New Books in Mexican Studies

Fernando Pérez-Montesinos's first book, Landscaping Indigenous Mexico: The Liberal State and Capitalism in the Purépecha Highlands (University of Texas Press, 2025), focuses on the Purépecha people of Michoacán, Mexico, and examines why and how long-standing patterns of communal landholding changed in response to liberal policies, railroad expansion, and the rise of the timber industry in Mexico. A history of the Purépecha people's survival amid environmental and political changes. Fernando Pérez-Montesinos holds that landscapes are more than geological formations; they are living records of human struggles. Landscaping Indigenous Mexico unearths the history of Juátarhu, an Indigenous landscape shaped and nurtured by the Purépecha—a formidable Mesoamerican people whose power once rivaled that of the Aztecs. Although cataclysmic changes came with European contact and colonization, Juátarhu's enduring agroecology continued to sustain local life through centuries of challenges. Contesting essentialist narratives of Indigenous penury, Pérez Montesinos shows how Purépechas thrived after Mexican independence in 1821, using Juátarhu's diverse agroecology to negotiate continued autonomy amid waves of national economic and political upheaval. After 1870, however, autonomy waned under the pressure of land privatization policies, state intervention, and industrial logging. On the eve of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Purépechas stood at a critical juncture: Would the Indigenous landscape endure or succumb? Offering a fresh perspective on a seemingly well-worn subject, Pérez Montesinos argues that Michoacán, long considered a peripheral revolutionary region, saw one of the era's most radical events: the destruction of the liberal order and the timber capitalism of Juátarhu. Fernando Pérez-Montesinos is a historian of modern Mexico with a focus on the nineteenth century and the Mexican revolution at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research combines environmental, social, and indigenous history to study the connections between processes of land privatization, class and state formation, and ecological change. At UCLA, he teaches courses on modern Latin America and Mexico, as well as environmental and indigenous history. I am currently one of the senior editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review. A chilango at heart, he enjoys tacos al pastor, the Mexican summer rains, and playing fingerstyle guitar. Hugo Peralta-Ramírez is a doctoral student in Colonial Mexican History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he works on the intersection of land, labor, and law among the indigenous communities of Oaxaca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Colbert Cairns of Salve Regina University and Nieves Romero-Díaz of Mount Holyoke join Jana Byars to talk about Early Modern Maternities in the Iberian Atlantic (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). It is the first volume to emphasize women's personal experiences and their life trajectories as mothers within the Peninsula and across the Atlantic. Although an official discourse that defined the conditions of motherhood emerged in the eighteenth century, before this period there were many different articulations of motherhood through which women negotiated hierarchical relationships, power struggles and alliances. While the individual experiences were unique and depended upon the positionality of race and class, the complexities of being a mother were universal. The wide variety of written and visual documents included in this volume highlight women's voices in the first person along with more subtle references to motherhood as well as silences. This collection broadens our understanding of the complexities of motherhood, addressing the pressures of becoming a mother, miscarriage, the acts of giving birth and lactation and the ordeals of raising children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Banned: The Fight for Mexican American Studies in the Streets and in the Courts (Cambridge UP, 2025), readers are taken on a journey through the intense racial politics surrounding the banning of Mexican American Studies in Tucson, Arizona. This book details the state-sponsored racism that led to the elimination of this highly successful program, and the grassroots and legal resistance that followed. Through extensive research and firsthand narratives, readers will gain a deep understanding of the controversy surrounding this historic case. The legal challenge successfully overturned the Arizona law and became a central symbol in the modern-day Ethnic Studies renaissance. This work is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the power of community activism, the importance of fighting for educational equity, and why the example of Tucson created an alternative blueprint for how we can challenge states that are currently banning critical race theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A cornerstone of the evangelization of early New Spain was the conversion of Nahua boys, especially the children of elites. They were to be emissaries between Nahua society and foreign missionaries, hastening the transmission of the gospel. Under the tutelage of Franciscan friars, the boys also learned to act with militant zeal. They sermonized and smashed sacred objects. Some went so far as to kill a Nahua religious leader. For three boys from Tlaxcala, the reprisals were just as deadly. In Child Martyrs and Militant Evangelization in New Spain (University of Texas Press, 2025), Dr. Stephanie Schmidt sheds light on a rare manuscript about Nahua child converts who were killed for acts of zealotry during the late 1520s. This is the Nahuatl version of an account by an early missionary-friar, Toribio de Benavente Motolinía. To this day, Catholics venerate the slain boys as Christian martyrs who suffered for their piety. Yet Franciscan accounts of the boys' sacrifice were influenced by ulterior motives, as the friars sought to deflect attention from their missteps in New Spain. Illuminating Nahua perspectives on this story and period, Schmidt leaves no doubt as to who drove this violence as she dramatically expands the knowledgebase available to students of colonial Latin America. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The spread of democracy across the Global South has taken many different forms, but certain features are consistent: implementing a system of elections and an overarching mission of serving the will and well-being of a country's citizens. But how do we hold politicians accountable for such a mission? How are we to understand the efficacy of the policies they put forth?  In Indicators of Democracy (Stanford UP, 2024), Diana Graizbord exposes the complex, often-hidden world of the institutions that are meant to ensure democratic accountability and transparency. Taking the case of Mexico's National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), Graizbord provides a deep theory of what happens when democratic aspirations intersect with technocratic ambitions. Analyzing what it takes to establish and sustain monitoring and evaluation as a form of official state expertise, Graizbord is able to put forward the contours of technodemocracy—a democratic political project that hinges on the power of experts to shape politics in unexpected but profound ways. