organic Coffee
Sustainable Development by Mayan Farmers
By Maria Elena Martinez-Torres
Despite deepening poverty and environmental degradation throughout rural Latin America, Mayan peasant farmers in Chiapas, Mexico, are finding environmental and economic success by growing organic coffee.…
Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas
In many Latin American countries, guerrilla struggle and feminism have been linked in surprising ways. Women were mobilized by the thousands to promote revolutionary agendas that had little to do with increasing gender equality.…
Threatening Others
Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica
During the last two decades, a decline in public investment has undermined some of the national values and institutions of Costa Rica. The resulting sense of dislocation and loss is usually projected onto Nicaraguan “immigrants.…
Writing Women in Central America
Gender and the Fictionalization of History
What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about that past? Writing Women in Central America explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts.…
Gabriela Mistral
The Audacious Traveler
Edited by Marjorie Agosín
Gabriela Mistral is the only Latin American woman writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even so, her extraordinary achievements in poetry, narrative, and political essays remain largely untold.…
Cultivating Coffee
The Farmers of Carazo, Nicaragua, 1880–1930
Many scholars of Latin America have argued that the introduction of coffee forced most people to become landless proletarians toiling on large plantations. Cultivating Coffee tells a different story: small and medium-sized growers in Nicaragua were a vital part of the economy, constituting the majority of the farmers and holding most of the land.…
Taking Root
Narratives of Jewish Women in Latin America
In Taking Root, Latin American women of Jewish descent, from Mexico to Uruguay, recall their coming of age with Sabbath candles and Hebrew prayers, Ladino songs and merengue music, Queen Esther and the Virgin of Guadalupe.…
Beyond the Barricades
Nicaragua and the Struggle for the Sandinista Press, 1979–1998
By Adam Jones
Throughout the 1980s, Barricada, the official daily newspaper of the ruling Sandinista Front, played the standard role of a party organ, seeking the mobilize the Nicaraguan public to support the revolutionary agenda.…
Collisions with History
Latin American Fiction and Social Science from “El Boom” to the New World Order
Latin American intellectuals have traditionally debated their region’s history, never with so much agreement as in the fiction, commentary, and scholarship of the late twentieth century. Collisions with History shows how “fictional histories” of discovery and conquest, independence and early nationhood, and the recent authoritarian past were purposeful revisionist collisions with received national versions.…
Terror in the Countryside
Campesino Responses to Political Violence in Guatemala, 1954-1985
The key to democratization lies within the experience of the popular movements. Those who engaged in the popular struggle in Guatemala have a deep understanding of substantive democratic behavior, and the experience of Guatemala's civil society should be the cornerstone for building a meaningful formal democracy.…
Managing the Counterrevolution
The United States and Guatemala, 1954–1961
The Eisenhower administration's intervention in Guatemala is one of the most closely studied covert operations in the history of the Cold War. Yet we know far more about the 1954 coup itself than its aftermath.…
The Cuban Counterrevolution
For forty years the Cuban Revolution has been at the forefront of American public opinion, yet few are knowledgeable about the history of its enemies and the responsibility of the U.S. government in organizing and sustaining the Cuban counterrevolution.…
Populist Seduction in Latin America
The Ecuadorian Experience
A new brand of populist politicians has risen to power in the late 1980s and 90s. They have kept the Manichaean and moralistic populist discourse of their predecessors while pursuing different economic programs.…
Peasants in Arms
War and Peace in the Mountains of Nicaragua, 1979-1994
By Lynn Horton
Drawing on testimonies from contra collaborators and ex-combatants, as well as pro-Sandinista peasants, this book presents a dynamic account of the growing divisions between peasants from the area of Quilalí who took up arms in defense of revolutionary programs and ideals such as land reform and equality and those who opposed the FSLN.…
Voices from the Silence
Guatemalan Literature of Resistance
Edited by Marc Zimmerman and Raúl Rojas
The conquest, colonization, independence, the liberal reforms, the regimes, revolution, and dictatorships, the insurrections and ongoing peace dialogues all are combined in a narrative projecting the most important forces in Guatemalan history from the Mayan period to our own times.…
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Latin American Studies titles sorted by release date (or by book title):
