Category: Book Reviews

Alejandro L. Madrid’s new book challenged me, the former organizer of a musical festival in Mexico, to open my mind and entertain new ways to perceive a world where I once lived. In The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening, he introduced me to networks of Mexico City sound archive creators who connect with each other as well as their counterparts throughout Latin America. For me, Mexico was a wonderland of sound and, while I listened to lots of music during the 18 years I explored the country, there was much I did not hear.

The focus of The Interior, an edited collection of articles, is to “recenter Brazilian history,” as editors Frederico Freitas and Jacob Blanc establish in the book’s subtitle. Drawing on the multiplicity of meanings of the term “interior” (and its sometimes extension, sometimes counterpart: sertão) in Brazil over time and across the country’s vast inland spaces, the editors put together a collection of texts that span most regions, representing several types of Brazilian interiors.

Scott’s Wallace’s Central America in the Crosshairs of War; on the Road from Vietnam to Iraq is really several books at once that cohere into a magnificent whole. It is the evocative, at times nostalgic, at others harrowing, personal account of a young journalist’s coming of age during his first foreign journalism assignment, always keenly observant and thoughtful. But it also offers a carefully developed analysis of the nature of U.S. foreign policy, at least in those poorer parts of the world where it has intervened militarily or more clandestinely, or heavily supported the wars waged by its clients. Wallace has witnessed these wars both earlier and later in his life, as a citizen and journalist.

Brooke Larson’s book on the history Indigenous education in Bolivia is a masterpiece. It is deeply researched, beautifully written, a pleasure to read and a gift to historians of Bolivia, education, Indigenous movements and so much more.

No one truly wants to leave their homeland.
That’s a saying I’ve heard countless times in two decades of reporting on immigrants and immigration policy in the United States for the Boston Globe and other newspapers. It’s almost conventional wisdom by now — a quiet, often-ignored truth that sits beneath the headlines and political slogans.

In graduate school at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, I knew that I wanted to work on Central America, on U.S. involvement there, and on social or labor history. What I knew about Central America came from the news, from the Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees whom I worked with as a volunteer with the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, and from local solidarity events, visiting speakers and documentaries.

About ten years ago, when I arrived at the Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery in the mountain town of Orizaba, Veracruz, in Mexico, I was excited that the administrator I’d spoken with earlier had arranged a private tour for me. Founded in 1896, the Moctezuma Brewery was saved from bankruptcy when it was bought out by Mexico’s behemoth Cuauhtémoc Brewery in 1985. It is best known globally for its Dos Equis amber lager and for Sol, the light, golden, pilsner-style beer now sold in over 70 countries around the world.

I remember reading with emotion during my adolescence “Juan López and John Ward,” the poem that the great writer of fantastic literature Jorge Luis Borges dedicated to the Falklands War of 1982. What moved me, I think, was the idea that two young men who could have been friends (united by their love of literature, in addition to belonging to the same generation and sharing the same name) saw each other face-to-face only once, but since that one encounter was during a war, each became both Cain and Abel.

Panama has been in the news recently as the target of intimidating and ill-informed remarks by President-elect Donald Trump. Around Christmastime, Trump first accused Panama of charging “exorbitant” fees to U.S. commerce that transits the Panama Canal, which, according to him, was “foolishly” given away to a country that has been shown “extraordinary generosity” by the United States. “If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without question“, threatened Trump, without explaining how he intends to force Panama into surrendering its most beloved asset, one that is at the very heart of its national identity.

Every time I travel back to Buenos Aires, my hometown, I immediately text my dad, “Can you get tickets to go to La Bombonera?” La Bombonera is Boca Juniors’ stadium, and Boca is our football team—just as it was my grandfather’s and as it is my nephew’s. When I was younger, before moving to the United States to pursue my Ph.D., I used to go on Sundays with friends to la popular—the standing terraces, akin to those in old British stadiums. Now, when I return, we need to get seats, as my father no longer wants to stand for three hours, and my nephew is still too young for the chaos of la popular.