Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (Stanford University Press, 2020) is a history of migration and nation-building from the vantage point of those who lived between states. Author Devi Mays traces the histories of Ottoman Sephardi Jews who emigrated to the Americas—and especially to Mexico—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the complex relationships they maintained to legal documentation as they migrated and settled into new homes. ...
May 26, 2021•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 225
Bounded by desert and mountains, El Centro, California, is isolated and difficult to reach. However, its location close to the border between San Diego and Yuma, Arizona, has made it an important place for Mexican migrants attracted to the valley’s agricultural economy. In 1945, it also became home to the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp. The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) tells the story of how that camp evol...
May 24, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 82
Ethnic Mexicans living in the United States have always struggled to understand their position within the fabric of the nation-state. The groups that fall under the banner of “ethnic Mexican,” however, are complex. They include Mexican nationals fleeing war in the early 1900s, U.S.-born Mexican Americans asserting themselves as firstly American, and more radical communist and Chicanx leftists of the midcentury and postwar eras who challenged notions of belonging. While it may seem difficult to h...
May 19, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 81
Cristina Beltrán has written a thoughtful and interrogating analysis of the concept of citizenship, particularly in the United States, and how the history of the United States as a country has shaped an understanding of who gets to be “belong” as a member of this society. The book, Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy is part of the Forerunners book series published by the University of Minnesota Press—this series, as we discuss in our conversation, publishes sh...
May 13, 2021•55 min•Ep. 523
Swashbuckling tales of valiant gauchos roaming Argentina and Uruguay were nineteenth-century Latin American best sellers. But when these stories jumped from the page to the circus stage and beyond, their cultural, economic, and political influence revolutionized popular culture and daily life. In Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay (University of New Mexico Press), William Acree guides readers through the deep history of popular entertainment before t...
May 12, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 118
Um retrato original da Bahia no século XIX, num livro cheio de movimento e vozes, sobretudo da gente negra. Em Ganhadores: A Greve Negra de 1857 na Bahia (Companhia das Letras, 2019), o historiador João José Reis reconstitui a história dos negros de ganho, ou ganhadores, protagonistas de uma insólita greve que paralisou o transporte na capital baiana durante vários dias em 1857. Esses trabalhadores escravizados, libertos ou livres, todos africanos ou seus descendentes, se organizavam em grupos d...
May 12, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 120
Eleni Kefala's book The Conquered: Byzantium and America on the Cusp of Modernity (Dumbarton Oaks, 2021) probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems composed soon after the conquest of Constantinople and Tenochtitlán. These texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic, and articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin A...
May 10, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 117
In the late nineteenth century, Spanish intellectuals and entrepreneurs became captivated with Hispanism, a movement of transatlantic rapprochement between Spain and Latin America. Not only was this movement envisioned as a form of cultural empire to symbolically compensate for Spain?s colonial decline but it was also imagined as an opportunity to materially regain the Latin American markets. Paradoxically, a central trope of Hispanist discourse was the antimaterialistic character of Hispanic cu...
May 06, 2021•57 min•Ep. 119
Evo Morales, Bolivia's first Indigenous president, won reelection three times on a leftist platform championing Indigenous rights, anti-imperialism, and Bolivian control over the country's natural gas reserves. In Bolivia in the Age of Gas (Duke UP, 2020), Bret Gustafson explores how the struggle over natural gas has reshaped Bolivia, along with the rise, and ultimate fall, of the country's first Indigenous-led government. Rethinking current events against the backdrop of a longer history of oil...
May 03, 2021•52 min•Ep. 25
In Black Market Capital Urban Politics and the Shadow Economy in Mexico City (University of California Press, 2018), Andrew Konove traces the history of illicit commerce in Mexico City from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, showing how it became central to the economic and political life of the city. The story centers on the untold history of the Baratillo, the city’s infamous thieves’ market. Originating in the colonial-era Plaza Mayor, the Baratillo moved to the neighborhood of Tepito ...