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do media producers appeal to international audiences in the streaming era? In this episode of the Global Media & Communication podcast, our host Juan Llamas-Rodriguez interviews Elia Cornelio Marí about her research on Mexican melodramas, Netflix algorithms, and television in translation. In this episode you will hear about: Why melodrama became an important genre in the development of Netflix's original series across Latin America How translation affects the reception of television in Mexico and Italy The concept of “cultural proximity” and how it helps explain what TV series become popular across different national cultures The Global Media & Communication podcast series is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. Guest Biography: Elia Cornelio Marí is Assistant Professor at the Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco, Mexico. She holds a PhD in Communication, Technology and Society by La Sapienza University of Rome, and a M.A. in Media Studies by the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in television studies. Her publications focus on the original production of Netflix for Mexico, the reception of dubbed television by international audiences, and the practice of binge-watching among college students. She is a member of RELATA, the Latin American Network of Audience and Reception Studies. Host Biography: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is a researcher and educator interested in how media theories allow us to critically analyze social phenomena on a global scale. He works as assistant professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and associate director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the US-Mexico Underground (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and Y Tu Mamá También: A Queer Film Classic (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025), and editor of Media Travels: Toward an Atlas of Global Media (Amherst College Press, 2025). CreditsInterview by: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez Produced by: Juan Llamas-RodriguezEdited by: Anna Gamarnik Keywords: algorithms, animation, dubbing, Mexico, Netflix, translation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the birthplace of maize and a celebrated culinary destination, Mexico stands at the crossroads of gastronomic richness and stark social disparities. In México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality (University of Arizona Press, 2025), Dr. Enrique C. Ochoa unveils the historical and contemporary forces behind Mexico's polarized food systems. México Between Feast and Famine provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico's food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Dr. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico's mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of food production but also interrogates the social and cultural impacts. As debates around food sovereignty, globalization, and sustainable development intensify globally, México Between Feast and Famine provides a timely analysis that counters conventional narratives about Mexican cuisine. Even as it looks back, this work looks to the future, where more equitable and sustainable food systems prioritize social justice and community well-being. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and Elizabeth had the chance to talk with Ieva Jusionyte, anthropologist, journalist, emergency medical technician. Her award-winning books include Exit Wounds, which uses anthropological and journalistic methods to follow guns purchased in the United States through organized crime scenes in Mexico, and their legal, social and personal repercussions. Ieva described researching the topic, balancing structural understandings of how guns become entangled with people on both sides of the border with an emphasis on individual stories. The three also talked about how language captures and fails to capture violence, the ways violence and the fear of violence organize space, and the importance of a humble, responsive, and empathetic approach to speaking with people touched by gun violence. Mentioned in this episode: Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985) Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence (1991) Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (2004) Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009) tr. by Lisa Dillman, see RTB episode 48 "Transform, not Transfer: Lisa Dillman on Translation Deborah Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, 2019 Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985) Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (1998) and the "state of exception" Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and the "zone" Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (2023) Recallable Books/Films Ieva suggested E.P Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act (1975) for its thoughtful framing of state violence and its incredible detail, and also Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (2000), for the ways in which the book's structure enacts its argument. Elizabeth went with the documentary by Raul Paz Pastrana, Border South (2019), which also weaves together the stories of those affected, including the anthropologist Jason De León, in ways that account for the multidimensionality of human experience. John prasied the contested Northern Irish spaces of Anna Burns' novel Milkman (2018) Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Global Media & Communication podcast series, a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. Today, our host Juan Llamas-Rodriguez interviews Martín Echeverría about his book Political Entertainment in a Post Authoritarian Democracy: Humor in the Mexican Media (Routledge, 2024), co-written with Frida Rodelo. In this episode you will hear about: The affordances and limitations of YouTube for the political media ecosystem The role of memes in generating political interest among politically disinterested groups How people's distrust of news organizations impact the communication environment for political news How restrictions on political speech have shifted in Mexico in the last few decades Guest Biography: Martín Echeverría is the Head of the Center for Studies in Political Communication at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico. He holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from the University of Seville, Spain, and serves as Co-Chair of the Political Communication Section of the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). His research, which focuses on the mediatization of politics, media systems, and the reception and political effects of media, has been published in leading journals such as The International Journal of Press/Politics, International Journal of Communication, Journalism Studies, and top Latin American outlets. He is the author and editor of several books, including Media and Politics in Post-Authoritarian Mexico: The Continuing Struggle for Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and Political Entertainment in a Post-Authoritarian Democracy (Routledge, 2023), the latter receiving the AEJMC 2024 Knudson Award for the best book on Latin American media in the United States. Host Biography: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is a researcher and educator interested in how media theories allow us to critically analyze social phenomena on a global scale. He works as assistant professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and associate director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the US-Mexico Underground (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and Y Tu Mamá También: A Queer Film Classic (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025), and editor of Media Travels: Toward an Atlas of Global Media (Amherst College Press, 2025). Credits Interview by: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez Produced by: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez  Edited by: Anna Gamarnik Keywords: authoritarianism, memes, Mexico, political communication, political satire, YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University and author of Border Games: The Politics of Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, 3rd edition (Cornell UP, 2022) and The Illicit Global Economy (Oxford UP, 2025), joins RBI Director John Torpey to unpack the myths and realities of border control, illicit trade, and tariffs in the era of Trump. Why do Trump's border policies resonate with so many despite lower deportation numbers than previous administrations? How are fentanyl, tariffs, and military threats shaping U.S. relations with Mexico and Canada? Andreas explains the performative politics of the border, the historical amnesia around immigration enforcement, and why the lines between legal and illegal economies are blurrier than we think. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico (Duke UP, 2020), Vanessa Freije explores the causes and consequences of political scandals in Mexico from the 1960s through the 1980s. Tracing the process by which Mexico City reporters denounced official wrongdoing, she shows that by the 1980s political scandals were a common feature of the national media diet. News stories of state embezzlement, torture, police violence, and electoral fraud provided collective opportunities to voice dissent and offered an important, though unpredictable and inequitable, mechanism for political representation. The publicity of wrongdoing also disrupted top-down attempts by the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional to manage public discourse, exposing divisions within the party and forcing government officials to grapple with popular discontent. While critical reporters denounced corruption, they also withheld many secrets from public discussion, sometimes out of concern for their safety. Freije highlights the tensions-between free speech and censorship, representation and exclusion, and transparency and secrecy-that defined the Mexican public sphere in the late twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Port of Los Angeles is all around us. Objects we use on a daily basis pass through it: furniture, apparel, electronics, automobiles, and much more. The busiest container port in the Western hemisphere, it claims one-sixth of all US ocean shipping. Yet despite its centrality to our world, the port and the story of its making have been neglected in histories of the United States. In A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America (WW Norton, 2024), historian Dr. James Tejani corrects that significant omission, charting the port's rise out of the mud and salt marsh of San Pedro estuary—and showing how the story of the port is the story of modern, globalized America itself. By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans had identified the West Coast as the republic's destiny, a gateway to the riches of the Pacific. In a narrative spanning decades and stretching to Washington, DC, the Pacific Northwest, Civil War Richmond, Southwest deserts, and even overseas to Europe, Hawaii, and Asia, Tejani demonstrates how San Pedro came to be seen as all-important to the nation's future. It was not virgin land, but dominated by powerful Mexican estates that would not be dislodged easily. Yet American scientists, including the great surveyor George Davidson, imperialist politicians such as Jefferson Davis and William Gwin, and hopeful land speculators, among them the future Union Army general Edward Ord, would wrest control of the estuary, and set the scene for the violence, inequality, and engineering marvels to come. San Pedro was no place for a harbor, Dr. Tejani reveals. The port was carved in defiance of nature, using new engineering techniques and massive mechanical dredgers. Business titans such as Collis Huntington and Edward H. Harriman brought their money and corporate influence to the task. But they were outmatched by government reformers, laying the foundations for the port, for the modern city of Los Angeles, and for our globalized world. Interweaving the natural history of San Pedro into this all-too-human history, Dr. Tejani vividly describes how a wild coast was made into the engine of American power. A story of imperial dreams and personal ambition, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth is necessary reading for anyone who seeks to understand what the United States was, what it is now, and what it will be. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The first birth control clinic in El Paso, Texas, opened in 1937. Since then, Mexican-origin women living in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez have confronted various interest groups determined to control their reproductive lives, including a heavily funded international population control campaign led by Planned Parenthood Federation of America as well as the Catholic Church and Mexican American activists. Uncovering nearly one hundred years of struggle, Lina-Maria Murillo reveals how Mexican-origin women on both sides of the border fought to reclaim autonomy and care for themselves and their communities. Faced with a family planning movement steeped in eugenic ideology, working-class Mexican-origin women strategically demanded additional health services and then formed their own clinics to provide care on their own terms. Along the way, they developed what Murillo calls reproductive care— quotidian acts of community solidarity—as activists organized for better housing, education, wages, as well as access to birth control, abortion, and more. In Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands (UNC Press, 2025), Murillo lays bare Mexican-origin women's long battle for human dignity and power in the borderlands as reproductive freedom in Texas once again hangs in the balance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dental modification was common across ancient societies, but perhaps none were more avid practitioners than the Maya. They filed their teeth flat or pointy, polished and drilled them, and crafted decorative inlays of jade and pyrite. Unusually, Maya of all social classes, ages, and professions engaged in dental modification. What did it mean to them? Ancient Maya Teeth: Dental Modification, Cosmology, and Social Identity in Mesoamerica (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Vera Tiesler is the most comprehensive study of Maya dental modification ever published, based on thousands of teeth recovered from 130 sites spanning three millennia. Esteemed archaeologist Dr. Tiesler sifts the evidence, much of it gathered with her own hands and illustrated here with more than a hundred photographs. Exploring the underlying theory and practice of dental modification, Tiesler raises key questions. How did modifications vary across the individual's lifespan? What tools were used? How did the Maya deal with pain—and malpractice? How did they keep their dentitions healthy, functioning, and beautiful? What were the relationships among gender, social identity, and particular dental-modification choices? Addressing these and other issues, Ancient Maya Teeth reveals how dental-modification customs shifted over the centuries, indexing other significant developments in Mayan cultural history. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Violence has only increased in Mexico since 2000: 23,000 murders were recorded in 2016, and 29,168 in 2017. The abundance of laws and constitutional amendments that have cropped up in response are mirrored in Mexico's fragmented cultural production of the same period. Contemporary Mexican literature grapples with this splintered reality through non-linear stories from multiple perspectives, often told through shifts in time. The novels, such as Jorge Volpi's Una novela criminal [A Novel Crime] (2018) and Julián Herbert's La casa del dolor ajeno [The House of the Pain of Others] (2015) take multiple perspectives and follow non-linear plotlines; other examples, such as the very short stories in ¡Basta! 100 mujeres contra la violencia de género [Enough! 