Category: Book Reviews

One afternoon in 2014, driving along a dirt road that snaked through countryside several hours outside of the Nicaraguan capital of Managua, I came across an ancient woman on foot, carrying a load of firewood on her back. I pulled up alongside her and asked her if she wanted a lift. She didn’t seem to comprehend at first, whereupon I explained that was offering her a ride to her destination. She smiled and shook her head. She would carry on walking, she said, but said that if I had some alms—she used that term, limosna, in Spanish—she’d accept them.

In the late 1940s, a young aspiring journalist Stephen G. Bloom was having trouble finding work at any stateside newspaper. After a stint at his college newspaper, the University of California Daily Californian, Bloom worked as a waiter at a Berkeley eatery, got arrested in Canada with his girlfriend for trying to bring pot across the border and got turned down for a reporter’s job by a raft of newspapers. The opportunity came up for a vague promise of a job in the Brazilian English-language language newspaper the Brazil Herald.

On March 19, 2010, two graduate students at the Tec de Monterrey, Jorge Antonio Mercado Alonso and Javier Francisco Arredondo Verdugo, were killed by members of the Mexican Army inside the university campus. To cover up the murder, the Army and Mexican authorities initially claimed the victims were armed sicarios—hitmen— with organized crime connections. An investigation later revealed that Jorge and Javier were engineering students who did not belong to any criminal group and were unarmed when the perpetrators shot them.

Mexican culinary nationalists have enshrined Oaxaca as the “land of seven moles,” the diverse chile stews that provide an Indigenous counterpoint to the supposed cradle of creole gastronomy, Puebla, with its chile and chocolate centerpiece, mole poblano. Although the count of seven moles is an invented tradition, Oaxaca’s culinary roots indeed reach deep into the past, as is shown by the essays in this splendid collection. The volume also effectively illustrates the advances of the archaeological study of food, from an early focus on the processes of domestication and subsistence regimes.

At a recent Harvard Petrie-Flom Center event, Law and Policy of Psychedelic Medicine, author Ayelet Waldman offered a nuanced perspective on microdosing and government policy. I asked her how we could incorporate understandings of Indigenous cosmologies into our practices of understanding psychedelic integration both in clinical and non-clinical settings. She emphasized the importance of agency, arguing that Indigenous peoples who hold these lineages sacred should lead the conversation.

Oxford University Press, in collaboration with The Council on Foreign Relations, published Paul J. Angelo’s much-anticipated monograph in March 2024. The book is a comparative study, focusing on U.S. security policy to two countries in Latin America at roughly the same period, i.e. during the first fifth of the 21st century. From Peril to Partnership represents a nearly 20-year focus by the author on Latin America in general, Colombia and Mexico, specifically.

Jonathan Blitzer’s well-written and evocative book, Everyone Who is Gone is Here, has been hailed as a must-read on the U.S. current immigration emergency. In my opinion, it’s not.
In fact, it’s more about the emergency that occurred a generation or more ago, when civil wars across Central America dominated Cold War news coverage and spilled over into bitter battles between Democrats and Republicans in Congress. That war still exists, and polemics about immigration and an “unsecure” border are among the weaponry.

Fresh insight into seemingly exhausted topics often comes from unexpected places. Luís Cláudio Villafañe’s biographical account of Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916), one of Latin America’s most influential and well-known artists, may serve as an illuminating case in point.
Instead of enlarging the already incommensurable literature on the subject with a specialized monograph or yet another mythologizing account, Villafañe chose to gather, digest and put in order all the existing material on the so-called “Prince of Spanish Letters” and produce a concise, much-needed retelling of his extraordinary life and times.

With this fascinating and theoretically sound study, Rosario Hubert has produced a key text not only in Asia-Latin American studies, but also in Latin American studies and Asian studies. In Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature, she explores, from the theoretical perspectives of world literature and cosmopolitanism, not so much how Latin American authors have mimetically represented China in their works but, rather, how their own misreadings (hence, the “disoriented” in the title of the book) of Chinese culture allowed them to reconsider world literature and join global cross-cultural debates.

During most of the 1980s I lived in Managua, Nicaragua, as a photojournalist for Newsweek magazine. I had covered the 1979 Sandinista Revolution that sent shockwaves through Washington because Nicaragua “lost” a staunch ally against Communism. Central America had become the final battleground of the Cold War, and Washington was not about to lose another Vietnam.

Omar Torrijos, military dictator of Panama, may be one of the most understudied leaders in modern Latin American history. After seizing power in 1968, he reshaped the country’s destiny, most notably by negotiating the transfer of the Panama Canal from U.S. to Panamanian control in 1977. Up until his sudden death in 1981, he also played an outsized role in inter-American affairs.

Guantánamo/GTMO: Cuba’s easternmost province, occupied territory, U.S. military base, prison, refuge, natural habitat, torture site, symbol, legal exception and geographical reference of the famous “Guajira guantanamera” song. Esther Whitfield’s book gathers an unprecedented cultural archive exploring many Guantánamos. It reveals how the stories we tell about Guantánamo—and just as importantly, the ones we do not—pattern a global, political experience of the present.

On July 28, the Venezuelans will hopefully have the opportunity to elect a new president. Twenty-five years after President Hugo Chávez came to power, very few of them are said to freely support his successor Nicolas Maduro and their movement, as the state of the economy and the political system has so severely undermined the people’s ability to live dignified lives.

I received my copy of A Body of One’s Own just a few months into the chaotic Milei presidential administration in Argentina. This meant that I was reading Patricio Simonetto’s excellent book on trans and travesti history, citizenship and embodiment in 20th century Argentina as the manosphere’s latest darling was banning gender-inclusive language, rallying to recriminalize abortion, gutting health and social services and dissolving government agencies.