May 03, 2021•38 min•Ep. 2
Megan Ryburn’s Uncertain Citizenship: Everyday Practices of Bolivian Migrants in Chile (University of California Press, 2018) is a multi-sited ethnography of citizenship practices of Bolivian migrants in Chile. The book asks readers to think beyond a binary category of citizen/noncitizen when looking at migrant practices and spaces. Instead, Uncertain Citizenship emphasizes the transnational, overlapping, and fluctuating forms of citizenship that migrants engage with and inhabit as they move thr...
Apr 23, 2021•52 min•Ep. 116
Though poverty and vagrancy as social phenomena greatly preoccupied authorities of Colonial Mexico, the social and individual lives of vagabonds and strangers of Spanish American early modernity remain elusive to the historian. In his new book, Fugitive Freedom: The Improbable Lives of Two Impostors in Late Colonial Mexico (University of California Press, 2021), William B. Taylor uncovers the fascinating stories of two wanderers in Colonial Mexico. Joseph Aguayo and Juan Atondo were priest imper...
Apr 19, 2021•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 115
The western travel narrative genre has a history long tied to voyeurism and conquest. A way to see the world—and its many unique people and places—through the eyes of mostly white and male travelers. In an increasingly globalized world, many writers are beginning to raise questions about the ethics of travel writing and its tropes, especially the way western travelers tend to characterize cultures that are unfamiliar to them. These new books challenge the conventional approach, instead asking re...
Apr 16, 2021•39 min•Ep. 175
Allison B. Wolf's Just Immigration in the Americas: A Feminist Account (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) proposes a pioneering, interdisciplinary, feminist approach to immigration justice, which defines immigration justice as being about identifying and resisting global oppression in immigration structures, policies, practices, and norms. In contrast to most philosophical work on immigration (which begins with abstract ideas and philosophical debates and then makes claims based on them), this book ...
Apr 13, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 114
How can Sociology be nudged away from its traditional parochialism to embrace empirical work that focuses on the global south? Marco Garrido (assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago) and Victoria Reyes (assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside) are the editors of a recent special issue of Contexts magazine, New Ethnographies of the Global South, that brings together scholars doing fieldwork outside of the US and Europe. Marco and Victoria ...
Apr 08, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 9
In Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico (U California Press, 2020), based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Maurice Magaña considers how urban and migrant youth in Oaxaca embrace subcultures from hip-hop to punk and adopt creative organizing practices to create meaningful channels of participation in local social and political life. In the process, young people remake urban space and construct new identities in ways that directly challenge elite vis...
Apr 06, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 100
The child of Salvadoran immigrants, Roberto Lovato grew up in 1970s and 80s San Francisco as MS-13 and other notorious Salvadoran gangs were forming in California. In his teens, he lost friends to the escalating violence, and survived acts of brutality himself. He eventually traded the violence of the streets for human rights advocacy in wartime El Salvador where he joined the guerilla movement against the U.S.-backed, fascist military government responsible for some of the most barbaric massacr...
Mar 30, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 78
The middle decades of the 19th century witnessed the expansion of slavery and white settlement and dispossession of Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi River, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire followed by the importation of indentured laborers from India and China into the West Indies, the consolidation of British rule in India followed by the so-called Indian Mutiny, and the expansion of settler colonialism in Australia. These processes were all tied together by commerce, empi...
Mar 29, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 46
Picking up where most historians conclude, Chelsea Stieber explores the critical internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between monarchy and republic. What transpired was a war of swords and of pens, waged in newspapers and periodicals, in literature, broadsheets, and fliers. In Haiti's Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804-1954 (NYU Press, 2020) — her analysis of Haitian writing that followed independence — Stiebe...
Mar 26, 2021•47 min•Ep. 71
A close friend and muse of many of postrevolutionary Mexico's greatest artists, Luz Jiménez's likeness appears across Mexico City in the form of painting, photography, and sculpture. Jiménez's ubiquity has earned her the titles of "the most painted woman in all of Mexico" and "the archetype of Indigenous Mexican woman." And yet the details of her complex life as an Indigenous woman at mid century have long remained shrouded by artistic depictions of her face and body. Jiménez's experience of hyp...
