In this sweeping history, 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...

Finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for CriticismBy one of Mexico's greatest contemporary writers, this investigation into state violence and mourning gives voice to the political experience of collective pain.Grieving is a hybrid...

A prominent scholar of Mexican and Latin American history challenges the field’s focus on historical memory to examine colonial-era conceptions of the futureGoing against the grain of most existing scholarship, Matthew D. O’Hara explores the archives of...

Reveals the revolutionary power of the Chavista grassroots movementVenezuela has been the stuff of frontpage news extravaganzas, especially since the death of Hugo Chavez. With predictable bias, mainstream media focus on violent clashes between...

First published in 1936, the classic work Roots of Brazil by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda presented an analysis of why and how a European culture flourished in a large tropical environment that was totally foreign to its traditions, and the manner and...

1956. Argentina has just lost its charismatic president Juán Perón in a military coup, and terror reigns across the land. June 1956: eighteen people are reported dead in a failed Peronist uprising. December 1956: sometime journalist, crime fiction...

Winner, American Library Association Booklist’s Top of the List, 2019 Adult NonfictionAcclaimed writer Marie Arana delivers a cultural history of Latin America and the three driving forces that have shaped the character of the region: exploitation...

Brazil is associated in many people's minds with conviviality, sensuality, and natural beauty. Yet the country behind these images and associations is something of an enigma. It is alternately praised as the "country of the future," a rising power ready...

This theoretically inspired study explores legislative politics in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Instead of beginning with an assumption that these legislatures are either rubber-stamps or obstructionist bodies, the chapters provide new data and...

After the 1854 abolition of slavery in Peru, a new generation of plantation owners turned to a system of peasant tenantry to maintain cotton production through the use of cheap labor. In Peasants on Plantations Vincent C. Peloso analyzes the changing...

Containing both official and popular documents, U.S. War with Mexico explores the events leading up to the war, the politics surrounding it, popular sentiment in both countries about it, and the war’s long-term impact on the future development and...

Two years after Hurricane Maria hit, Puerto Ricans are still reeling from its effects and aftereffects. Aftershocks collects poems, essays and photos from survivors of Hurricane Maria detailing their determination to persevere.The concept of...

An extensive update to the authoritative introduction to Mexico’s ancient civilizations.“Masterly. . . . The complexities of Mexico’s ancient cultures are perceptively presented and interpreted.” Library Journal“A must for anyone interested in...

Change looms in Havana, Cuba's capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in cliché90 miles from U.S. shores and off-limits to most Americans. Journalist Julia Cooke, who lived there at intervals over a period of five years, discovered a...

Why has violence spiked in Latin America's contemporary democracies? What explains its temporal and spatial variation? Analyzing the region's uneven homicide levels, this book maps out a theoretical agenda focusing on three intersecting factors: the...

Modernity in Latin America is defined above all by its multi-layered, kaleidoscopic quality. Reminiscent of Octavio Paz’s labyrinth, it is a modernity which has accommodated a piling-on of new traditions to old, a blending of external cultures with...