100 Women against Gender-Based Violence] (2013), present perspectives from multiple authors. Few scholars compare cultural production and legal texts in situations like Mexico, where extreme violence coexists with a high number of human rights laws. Unlawful Violence: Mexican Law and Cultural Production (Vanderbilt UP, 2022) measures fictional accounts of human rights against new laws that include constitutional amendments to reform legal proceedings, laws that protect children, laws that condemn violence against women, and laws that protect migrants and Indigenous peoples. It also explores debates about these laws in the Mexican house of representatives and senate, as well as interactions between the law and the Mexican public. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As of 2018, only about one in ten Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx (MMAX) students graduate with a college degree. Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant observations, pláticas, document analyses, and literature on race, space, and racism in higher education, Why you always so political?: The Experiences and Resiliencies of Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx Students in Higher Education (Viva Oxnard, 2024) by Dr. Martín Alberto Gonzalez documents the narratives of 20 MMAX undergraduate students at a private, historically and predominantly white university in the Northeast United States. Utilizing counterstorytelling as a research method, Martín Alberto Gonzalez argues that the racially hostile campus environment experienced by MMAX students at their respective university manifests itself as a form of educational-environmental racism. By providing culturally relevant counterstories about racism in higher education, this book offers an accessible tool for teaching and learning about the harsh realities of Students of Color who attend predominantly white universities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Laird, of Brown University, discusses Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2024). In 1536, only fifteen years after the fall of the Aztec empire, Franciscan missionaries began teaching Latin, classical rhetoric, and Aristotelian philosophy to native youths in central Mexico. The remarkable linguistic and cultural exchanges that would result from that initiative are the subject of this book. Aztec Latin highlights the importance of Renaissance humanist education for early colonial indigenous history, showing how practices central to humanism — the cultivation of eloquence, the training of leaders, scholarly translation, and antiquarian research — were transformed in New Spain to serve Indian elites as well as the Spanish authorities and religious orders. While Franciscan friars, inspired by Erasmus' ideal of a common tongue, applied principles of Latin grammar to Amerindian languages, native scholars translated the Gospels, a range of devotional literature, and even Aesop's fables into the Mexican language of Nahuatl. They also produced significant new writings in Latin and Nahuatl, adorning accounts of their ancestral past with parallels from Greek and Roman history and importing themes from classical and Christian sources to interpret pre-Hispanic customs and beliefs. Aztec Latin reveals the full extent to which the first Mexican authors mastered and made use of European learning and provides a timely reassessment of what those indigenous authors really achieved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chile is more than just spice, writes Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and Cal Poly Ethnic Studies professor Victor Valle in The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands (U New Mexico Press, 2023). By tracing the meaning of chile as a plant and chile eating as an act. Valle shows how Indigenous cultivation and culinary practices troubled colonizers, sustained cultures, and fostered exchange. The Poetics of Fire calls for decolonization of chile cultivation and a renewed embrace of Indigenous ideals toward land and nourishment, arguing that chiles serve as a connection point between pre-colonization Indigenous societies and twentieth century (and beyond) Chicanx and Latinx communities. At once food studies, Indigenous studies, and Latinx studies, The Poetics of Fire dispenses with Scoville units and instead thinks about how chile is a window for understanding a decolonized world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Robert Wright about Indigenous Autonomy at La Junta de Los Rios: Traders, Allies, and Migrants on New Spain's Northern Frontier (Texas Tech UP, 2023). The Indigenous nations of the valley of the Rio Grande that is now centered upon Ojinaga, Chihuahua, and Presidio, Texas―the La Junta valley in colonial times―had a long and unique history with Hispanics during the colonial period. Their valley was the initial route to New Mexico and West Texas explored by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s. In the mid-1600s, the Juntans began engaging in long-distance migrant labor in Nueva Vizcaya, and in the 1680s they began inviting Franciscan missionaries and serving as important military allies to Hispanic troops. Yet for seventy-five years only the missionaries, without any Hispanic military or civilians, lived among them, due to both the remoteness of their valley from Hispanic settlements and the Juntans' insistence upon their autonomy. This is unique in Spanish colonial annals on the northern frontier of New Spain. This detailed research study adds much new information and many corrections to the rare previous studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For over a century Mexico has been embroiled in a drug war dictated by the demands of their neighbor to the north. In The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade (W. W. Norton, 2021), Benjamin T. Smith offers a history of the trade and its effects upon the people of Mexico. As he reveals, at the start of the 20th century drugs such as marijuana and opium were largely on the margins of Mexican society, used mainly by soldiers, prisoners, and immigrants. The association of marijuana with a bohemian subculture in the early 1920s prompted the first punitive laws against it, while the use of opium by Chinese immigrants led Mexican officials to target the drug as a means to arrest the country's Chinese population. Yet the drug trade thrived thanks to the growing demand for marijuana and heroin in the United States. In response, American officials pressured their Mexican counterparts to end drug production and distribution in their country, even to the point of ending the effort to provide heroin in a regulated way for the country's relatively small population of heroin addicts. Yet these efforts often foundered on the economic factors involved, with many government officials protecting the trade either for personal profit or for the financial benefits the trade provided to their states. This trade only grew in the postwar era, as the explosion of drug use in the 1960s and the crackdown on the European heroin trade made Mexico an increasingly important supplier of narcotics to the United States. The vast profits to be made from this changed the nature of the trade from small-scale family-managed operations to much more complex organizations that increasingly employed violence to ensure their share of it. As Smith details, the consequences of this have proven enormously detrimental both to the Mexican state and to the Mexican people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of women. At the same time, abortion laws have grown harsher in several states outside the capital as part of a coordinated national backlash. In Lawful Sins: Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2022), Dr. Elyse Ona Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City's public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a critical account of the relationship among reproductive rights, gendered citizenship, and public healthcare. