In Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Techno-Borderlands (Princeton UP, 2023), Héctor Beltrán examines Mexican and Latinx coders’ personal strategies of self-making as they navigate a transnational economy of tech work. Beltrán shows how these hackers apply concepts from the code worlds to their lived experiences, deploying batches, loose coupling, iterative processing (looping), hacking, prototyping, and full-stack development in their daily social interactions—at home, in the workplace, on the dating scene, and in their understanding of the economy, culture, and geopolitics. M ..read more

In The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History (Routledge, 2015), Jeremy Black presents a compact yet comprehensive survey of slavery and its impact on the world, primarily centered on the Atlantic trade. Opening with a clear discussion of the problems of defining slavery, the book goes on to investigate the Atlantic slave trade from its origins to abolition, including comparisons to other systems of slavery outside the Atlantic region and the persistence of modern-day slavery. Crucially, the book does not ask readers to abandon their emotional ties to the subject, but puts events in c ..read more

In the summer of 2016, Disney introduced its first Latina princess, Elena of Avalor. Elena, Princess of the Periphery: Disney’s Flexible Latina Girl (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Diana Leon-Boys explores this Disney property using multiple case studies to understand its approach to girlhood and Latinidad. Following the circuit of culture model, Dr. Leon-Boys teases out moments of complex negotiations by Disney, producers, and audiences as they navigate Elena’s circulation. Case studies highlight how a flexible Latinidad is deployed through corporate materials, social media ..read more

Recognition Politics: Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lorenza B. Fontana is a pioneering work that explores a new wave of widely overlooked conflicts that have emerged across the Andean region, coinciding with the implementation of internationally acclaimed indigenous rights. Why are groups that have peacefully cohabited for decades suddenly engaging in hostile and, at times, violent behaviours? What is the link between these conflicts and changes in collective self-identification, claim-making, and rent-seeking dynamics? And ho ..read more

Sixteenth-century Spain was small, poor, disunited and sparsely populated. Yet the Spaniards and their allies built the largest empire the world had ever seen. How did they achieve this? In How the Spanish Empire Was Built: a 400-year History (Reaktion, 2024) Dr. Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Dr. Manuel Lucena Giraldo argue that Spain’s engineers were critical to this venture. The Spanish invested in infrastructure to the advantage of local power brokers, enhancing the abilities of incumbent elites to grow wealthy on trade and widening the arc of Spanish influence. Bringing to life st ..read more

Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago's people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today. In this masterful work of scholarship, Meléndez-Badillo sheds light on the vibrant cultures of the archipelago in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus and captu ..read more

American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States, anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte boldly embarked on a journey in the opposite direction—following the guns from dealers in Arizona and Texas to crime scenes in Mexico. An expert work of narrative nonfiction, Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence across the Border (University of California Press, 2024) provides a rare, intimate look into the world of firearms trafficking ..read more

Bringing into dialogue the fields of social history, Andean ethnography, and postcolonial theory, The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024) by Dr. Brooke Larson maps the moral dilemmas and political stakes involved in the protracted struggle over Indian literacy and schooling in the Bolivian Andes. Dr. Larson traces Bolivia’s major state efforts to educate its unruly Indigenous masses at key junctures in the twentieth century. While much scholarship has focused on “the Indian boarding school” and other Weste ..read more

Gustavo Guzmán's Attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jews: From Acceptable Undesirables to Respected Businessmen (Brill, 2022) is the first book in English to discuss the changing attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jewish immigrants and the State of Israel from the 1930s onwards. Jewish Chileans have ascended rapidly from the status of undesirable immigrants to middle and upper-middle class, facing less obstacles than their Argentine coreligionists. Particular emphasis is given to the failed struggle to extradite war criminal Walther Rauff and to the years of the military dictat ..read more

Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marc Edelman illuminates the transnational agrarian movements that are remaking rural society and the world's food and agriculture systems. Dr. Edelman explains how peasant movements are staking their claims from farmers' fields to massive protests around the world, shaping heated debates over peasants' rights and the very category of "peasant" within the agrarian organisations and in the United Nations. Dr. Edelman chronicles the rise of these movements ..read more