Mar 22, 2021•42 min
Edited by Drs. Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder, As if She Were Free (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a collective biography of African and African-descended women across the Americas. This collection of twenty-four beautifully crafted chapters, spans across centuries and geographies, giving us a varied and textured reading of women’s lives and experiences. More importantly than that, and herein lies the revolutionary character of this book, As If She Were Free changes our wa...
Mar 22, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 938
This episode of Ethnographic Marginalia features Dr. Leslie MacColman, a Postdoctoral Scholar in Sociology at The Ohio State University who studies crime and policing in Latin America. Leslie explains how extensive experiences with civil society organizations inspired her move to academia while continuing to inform her research. She then describes research on police reform in Buenos Aires and how a project that centered police experiences grew to include government officials, activists, sex work...
Mar 17, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 8
What is the difference between Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president? Why should we understand Trump as part of a dangerous “fourth wave” of radical right politicians? Dr. Cas Mudde’s new book The Far Right Today (Polity, 2019) argues that politicians like Le Pen represented a 20th-century marginalized populist radical right party but Trump (and others across the globe) represent a fourth wave in which the 21st-century radical right parties are normaliz...
Mar 15, 2021•55 min•Ep. 509
In this book, Antonio Gasparetto studies in detail the legal history of the state of exception during the First Republic in Brazil (1889-1930). Atmósfera de plomo: las declaraciones de estado de sitio en la Primera República Brasileña (Tirant lo Blanch, 2019) explores the origins as well as the transnational use of the term in international legislation in order to understand the particularities of the Brazilian case. Gasparetto studies the use of the state of exception, a measure originally crea...
Mar 15, 2021•52 min•Ep. 113
Dr. Juan José Ponce Vázquez's new book, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1690 (Cambridge UP, 2020) tracks the importance of smuggling to the society, economy, and politics of the island of Hispaniola in this “long seventeenth century.” Smuggling, in his words, made people's lives on the island, an island that had suffered from imperial commercial neglect and a declining sugar industry. Concomitant with this endemic smuggling, local elites began asserting...
Mar 12, 2021•51 min•Ep. 933
Tijuana is the largest of Mexico’s northern border cities, and although it has struggled during the United States’ dramatic escalation of border enforcement, it nonetheless remains deeply connected with California by one of the largest, busiest international ports of entry in the world. In Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Rihan Yeh probes the border’s role in shaping Mexican senses of self and collectivity. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Yeh exa...
Mar 09, 2021•53 min•Ep. 98
In Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic (Rutgers University Press, 2020), Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara examines the dominant modes of power that seek to suppress LGBTQ lives and identities as well as the ways in which these communities and individuals push back. Lara details how Catholicism and Christianity attempt to delegitimize LGBTQ lives through an insistence on gender binaries and heteronormativity through power it yields in political and domestic life. LGBTQ people and...
Feb 22, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 96
Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez pens towards decolonial freedom. Her recently published book, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020), uses peripheralized (5) novels, visual/sonic works, poetry, essays, and short stories by diasporic and exiled Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone writers and artists towards “render[ing] legible what these texts offer to subjects who resist ongoing forms of colonialism…” (1). By centering the relationality of ...
Feb 18, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 77
From 2002 to 2013, China’s rapid economic growth caused a boom in the prices of commodities—particularly of metals, fuel, and soybeans. According to political economist Dr. Nick Jepson, the commodity boom offered resource exporters in the Global South the financial resources and thus the opportunity to break away from international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and set their own policy agendas. But not all resource-exporting countries that benefited from the commodi...
Feb 17, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 4
The period of the "second slavery" was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil and chronological expansion into the industrial age. As The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford UP, 2020) shows, ambitious planters throughout the Greater Caribbean hired a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other "plantation experts" to assist them in adapting industrial technologies...
Feb 16, 2021•41 min•Ep. 70