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, Dr. Singer reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women's citizenship in liberal societies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From 1845 to 1865 the Gulf of Mexico was at the center of American expansion and southern imperialism. A Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War–Era Gulf South (University of Georgia Press, 2024) by Dr. Maria Angela Diaz tells the story of several communities, such as Galveston, New Orleans, and Pensacola, as well as countries such as Mexico and Cuba, to uncover the way that wars within the upper rim of the Gulf of Mexico facilitated American and southern attempts to conquer Latin American nations. In the push for westward expansion that preceded the Civil War, white southerners along with other Americans engaged in violent conquest in Latin America and the American West. Through the wars that are chronicled here, white southern concepts of race became more rigidly fixed. Dr. Maria Angela Diaz covers several conflicts leading up to the Civil War with Mexicans, Cubans, and Native Americans. She places the Civil War within this framework and follows the trajectory of relations with Latin America through the end of the Civil War and ex-Confederates' attempts to emigrate abroad. Gulf Coast communities facilitated both the physical efforts to seize territory and the construction of the highly racialized imperialist ideas that reimagined Latin America as a region that could secure the South's future. Yet the pursuit of that territory created a fluctuating and uncertain situation that shaped the choices of the diverse peoples who lived along the upper rim of the Gulf of Mexico in ways they did not expect. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's book is: Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States (U California Press, 2024), a which explores how each year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, California, Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales shows that while a lucky few do find reprieve, many are met by resource-impoverished relatives who are unable to support them, exploitative jobs that are no match for the high cost of living, and individualistic social norms that render them independent and alone. Sin Padres, Ni Papeles illuminates how unaccompanied teens who grow up as undocumented low-wage workers navigate unthinkable material and emotional hardship, find the agency and hope that is required to survive, and discover what it means to be successful during the transition to adulthood in the United States. Our guest is: Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales, who is a researcher, author, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. She specializes in the study of international migration and immigrant integration, with particular interest in the experiences of Latin American migrants in the United States. Throughout her research and writing, Stephanie explores the role of immigration policy in shaping the everyday lives of migrant children and their families, how immigrants and the communities they arrive to (re)make one another mutually, and the meanings immigrants make of success and wellbeing within an increasingly unequal US society. She is the author of Sin Padres, Ni Papeles. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. Playlist for listeners: We Are Not Dreamers Immigration Realities The Ungrateful Refugee Who Gets Believed Reunited Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You'll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Hispano Bastion: New Mexican Power in the Age of Manifest Destiny, 1837-1860 (University of New Mexico Press, 2023), historian Dr. Michael J. Alarid examines New Mexico's transition from Spanish to Mexican to US control during the nineteenth century and illuminates how emerging class differences played a crucial role in the regime change. After Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, trade between Mexico and the United States attracted wealthy Hispanos into a new market economy and increased trade along El Camino Real, turning it into a burgeoning exchange route. As landowning Hispanos benefited from the Santa Fe trade, traditional relationships between wealthy and poor Nuevomexicanos--whom Alarid calls patrónes and vecinos--started to shift. Far from being displaced by US colonialism, wealthy Nuevomexicanos often worked in concert with new American officials after US troops marched into New Mexico in 1846, and in the process, Dr. Alarid argues, the patrónes abandoned their customary obligations to vecinos, who were now evolving into a working class. Wealthy Nuevomexicanos, the book argues, succeeded in preserving New Mexico as a Hispano bastion, but they did so at the expense of poor vecinos. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's book is: Reunited: Family Separation and Central American Youth Migration (Russell Sage Foundation, 2024), by Dr. Ernesto Castañeda and Daniel Jenks, which explains the reasons for Central American youth migration, describes the journey, and documents how minors experienced separation from their families and their subsequent reunification. Castañeda and Jenks find that these minors migrate on their own for three main reasons: gang violence, lack of educational and economic opportunity, and a longing for family reunification.  The authors recount these young migrants' journey to the U.S. border, detailing the difficulties passing through Mexico, their encounters with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, and staying in shelters while their sponsorship, placement, and departure are arranged. The authors also describe the tensions the youth face when they reunite with family members they may view as strangers. Despite their biological, emotional, and financial bonds to these relatives, the youth must learn how to relate to new authority figures and decide whether or how to follow their rules. They are likely to have lived through traumatizing experiences that inhibit their integration. Consequently, schools and social service organizations are crucial, the authors argue, for enhancing youth migrants' sense of belonging and their integration into their new communities. Bilingual programs, Spanish-speaking PTA groups, message boards, mentoring of immigrant children, and after-school programs for members of reunited families are all helpful in supporting immigrant youth as they learn English, finish high school, apply to college, and find jobs. Offering a complex exploration of youth migration and family reunification, Reunited provides a moving account of how young Central American migrants make the journey north and ultimately reintegrate with their families in the United States. Our guest is: Dr. Ernesto Castañeda, who is director of the Center for Latin American and Latino studies at American University. The co-author is: Daniel Jenks, who is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. Playlist for listeners: Immigration Realities Community Building The Fight To Save the Town Hands Up, Don't Shoot: Researching Racial Injustice We Are Not Dreamers Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You'll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dan La Botz's book Riding with the Revolution: The American Left in the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1925 (Brill, 2024) tells the story of Americans who from 1900 to 1925 became involved with the Mexican Revolution. John Reed actually saddled up and rode with Pancho Villa. Later, American war resisters crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, where they helped found the Communist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and a Feminist Council. Protestant ministers, Socialist Eugene Debs, Samuel Gompers head of the AFL, the anarchist Emma Goldman, and Communists John Reed, Louis Fraina, Bertram Wolfe, as well as foreign politicos M.N. Roy, Sen Katayama, and Alexander Borodin all took a hand in the Mexican labor movement. Dan La Botz is the author of twelve books, and his latest is part of Brill's Historical Materialism series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Perceptions of the United States as a nation of immigrants are so commonplace that its history as a nation of emigrants is forgotten. However, once the United States came into existence, its citizens immediately asserted rights to emigrate for political allegiances elsewhere. Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America (UNC Press, 2024) recovers this unfamiliar story by braiding the histories of citizenship and the North American borderlands to explain the evolution of emigrant rights between 1750 and 1870. Eric R. Schlereth traces the legal and political origins of emigrant rights in contests to decide who possessed them and who did not. At the same time, it follows the thousands of people that exercised emigration right citizenship by leaving the United States for settlements elsewhere in North America. Ultimately, Schlereth shows that national allegiance was often no more powerful than the freedom to cast it aside. The advent of emigrant rights had lasting implications, for it suggested that people are free to move throughout the world and to decide for themselves the nation they belong to. This claim remains urgent in the twenty-first century as limitations on personal mobility persist inside the United States and at its borders. This interview was conducted by Hannah Nolan, a PhD Candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work focuses upon the intersection of memory, partisanship, and ethnic identity during the early republic to explore the construction of Irish and American identities in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Underground Leviathan: Corporate Sovereignty and Mining in the Americas (U Nevada Press, 2024) explores the emergence, dynamics, and lasting impacts of a mining firm, the United States Company. Through its exercise of sovereign power across the borders of North America in the early twentieth century, the transnational US Company shaped the business, environmental, political, and scientific landscape. Between its initial incorporation in Maine in 1906 and its final demise in the 1980s, the mining company held properties in Utah, Colorado, California, Nevada, Alaska, Mexico, and Canada. The firm was a prototypical management-ruled corporation, which strategically planned and manipulated the technological, production, economic, urban, environmental, political, and cultural activities wherever it operated, all while shaping social actors internationally, including managers, engineers, workers, neighbours, and farmers. In this study, he aims to unearth the hidden relationships between communities that transcend national states. Throughout the book, the author points out how modern corporations are run by a kaleidoscope of interests and groups, and many of the issues they face are relevant today.  Israel García Solares was born and raised in the Xochimilco neighbourhood of Mexico City. I studied for an undergraduate and master's in economics at Mexico's National University (UNAM) and a PhD in History at El Colegio de México. García Solares is currently an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Research in Applied Mathematics and Systems at UNAM, and his research focuses on the global history of technological actors in the 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America (SUNY Press, 2022) proposes the existence of a recognizably distinct Holocaust consciousness in Latin America since the 1970s. Community leaders, intellectuals, writers, and political activists facing state repression have seen themselves reflected in Holocaust histories and have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries. In so doing, they have developed a unique, controversial approach to the memory of the Holocaust that is little known outside the region. Estelle Tarica deepens our understanding of Holocaust awareness in a global context by examining diverse Jewish and non-Jewish voices, focusing on Argentina, Mexico, and Guatemala. What happens, she asks, when we find the Holocaust invoked in unexpected places and in relation to other events, such as the Argentine "Dirty War" or the Mayan genocide in Guatemala? The book draws on meticulous research in two areas that have rarely been brought into contact—Holocaust Studies and Latin American Studies—and aims to illuminate the topic for readers who may be new to the fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Will Grant about his book Populista: The Rise of Latin America's 21st Century Strongman (Bloomsbury, 2021). or more than six decades, Fidel Castro's words have echoed through the politics of Latin America. His towering political influence still looms over the region today. The swing to the Left in Latin America, known as the 'Pink Tide', was the most important political movement in the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century. It involved some of the biggest, most colorful and most controversial characters in Latin America for decades, leaders who would leave an indelible mark on their nations and who were adored and reviled in equal measure. Parties became secondary to individual leaders and populism reigned from Venezuela to Brazil, from Central America to the Caribbean, financed by a spike in commodity prices and the oil-backed largesse of Venezuela's charismatic socialist president, Hugo Chávez.  Yet within a decade and a half, it was all over. Today, this wave of populism has left the Americas in the hands of some of the most authoritarian and dangerous leaders since the military dictatorships of the 1970s. Will Grant is one of the UK's leading broadcast journalists on Latin American affairs. He has been a BBC correspondent in Latin America since 2007 with successive deployments to Venezuela, Mexico and Cuba. Across his career, he has been responsible for covering the region from Patagonia to the Rio Grande and has traveled to every part of the continent in that time. He is currently based in Havana and Mexico City. Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A perpetual tension exists between history and change, which is an issue long explored by historians and social scientists. Reckoning with Change in Yucatán: Histories of Care and Threat on a Former Hacienda (Routledge, 2023) engages with how best to look upon and respond to change, arguing that this debate is an important arena for negotiating local belonging and a force of transformation in its own right. For residents of Chunchucmil, a historic rural community in Yucatán, Mexico, history is anything but straightforward. Living in what is both a defunct 19th-century hacienda estate and a vibrant Catholic pilgrimage site, Chunchucmileños reckon past, present, and future in radically different ways. For example, while some use the aging estate buildings to weave a history of economic decline and push for revitalization by hotel developers, others highlight the growing fame of the Virgin of the Rosary in the attached church and vow to defend the site from developer interference.  By exploring how past and future are channeled through changing built environments, landscapes, sacred relics, and legal documents, this ethnographic study details how the politics of change provide Chunchucmileños with a common language for debating commitments to place and each another in the present. Against Western notions of ‘History' as a relatively coherent account of change, Jason Ramsey suggests we reframe it as an ongoing performance that is always fractured, democratic, and morally tinged. Jason Ramsey is a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. Based on fieldwork in Yucatan among former plantation laborers, he publishes on topics such as semiotics, ruination, value, and the anthropology of history. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) never crossed the Atlantic himself, but his impact in colonial Latin America was profound. Prints made after the Flemish artist's designs were routinely sent from Europe to the Spanish Americas, where artists used them to make all manner of objects. Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America (Getty Research Institute, 2021) by Dr. Aaron M. Hyman is the first comprehensive study of this transatlantic phenomenon, despite broad recognition that it was one of the most important forces to shape the artistic landscapes of the region. Copying, particularly in colonial contexts, has traditionally held negative implications that have discouraged its serious exploration. Yet analysing the interpretation of printed sources and recontextualizing the resulting works within period discourse and their original spaces of display allow a new critical reassessment of this broad category of art produced in colonial Latin America—art that has all too easily been dismissed as derivative and thus unworthy of sustained interest and investigation. This book takes a new approach to the paradigms of artistic authorship that emerged alongside these complex creative responses, focusing on the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that the use of European prints was an essential component of the very framework in which colonial artists forged ideas about what it meant to be a creator. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Each year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, California to produce Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales shows that while a lucky few do find reprieve, many are met by resource-impoverished relatives who are unable to support them, exploitative jobs that are no match for the high cost of living, and individualistic social norms that render them independent and alone. Sin Padres, Ni Papeles illuminates how unaccompanied teens who grow up as undocumented low-wage workers navigate unthinkable material and emotional hardship, find the agency and hope that is required to survive, and discover what it means to be successful during the transition to adulthood in the United States. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the past fifteen years in Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been murdered and 110,000 more have been disappeared. In Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico (Duke UP, 2024), Claudio Lomnitz examines the Mexican state in relation to this extreme violence, uncovering a reality that challenges the familiar narratives of “a war on drugs” or a “failed state.” Tracing how neoliberal reforms, free trade agreements, and a burgeoning drug economy have shaped Mexico's sociopolitical landscape, Lomnitz shows that the current crisis does not represent a tear in the social fabric. Rather, it reveals a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state and the economy in which traditional systems of policing, governance, and the rule of law have eroded. Lomnitz finds that power is now concentrated in the presidency and enforced through militarization, which has left the state estranged from itself and incapable of administering justice or regaining control over violence. Through this critical examination, Lomnitz offers a new theory of the state, its forms of sovereignty, and its shifting relation to capital and militarization. In this episode, host Richard Grijalva and Claudio Lomnitz discuss the long gestation of what became Sovereignty and Extortion, the challenges of writing for a broader public discussion, the affordances and responsibilities of a writer in a public-facing institution like El Colegio Nacional, the central ideas and arguments animating Sovereignty and Extortion, and the prospects facing president-elect Claudia Shienbaum Pardo's tenure in confronting the issues Lomnitz raised in these lectures. They also discuss the kind of traction that this work has produced in Mexico and the possibilities for collective, collaborative work that the topic warrants.   Claudio W. Lomnitz is Campbell Family Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is the author of several books in English and Spanish, including Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National Space (Univ. of California Press, 1992), Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001), Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2014), and Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation (Other Press, 2021). In 2021, he was named a member of El Colegio Nacional in Mexico City. Sovereignty and Extortion gathers the cycle of inaugural lectures he delivered at the Colegio, which was published in Spanish in 2022 by Ediciones Era as El tejido social rasgado. Richard A. Grijalva is a scholar of Mexican and Mexican American Studies based in Austin, TX. From 2022-2024 he was an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When General Porfirio Díaz assumed power in 1876, he ushered in Mexico's first prolonged period of political stability and national economic growth--though "progress" came at the cost of democracy. Indigenous Autocracy presents a new story about how regional actors negotiated between national authoritarian rule and local circumstances by explaining how an Indigenous person held state-level power in Mexico during the thirty-five-year dictatorship that preceded the Mexican Revolution (the Porfiriato), and the apogee of scientific racism across Latin America. Although he was one of few recognizably Indigenous persons in office, Próspero Cahuantzi of Tlaxcala kept his position (1885-1911) longer than any other gubernatorial appointee under Porfirio Díaz's transformative but highly oppressive dictatorship (1876-1911). Cahuantzi leveraged his identity and his region's Indigenous heritage to ingratiate himself to Díaz and other nation-building elites. Locally, Cahuantzi navigated between national directives aimed at modernizing Mexico, often at the expense of the impoverished rural majority, and strategic management of Tlaxcala's natural resources--in particular, balancing growing industrial demand for water with the needs of the local population.  In Indigenous Autocracy: Power, Race, and Resources in Porfirian Tlaxcala, Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2024), Jaclyn Ann Sumner shows how this intermediary actor brokered national expectations and local conditions to maintain state power, challenging the idea that governors during the Porfirian dictatorship were little more than provincial stewards who repressed dissent. Drawing upon documentation from more than a dozen Mexican archives, the book brings Porfirian-era Mexico into critical conversations about race and environmental politics in Latin America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throughout the 1920s Mexico was rocked by attempted coups, assassinations, and popular revolts. Yet by the mid-1930s, the country boasted one of the most stable and durable political systems in Latin America. In the first book on party formation conducted at the regional level after the Mexican Revolution, Sarah Osten examines processes of political and social change that eventually gave rise to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which dominated Mexico's politics for the rest of the twentieth century. In analyzing the history of socialist parties in the southeastern states of Campeche, Chiapas, Tabasco, and Yucatán, Osten demonstrates that these 'laboratories of revolution' constituted a highly influential testing ground for new political traditions and institutional structures.  The Mexican Revolution's Wake: The Making of a Political System, 1920–1929 (Cambridge UP, 2018) shows how the southeastern socialists provided a blueprint for a new kind of party that struck calculated balances between the objectives of elite and popular forces, and between centralized authority and local autonomy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why did José de León Toral kill Álvaro Obregón, leader of the Mexican Revolution? So far, historians have characterized the motivations of the young Catholic militant as the fruit of fanaticism.  