The arrival in 1532 of a small group of Spanish conquistadores at the Andean town of Cajamarca launched one of the most dramatic – and often misunderstood – events in world history. In Inca Apocalypse: The Spanish Conquest and the Transformation of the Andean World (Oxford UP, 2020), R. Alan Covey draws upon a wealth of new archaeological and archival discoveries to detail the remarkable events that ended one empire and transformed another. From this he builds a new narrative that highlights the...
Feb 11, 2021•52 min•Ep. 903
Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (University of California Press, 2021) uncovers the surprising influence of post-revolutionary Mexico on the twentieth century's most important international economic institutions. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, Christy Thornton meticulously traces how Mexican officials repeatedly rallied Third World leaders to campaign for representation in global organizations and...
Feb 11, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Daniel A. Rodriguez's history of a newly independent Cuba shaking off the U.S. occupation, The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), focuses on the intersection of public health and politics in Havana. While medical policies were often used to further American colonial power, in Cuba, Rodriguez argues, they evolved into important expressions of anticolonial nationalism as Cuba struggled to establish itself as a modern sta...
Feb 11, 2021•52 min•Ep. 69
Travelers often become enchanted with the first country that captures their hearts and gives them license to be free. For Wade Davis, it was Colombia. In his new book Magdalena, River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia (Knopf, 2020), the bestselling author tells of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep l...
Feb 08, 2021•57 min•Ep. 111
In her latest book Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (Oxford University Press 2020), Camilla Townsend tells the story of the Aztecs from their perspective and using their own historical sources. Although this sounds like a simple premise, a Fifth Sun revolutionizes our way of understanding the past of the Mexica (meh-HEE-kah) and the people that lived under their rule in Mexico’s central valley. Townsend, who has worked on Nahuatl (the politically dominant tongue in central Mexico by the ti...
Feb 05, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 110
The devil is a defiant, nefarious figure, the emblem of evil, and harbinger of the damned. However, the festive devil—the devil that dances—turns the most hideous acts into playful transgressions. Edited by Milla Cozart Riggio, Angela Marino, and Paolo Vignolo, Festive Devils of the Americas (Seagull Books, 2015) presents a transnational and performance-centered approach to this fascinating, feared, and revered character of fiestas, street festivals, and carnivals in North, Central, and South Am...
Feb 04, 2021•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 11
What meaning does a daily soccer game in a public Los Angeles park have for a group of Latino men and the ethnographer who studied them? In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. David Trouille, Assistant Professor of Sociology at James Madison University, about the ten years of fieldwork behind his new book Fútbol in the Park from the University of Chicago press. In a thoughtful self-reflexive conversation, David tells us how a neighborhood campaign against the players initially drew him to the comm...
Feb 01, 2021•54 min•Ep. 5
In Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico (Duke University Press, 2020), Vanessa Freije develops a new rich thesis about the role of the press in Mexican civil society. In this well researched monograph, Freije shows how journalists played a key role in producing scandalous spectacles that brought an otherwise authoritarian PRI to account. Simultaneously, each chapter explores the limitations and drawbacks of Mexican muckraking as bribery, violence, and...
Feb 01, 2021•1 hr 4 min
Diana Taylor's ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (Duke University Press, 2020) examines what it means to be presente in the context of protest, theatre, and everyday life. Taylor pays particular attention to the performativity of protest politics and the politics of performance art in the Americas, including case studies of the Zapatistas, post-dictatorship historical memory in Chile and Argentina, and the leftist pranksters The Yes Men. ¡Presente! is a wide-ranging and entertaining work of sc...
Jan 29, 2021•54 min•Ep. 53
How do ideologies of development shape the perceptions of security threats of US foreign policymakers and the political and military leaders of developing countries? What is the relationship between development, democracy, and military coups? How does US foreign aid affect political stability in recipient countries? These are some of the questions addressed in Thomas Field’s fantastic book From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era (Cornell UP, 201...
Jan 29, 2021•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 44
Professor Andrew Grant Wood’s new edited volume, The Business of Leisure: Tourism History in Latin America and the Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), explores the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of tourism in the region and its relationship to nationalism, imperialism, development, and many other themes. The volume also provides a new way of understanding the relationship between the United States and Latin America during the twentieth century, showing how Latin America...
Jan 27, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 68
This is a Special Series on Third World Nationalism. In the wake of a rise in nationalism around the world, and its general condemnation by liberals and the left, in addition to the rise of China and Russia, we have put together this series on Third World Nationalism to nuance the present discourse on nationalism, note its centrality to anti-imperial, anti-colonial politics around the world, the reconfiguration of global power, and its inextricability from mainstream politics in Africa, Asia, La...
Jan 26, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 6
Acts of Repair: Justice, Truth, and the Politics of Memory in Argentina (Rutgers UP, 2020) explores how ordinary people grapple with political violence in Argentina, a nation home to survivors of multiple genocides and periods of violence, including the Holocaust, the political repression of the 1976-1983 dictatorship, and the 1994 AMIA bombing. Despite efforts for accountability, the terrain of justice has been uneven and, in many cases, impunity remains. How can citizens respond to such ongoin...
Jan 22, 2021•1 hr 14 min
The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamist Dissident, and Utopian Founder, 1878-1961 (Oxford University Press, 2020) provides the first full-length biography of a celebrated Latino Mormon leader in the U.S. and Mexico in the early twentieth century. Surprisingly little is known about Bautista's remarkable life, the scope of his work, or the development of his vision. Elisa Eastwood Pulido draws on his letters, books, pamphlets, and unpublished diaries t...
Jan 20, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 76
The University of Pennsylvania describes Mongey's work as follows. "When we think of the Age of Revolutions, George Washington, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture, or Simon Bolivar might come to mind. But Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) recovers the interconnected stories of now forgotten "foreigners of desperate fortune" who dreamed of overthrowing colonial monarchy and creating their own countries. They were not members of th...
Jan 20, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 67
In The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Makin (University of North Carolina Press 2020), Dr. Sharika Crawford tells the story of Caymanian turtle hunters, men that plied the sea in search of the green and the hawksbill turtles. Using the personal stories of turtlemen collected by the Oral History Programme at the Cayman Islands National Archive, and governmental and diplomatic documents collected in archives of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, and...
Jan 12, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 108
The story of Manifest Destiny and the role of expansion in American slavery is dominated by the history of Western migration. In A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), Claire M. Wolnisty shows that the South had a long history of looking not just West, but South to protect the future of a proslavery southern system. In the antebellum era, multiple groups of southerners built connections in Lat...
Jan 05, 2021•50 min•Ep. 887
During the eighteenth century, hundreds of thousands of free descendants of Africans in Mexico faced a highly specific obligation to the Spanish crown, a tax based on their genealogy and status. This royal tribute symbolized imperial loyalties and social hierarchies. As the number of free people of color soared, this tax became a reliable source of revenue for the crown as well as a signal that colonial officials and ordinary people referenced to define and debate the nature of blackness. Taxing...
Jan 04, 2021•48 min•Ep. 107
Today we speak with Javier Auyero, Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, about his 25 years of experience studying marginalized communities in Buenos Aires ethnographically. Javier tells us how he first came to sociology, and the intellectual curiosities and political interests that drove him to many of his projects. He also describes the very different ways he’s gone about ethnographic research: from the more classic model of solo ethnographer going into the field every d...
Jan 04, 2021•58 min•Ep. 3
In Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (New Press, 2020), historian Marjoleine Kars tells the story of a massive eighteenth-century slave rebellion in the Dutch colony of Berbice (in present-day Guyana). Drawing on some nine hundred pages of interrogation transcripts and letters that provide rare first person accounts from enslaved African-born rebels, Kars chronicles how nearly 5,000 of the total enslaved population held onto Berbice for over a year holding o...
