Browse by Subject: Latin American Studies

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Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Postrevolutionary Mexico

After the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1917, post-revolutionary leaders hoped to assimilate the country’s racially diverse population into one official mixed-race identity—the mestizo. This book shows that as part of this vision, the Mexican government believed it could modernize “primitive” indigenous peoples through technology in the form of education, modern medicine, industrial agriculture, and factory work. David Dalton takes a close look at how authors, artists, and thinkers—some state-funded, some independent—engaged with official views of Mexican racial identity from the 1920s to the 1970s.

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Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World's Largest Immigration Detention System

Immigrants make up the largest proportion of federal prisoners in the United States, incarcerated in a vast network of more than two hundred detention facilities. This book investigates when detention became a centerpiece of U.S. immigration policy. Detain and Punish reveals why the practice was reinstituted in 1981 after being halted for several decades and how the system expanded to become the world’s largest immigration detention regime.   

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Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies

Exploring a variety of topics including European colonialism, migration, citizenship, sex tourism, music, literature, and art, contributors demonstrate that alternate views of Haitian and Dominican history and identity have existed long before the present day. From a moving section on passport petitions that reveals the familial, friendship, and communal networks across Hispaniola in the nineteenth century to a discussion of the shared music traditions that unite the island today, this volume speaks of an island and people bound together in a myriad of ways.

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Migrants and Political Change in Latin America

This book reveals how migrants shape the politics of their countries of origin, drawing on research from Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador and their diasporas, the three largest in Latin America. Luis Jiménez discusses the political changes that result when migrants return to their native countries in person and also when they send back new ideas and funds—social and economic “remittances”—through transnational networks.

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Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba

In these often-overlooked centuries, Martínez-Fernández finds the roots of many of Cuba’s enduring economic, political, social, and cultural complexities. The result is a sweeping history, a seminal text that makes clear that to fully grasp revolutionary or contemporary Cuba we must first understand what came before.  

 

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Decolonizing Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié

This catalog adopts the theme of ‘refinement’ and seeks to decolonize this notion through a juxtaposition of art and historical artifacts from the southeastern United States with Duval-Carrié’s contemporary work.  

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Voices from Mariel: Oral Histories of the 1980 Cuban Boatlift

Between April and September 1980, more than 125,000 Cuban refugees fled their homeland, seeking freedom from Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. They departed in boats from the port of Mariel and braved the dangerous 90-mile journey across the Straits of Florida. Told in the words of the immigrants themselves, the stories in Voices from Mariel offer an up-close view of this international crisis, the largest overseas mass migration in Latin American history.  

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Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts

Juan Ramos uses “decolonial aesthetics,” a theory that frees the idea of art from Eurocentric forms of expression and philosophies of the beautiful, to examine the long decade of the 1960s in Latin America—a time of cultural production that has not been studied extensively from a decolonial perspective.

 

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Telling Migrant Stories: Latin American Diaspora in Documentary Film

Telling Migrant Stories explores how contemporary documentary film gives voice to Latin American immigrants whose stories would not otherwise be heard. 

 

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Afro-Cuban Religious Experience: Cultural Reflections in Narrative