The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader brings together thirty-six field-defining essays by the most prominent theorists of Latin American cultural studies. Written over the past several decades, these essays provide an assessment of Latin American cultural studies, an account of the field’s historical formation, and an outline of its significant ideological and methodological trends and theoretical controversies. With many essays appearing in English for the first time, the co...

Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s underwent a profound and often violent process of social change. From the Cuban Revolution to the massive guerrilla movements in Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, and most of Central America, to the democratic socialist experiment of Allende in Chile, to the increased popularity of socialist-oriented parties in Uruguay, or para-socialist movements, such as the Juventud Peronista in Argentina, the idea of social change was in the air. Although this top...

In 1982, the average Briton didn't know the Falkland Islands existed, let alone their status as a disputed British territory just off the coast of Argentina. That changed when the Argentinians invaded the islands and overwhelmed the small defending force. Both nations claimed the islands were theirs, but now Argentina thought the British would give them up without a fight.They were wrong.Britain sent a task force into the South Atlantic to re-take the islands, and the short...

Fernando Henrique Cardoso received a phone call in the middle of the night asking him to be the new Finance Minister of Brazil. As he put the phone down and stared into the darkness of his hotel room, he feared he'd been handed a political death sentence. The year was 1993, and he would be responsible for an economy that had had seven different currencies in the previous eight years to cope with inflation that had run at 3000 percent a year. Brazil had a habit of chewing up finance ministe...

John Dos Passos, the distinguished American novelist and historian has been personally interested in Brazil for the last fifteen years. He first visited the country in 1948, and returned again in 1956 and 1962. This book, which is based on his experiences in Brazil, presents the people and landscapes of a young country on the move.Here you will find several extraordinary reports on Brasilia, first in the planning stage, second in the wildly frantic period when it was a half-finishe...

Between 1730 and 1750, powerful healer and vodun priest Domingos Álvares traversed the colonial Atlantic world like few Africans of his time — from Africa to South America to Europe — addressing the profound alienation of warfare, capitalism, and the African slave trade through the language of health and healing. In Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, James H. Sweet finds dramatic means for unfolding a history of the eighteenth-ce...

In Disappearing Acts, Diana Taylor looks at how national identity is shaped, gendered, and contested through spectacle and spectatorship. The specific identity in question is that of Argentina, and Taylor’s focus is directed toward the years 1976 to 1983 in which the Argentine armed forces were pitted against the Argentine people in that nation’s "Dirty War." Combining feminism, cultural studies, and performance theory, Taylor analyzes the political spectacles that comprised the w...

In The Tribute of Blood Peter M. Beattie analyzes the transformation of army recruitment and service in Brazil between 1864 and 1945, using this history of common soldiers to examine nation building and the social history of Latin America’s largest nation. Tracing the army’s reliance on coercive recruitment to fill its lower ranks, Beattie shows how enlisted service became associated with criminality, perversion, and dishonor, as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Brazilian o...

The revolutionary movements that emerged frequently in Latin America over the past century promoted goals that included overturning dictatorships, confronting economic inequalities, and creating what Cuban revolutionary hero Che Guevara called the "new man." But, in fact, many of the "new men" who participated in these movements were not men. Thousands of them were women. This book aims to show why a full understanding of revolutions needs to take account of gender.Karen Kampwirth ...

Security and risk have become central to how cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited in the twenty-first century. In Endangered City, Austin Zeiderman focuses on this new political imperative to govern the present in anticipation of future harm. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Bogotá, Colombia, he examines how state actors work to protect the lives of poor and vulnerable citizens from a range of threats, including environmental hazards and urban ...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a massive wave of immigration transformed the cultural landscape of Argentina. Alongside other immigrants to Buenos Aires, German speakers strove to carve out a place for themselves as Argentines without fully relinquishing their German language and identity. Their story sheds light on how pluralistic societies take shape and how immigrants negotiate the terms of citizenship and belonging.Focusing on social welfare, education, r...

In 1946 Juan Perón launched a populist challenge to the United States, recruiting an army of labor activists to serve as worker attachés at every Argentine embassy. By 1955, over five hundred would serve, representing the largest presence of blue-collar workers in the foreign service of any country in history. A meatpacking union leader taught striking workers in Chicago about rising salaries under Perón. A railroad motorist joined the revolution in Bolivia. A baker showed Soviet workers t...