Robert Weis's book For Christ and Country: Militant Catholic Youth in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Cambridge UP, 2019) offers new insights on how diverse sectors experienced the aftermath of the Revolution by exploring the religious, political, and cultural contentions of the 1920s. Far from an isolated fanatic, León Toral represented a generation of Mexicans who believed that the revolution had unleashed ancient barbarism, sinful consumerism, and anticlerical tyranny. Facing attacks against the Catholic essence of Mexican nationalism, they emphasized asceticism, sacrifice, and the redemptive potential of violence. Their reckless enthusiasm to launch assaults was a sign of their devotion. León Toral insisted that 'only God' was his accomplice; in fact, he was cheered by thousands who dreamed of bringing the Kingdom of Christ to beleaguered Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Based on over a decade of research, a powerful, moving work of narrative nonfiction that illuminates the little-known world of the anexos of Mexico City, the informal addiction treatment centers where mothers send their children to escape the violence of the drug war. The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (FSG, 2024) reveals a hidden place where care and violence are impossible to separate: the anexos of Mexico City. The prizewinning anthropologist Angela Garcia takes us deep into the world of these small rooms, informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness, spread across Mexico City's tenements and reaching into the United States. Run and inhabited by Mexico's most marginalized populations, they are controversial for their illegality and their use of coercion. Yet for many Mexican families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, these rooms offer something of a refuge from what lies beyond them--the intensifying violence surrounding the drug war. This is the first book ever written on the anexos. Garcia, who spent a decade conducting anthropological fieldwork in Mexico City, draws readers into their many dimensions, casting light on the mothers and their children who are entangled in this hidden world. Following the stories of its denizens, she asks what these places are, why they exist, and what they reflect about Mexico and the wider world. With extraordinary empathy and a sharp eye for detail, Garcia attends to the lives that the anexos both sustain and erode, wrestling with the question of why mothers turn to them as a site of refuge even as they reproduce violence. Woven into these portraits is Garcia's own powerful story of family, childhood, homelessness, and drugs--a blend of ethnography and memoir converging on a set of fundamental questions about the many forms and meanings that violence, love, care, family, and hope may take. Infused with profound ethnographic richness and moral urgency, The Way That Leads Among the Lost is a stunning work of narrative nonfiction, a book that will leave a deep mark on readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Mexican Revolution: A Documentary History (Hackett, 2022), "Henderson and Buchenau have done an excellent and thoughtful job of collecting a wide range of voices for students to learn about the Mexican Revolution and its causes, both from ‘above' and from ‘below'. I'm particularly appreciative of the authors' inclusion of women's voices and women's issues of the era, including the point of view of the first woman elected to public office in Mexico. They deserve praise for including documents that complicate widely accepted, heroic revolutionary narratives of the period for students—such as the experience of soldaderas and the massacre of Chinese people in Torreón. It is also worth mentioning that the editors have done an admirable job in choosing documents from across Mexico's many diverse and heterogenous regions. The general Introduction is excellent; it is both accurate and highly readable for students. It is no easy feat to succinctly describe both the events and the significance of this period in Mexican history as the authors have done here."—Sarah Osten, The University of Vermont Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Surgery & Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Elizabeth O'Brien foregrounds the racial and religious meanings of surgery to draw important connections between historical and contemporary politics regarding fetal and maternal healthcare. She traces practices of caesarean section and coercive Christianization throughout Mexico's colonial period; patriarchal pregnancy management during republican state formation; and tubal ligation and vaginal bifurcation in Mexico's twentieth century Eugenics movement. Surgery and Salvation has received several awards including the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies' Judy Ewell Award; the Latin American Studies Association 2024 Best Book Award for the Nineteenth-Century Section; and Honorable Mention for the 2024 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize (WAWH) as well as the Thomas McGann Prize (RMCLAS). O'Brien is an Assistant Professor of the History of Medicine and Latin American History at the University of California, Los Angeles. In this episode, O'Brien is interviewed by Leah Cargin (PhD candidate, University of Oklahoma). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) by Dr. Paula S. De Vos examines the equipment, books, and remedies of colonial Mexico City's Herrera pharmacy—natural substances with known healing powers that formed part of the basis for modern-day healing traditions and home remedies in Mexico. Dr. De Vos traces the evolution of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition from its foundations in ancient Greece to the physician-philosophers of mediaeval Islamic empires and the Latin West and eventually through the Spanish Empire to Mexico, offering a global history of the transmission of these materials, knowledges, and techniques. Her detailed inventory of the Herrera pharmacy reveals the many layers of this tradition and how it developed over centuries, providing new perspectives and insight into the development of Western science and medicine: its varied origins, its engagement with and inclusion of multiple knowledge traditions, the ways in which these traditions moved and circulated in relation to imperialism, and its long-term continuities and dramatic transformations. Dr. De Vos ultimately reveals the great significance of pharmacy, and of artisanal pursuits more generally, as a cornerstone of ancient, mediaeval, and early modern epistemologies and philosophies of nature. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this sweeping new history, esteemed University of North Carolina historian Kathleen DuVal makes the case for the ongoing, ancient, and dynamic history of Native nationhood as a critical component of global history. In Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House, 2024), DuVal covers a thousand years of continental history, building on a new generation of scholars who have argued for the continued power and agency of Native people in the face of challenges, obstacles, and catastrophes. DuVal's history begins long before any European knew of continents across the Atlantic Ocean, and tracks the history of Native nationhood as an idea and practice up through the present day. Incorporating the use of of environmental history, global history, archaeology and oral history, among other diverse methods, DuVal presents a rich and complex history of a continent that has a history dating back far longer than many people might assume, and tells a story that, rather than a simple narrative of decline and conquest, is more intereseting and far more complex. It is impossible to come away from this book without believing that the story of Native nationhood is indeed, the story of North America itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices