New Books in Caribbean Studies

Marking the two year anniversary of Hurricane María making landfall in Puerto Rico, the September 2019 release of the anthology Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books, 2019) brings together a collective of artists, journalists, and scholars to reflect on the multiple disasters that have hit the island and how the people of Puerto Rico have responded.

Marisol LeBrón and Yarimar Bonilla, the editors of the anthology, in their editor’s introduction foreground the history of Puerto Rico’s continual state failure. Social abandonment, capitalization, and collective trauma were not simply a result of María, but instead, María revealed the systemic failures of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Government. “Long before María, Puerto Rico was already suffering the effects of a prolonged economic recession, spiraling levels of debt, and deep austerity cuts to public resources,” wrote Bonilla and LeBrón (5). María and its aftermath was not only a disaster in itself but an aftershock of both colonialism and the financial crisis decades in the making.

Aftershocks of Disaster offers poetry, theater, discussions about technology, photography, and other mediums as ways through which to produce and access knowledge about the multiple disasters before and after Hurricane María. Particularly inspiring are the discussions and critiques around notions of resistance, resiliency, and recovery on the archipelago. The anthology allows readers to imagine futures reliant on the self-determination of the people of Puerto Rico. As we find ourselves at the two year anniversary of Hurricane María and in the midst of more natural disasters in the Caribbean and the greater Atlantic Ocean, Aftershocks of Disaster will continue to serve as an epistemological and pedagogical tool for scholars.

NYU Latinx Project Video here.

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Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. They are a historian of 20th-century issues of race, labor, (im)migration, surveillance, space, relational Ethnic Studies, and Latinx Studies. Their research focuses on the rise of federally-funded encampments (i.e., the concentration of populations) from the advent of the New Deal until post-WWII era. Their dissertation, “The Age of Encampment: Race, Surveillance, and the Power of Spatial Scripts, 1933-1975” reveals underlying continuities between the presence of threatening bodies and the increasing surveillance of these bodies in camps throughout the United States. Jonathan is currently a Ford Predoctoral Fellow as well as an assistant curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz and on their personal website www.historiancortez.com

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Beginning in the mid 19th century, thousands of indentured laborers traveled from India to the Caribbean, and many settled in Trinidad. In The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)  Alexander Rocklin argues that the beliefs and practices they recreated in the new world only became recognizable as a discrete entity we now call “religion” over time and as the result of social and political processes. This book tells the story of the making of Hindu in the British colonial Caribbean. Over time, interactions between colonial officials, elite Indians and workers, as well as conflicts over public performances of rituals produced something that many now call Hinduism. But Rocklin argues that this was not necessarily a foregone conclusion, and his book highlights the contingent nature of this process.

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Chocolate – nothing is more irresistible for a decadent treat or a rich drink to warm you on a cold winter’s evening.  In eighteenth-century Venezuela, cacao became a life source for the colony. Neglected by the Spanish fleet system, Venezuelan colonists struggled to obtain European foods and goods. But, they found a solution in trading the highly coveted luxury good, cacao, for the necessities of life with contrabandists from the Dutch, English, and French Caribbean.  Establishing an intricate contraband network, an intricate contraband network, Venezuelans normalized their subversions to imperial law. Today, we’re pleased to welcome Jesse Cromwell to discuss his new book, The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela (published in 2018 by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press). This incredibly well researched and beautifully written book explores how smuggling in the Spanish Atlantic became more than an economic transaction or imperial worry.  Persistent local need elevated smuggling to a communal ethos and Venezuelans defended their commercial autonomy through passive measures as well as violent protests when the Spanish state enacted the Bourbon reforms in the eighteenth century. Exchanges over smuggling between the Spanish empire and its colonial subjects formed a key part of empire making and maintenance in the eighteenth century.

Dr. Julia M. Gossard is assistant professor of history and distinguished assistant professor of honor’s education at Utah State University. A historian of 18th-century France, Julia is finishing her manuscript, Coercing Children, that examines children as important actors in social reform, state-building, and imperial projects across the early modern French world. Dr. Gossard is active on Twitter. To learn more about her teaching, research, and experience in digital humanities, visit her website.

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In his new book, Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean (Princeton University Press, 2019), historian Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof seamlessly ties together various scholarly subfields into a truly transnational history of anticolonial politics and the Afro-Latino diaspora in the United States. Hoffnung-Garskof, Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan, brings to life the migration stories of black Cubans and Puerto Ricans who founded an intellectual and political movement in nineteenth-century New York. Though exiles and migrants from the Spanish Caribbean were but a fraction of the growing immigrant population during the Gilded Age, this small community of color produced leaders in industry, journalism, and above all, revolutionary struggle. From a small apartment in the center of segregated New York City, a mutual aid organization called La Liga became the political hub for a vast network of exiles of color seeking to liberate Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spanish colonialism. The book provides “a migrants’-eye view” through a collection of microhistories that shed light on the worldviews of a select group of thought leaders and their increasingly intertwined lives. While most of the historical actors featured in this text were afro-descendants, their own racial subjectivities and racialization by external parties took on various forms. This interview delves further into the migrants’ articulations of race – among many other issues – a core theme and line of inquiry throughout the book. In the shadow of a complex and contested historiography centered on revolutionary leaders such as José Martí, Hoffnung-Garskof highlights the invaluable contributions of the Spanish Caribbean’s “class of color.” Black Cuban and Puerto Rican intellectuals did not passively participate in the movement led by Martí, but rather fought to manifest their own vision of what a new interracial democracy could be.

Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr.

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Sam Erman is the author of Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Almost Citizens recounts the story of how Puerto Rico came to be part of the United States empire at the turn of the 20th Century. More specifically, Erman looks at how Puerto Ricans, U.S. legislators, presidents, judges, and a bevy of other people debated how Puerto Rico would be incorporated into the United States. The nexus for this debate centered on whether or not Puerto Ricans would be full citizens of the United States. Erman’s study illustrates the myriad of ways in which constitutional change occurs outside of the judiciary, showing how everyday people contributed to a radical shift in constitutional meanings of terms such as citizenship, alien, territory, and empire. The debates he shows within his book had a long lasting impact for the island and its people; an impact which is still felt today.

Sam Erman is Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, where he studies constitutional law, legal history, and the Supreme Court.

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A work of art about doing nothing; a work of art that invites people to take it apart; a work of art that consists of two people walking in a town in the Dominican Republic. These are just some examples Carlos Garrido Castellano takes up in Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere (Rutgers University Press, 2019), his provocative and complex exploration of conceptual art in the Caribbean as it has been presented over the last thirty years. He argues for a way of experiencing and writing about art that explodes all of our assumptions, and makes new spectators of us all. This book proposes that we can understand this art as creating agency in and through space. Its success is evident in the urgency it generates: we need to experience these creative interventions in order to better understand the Caribbean.

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In Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957 (NYU Press, 2017), Nancy Mirabal details New York Cuban diasporic history between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with keen attention to how political debates about the potential future, visibility, and belonging in Cuba played out along issues of race and gender. By shifting moments of importance in Cuban and U.S. history, it becomes clear exactly how contentious the differing opinions on how to move the island away from Spanish colonial rule and the role it would come to play – if any – on the political, racial, and economic landscape of the United States. Mirabal utilizes vast archival material spanning club records, literary texts, newspapers, photographs, and oral histories to tell how exiled Cuban migrants formed, maintained, and disagreed within social clubs in New York. Her inclusion of labor history, intellectual history, political history, social history, and immigration history makes for an incredibly detailed and dynamic history.

Mirabal is committed to writing a history that focuses on the experiences and intellectual debates of Afro-Cubans during a period of enslavement, empire, and colonialism. Further, she tells how the movement of peoples and ideas of revolution and independence were both being informed and redefined by an exiled Afro-Cuban experience well before and after 1898. Mirabal writes, “Afro-Cuban migrants were some of the most incisive, powerful, and radical voices in the exile nationalist movement, so much so that by the mid- to late nineteenth-century, meanings of Cubanidad were inextricably tied to ending slavery, racial equality, and a promise of enfranchisement” (6). Suspect Freedoms recounts a history of how nation-building in Cuba, which was dependent largely on diasporic intellectuals, was a racialized and masculinist project dependent on the white supremacy, anti-blackness, and patriarchy. Even then, the intricacies with which Dr. Mirabal recounts Black migrant’s, women’s, and Black women’s experiences and resistance to such fault lines within this century-long period of Cuban diasporic history is masterful.

Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. They are a historian of 20th-century issues of race, labor, (im)migration, surveillance, space, relational Ethnic Studies, and Latinx Studies. Their research focuses on the rise of federally-funded encampments (i.e., the concentration of populations) from the advent of the New Deal until post-WWII era. Their dissertation, “The Age of Encampment: Race, Surveillance, and the Power of Spatial Scripts, 1933-1975” reveals underlying continuities between the presence of threatening bodies and the increasing surveillance of these bodies in camps throughout the United States. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz and their personal website www.historiancortez.com

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Brenda Elsey and Joshua Nadel’s new book, Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2019), uncovers the hidden history of the arrival of physical education for girls in the late-nineteenth century, it’s expansion beyond schools, and the subterranean struggles of girls and women to play and expand access and support for sports across Latin America. While sports has often been sidelined in histories of gender, class, nationalism, and the so-called Social Question in the region, Elsey and Nadel show how women’s involvement in sports animated eugenic debates over healthy citizens, nationalism, and proper motherhood in government, the Church, and the press. Beginning with women’s sports clubs in schools and moving to charity events, informal play, and regional leagues, women began to take up previously denied national and international pastimes much earlier than previously acknowledged. With women’s sports facing opposition, underfunding, neglect, silence, and outright outlawing (in the case of futbol in Brazil) throughout the twentieth century and up to the current World Cup, the authors show how generations of women athletes’ struggles and memories wove together a vibrant history of play, competition, and resilience. Despite the title, the book explores women’s involvement in tennis, track, gymnastics, basketball, and futbol (soccer), and medical and media debates over which activities were “properly” or “improperly” feminine for women’s psychology, bodies, and futures as mother’s. It covers case studies in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, and El Salvador.

Jesse Zarley will be an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where in Fall 2019 he will be teaching Latin American, Caribbean, and World History. His research interests include borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Argentina. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Marisol LeBrón’s new book, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019), examines the rise of and resistance to punitive governance (tough on crime policing policies) in Puerto Rico from the 1990s to the present. As in the United States, LeBrón shows how increased investment in policing did not respond to a spike in crime. It actually emerged as a strategy to shore up the local political and economic establishment mired in the crisis of the archipelago’s postwar colonial development policy “Operation Bootstrap,” spiking unemployment, lack of U.S. investment, and a growing informal economy which included the drug trade. Puerto Rican elites hoped to reinvent themselves as models for tough on crime policing and gatekeepers for the United States to Latin America. Beginning with the mano dura contra el crimen (iron fist against crime) policy of commonwealth Governor Pedro Rosselló in 1993, police increasingly targeted lower income, predominantly Black public housing complexes (caseríos) as sources of criminality and lawlessness. Using Justice Department reports, social media research, newspapers, and oral interviews to create a “police archive,” LeBrón demonstrates that while police killings, brutality, surveillance, and harassment were hallmarks of mano dura, the policy also reinvented popular understandings of the “who” and “where” of crime that endure to the present. In doing so, she shows how presumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality linked to certain places (public housing, sex work neighborhoods, schools, and universities) created notions of victims and criminals who “deserved” life or death. The book’s second half explores critiques of and resistance to punitive governance by looking at underground rap, university student activism, social media debates, and non-punitive anti-violence activism. These case studies show the growing resistance to policing as policy instead of social investment, but also the tenacity of the discourses of criminality activists must wrestle with today.

LeBrón is also the author of the forthcoming Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books) and the co-creator of the Puerto Rico Syllabus.

Jesse Zarley will be an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where in Fall 2019 he will be teaching Latin American, Caribbean, and World History. His research interests include borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Argentina. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Katherine M. Marino is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) follows the many Latin American and Caribbean women in the first half of the century who not only championed feminism for the continent but also contributed to defining the meaning of international human rights. They drove a transnational movement for women’s suffrage that included equal work and maternity rights and the self-determination of their nations rejecting U.S. imperialism. Marino draws attention to the enduring contributions of women such as the Brazilian Bertha Lutz, Cuban Clara Gonzales and Chilean Marta Vergara who have yet to receive a significant place in human rights history. The work of Latin American and Caribbean feminist was impeded by internal race and class conflict, insufficient funding, lack of government support and by imperial assumptions of U.S. feminists. Their tenacious efforts through multiple organizations, gatherings, and personal networks led to the inclusion of women’s rights in the global human rights framework and assured that economic and social rights would not be sidelined. The book also illuminates the ideological differences that have plagued the global feminist movement and adds a significant piece to the history of human rights.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the intellectual history of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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