Dec 29, 2020•45 min•Ep. 66
The name Cancún brings to mind tourism, resorts, beaches, sun, and fun. In her book, Stuck With Tourism: Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary Yucatan (University of California Press, 2020), Matilde Córdoba Azcárate reveals the processes of labor, extraction, and reorganization that make places such as Cancún a tourism site. Dr. Azcárate examines four tourist sites across the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, including resorts in Cancún and Temozón, a nature preserve in Celestún, and guayabera shirt ...
Dec 29, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 87
In The Haitians: A Decolonial History (UNC Press, 2020), leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the U.S. occupat...
Dec 28, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 225
In From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Duke UP, 2018), Anne Garland Mahler traces the history and intellectual legacy of the understudied global justice movement called the Tricontinental—an alliance of liberation struggles from eighty-two countries, founded in Havana in 1966. Focusing on racial violence and inequality, the Tricontinental's critique of global capitalist exploitation has influenced historical radical thought, contemporary s...
Dec 22, 2020•35 min•Ep. 65
What is it like to do research in a marginalized community in the shadows of Ecuador’s largest oil refinery? On today’s episode we talk with Maricarmen Hernandez, assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. Maricarmen tells us about her fieldwork with a heavily contaminated community in the Ecuadorian coastal city of Esmeraldas. She tells us how she gained access to the community and reflects on the relationships she developed while in the field. Many of these relationships...
Dec 21, 2020•51 min•Ep. 2
A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America (Berghahn Books 2018) is a wonderful collection that seeks to provide a general overview of environmental history within Latin American history. Edited by John Soluri, Claudia Leal, and José Augusto Pádua, this fantastic book is meant for specialists and non-specialists alike. In the book, and our conversation, the editors propose four key features that characterize much of the scholarship in the region, and they discuss the contribu...
Dec 17, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 106
What history and motivations make up the discourses we are taught to hold, and spread, as common sense? As a member of Brazil's upper middle class, Ana Beatriz Ribeiro grew up with the image that to be developed was to be as European as possible. However, as a researcher in Europe during her country's Workers' Party era, she kept reading that Africans should be repaid for developing Brazilian society – via Brazil's "bestowal" of development upon Africa as an "emerging power." In Modernization Dr...
Dec 15, 2020•56 min•Ep. 105
On September 21, 1976, a car bomb exploded in Washington DC, killing a former Chilean diplomat named Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt. The assassination was a cruel and brazen attempt by the Chilean government to silence a critic of the Pinochet regime. And it proved to be a major strategic error––Pinochet himself used the language of “banana peel”––as the legal action that followed helped unravel US-Chile relations and provided a template for other human-rights victims ...
Dec 15, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 869
We are joined by Dr. Andrea Ballestero, associate Professor of Anthropology and Director Ethnography Studio, at Rice University. We will be talking about her book A Future History of Water, published by Duke University Press in 2019. Thanks to the Fondren Library's support, an Open Access pdf copy of the book can also be downloaded from the author's website at no cost. In A Future History of Water, Dr. Ballestero looks at the unexpected ethical and technical entanglements through which experts u...
Dec 11, 2020•57 min•Ep. 61
In The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties (Duke UP, 2020), Professor Eric Zolov retells the history of 1960s Mexico by focusing on the way that Mexican political leaders pursued a paradoxical foreign policy agenda. This agenda consisted reaffirming Mexico’s close and amicable relationship with the United States, while, at the same time, aggressively asserting a much more radical, anti-US conception of hemispheric and international relations. Zolov resolves this foreign policy parad...
Dec 09, 2020•56 min•Ep. 103
In Creative Transformations: Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas (SUNY Press, 2020), Krista Brune brings together Brazilian fiction, film, journalism, essays, and correspondence from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Drawing attention to the travels of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to the United States and other parts of the Americas, Brune argues that experiences of displacement have had a significant influence on their work. Across Brazilian literary...
Dec 09, 2020•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 104
