Bounded by desert and mountains, El Centro, California, is isolated and difficult to reach. However, its location close to the border between San Diego and Yuma, Arizona, has made it an important place for Mexican migrants attracted to the valley’s agricultural economy. In 1945, it also became home to the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp. The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) tells the story of how that camp evolved into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service Processing Center of the 2000s and became a national model for detaining migrants—a place where the policing of migration, the racialization of labor, and detainee resistance coalesced.

Using government correspondence, photographs, oral histories, and private documents, Jessica Ordaz reveals the rise and transformation of migrant detention through this groundbreaking history of one detention camp. The story shows how the U.S. detention system was built to extract labor, to discipline, and to control migration, and it helps us understand the long and shadowy history of how immigration officials went from detaining a few thousand unauthorized migrants during the 1940s to confining hundreds of thousands of people by the end of the twentieth century. Ordaz also uncovers how these detained migrants have worked together to create transnational solidarities and innovative forms of resistance.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Ethnic Mexicans living in the United States have always struggled to understand their position within the fabric of the nation-state. The groups that fall under the banner of “ethnic Mexican,” however, are complex. They include Mexican nationals fleeing war in the early 1900s, U.S.-born Mexican Americans asserting themselves as firstly American, and more radical communist and Chicanx leftists of the midcentury and postwar eras who challenged notions of belonging. While it may seem difficult to hold these histories alongside each other amidst the shifting sociopolitical landscape of the century, a recent book titled Homeland: Ethnic Mexican Belonging Since 1900 by Aaron E. Sánchez published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2021 completes this task. By recounting how different groups of ethnic Mexicans understood themselves in relation to each other, the nation, and the world, Sánchez provides readers with a strong understanding of homeland politics in the twentieth century. 

“Belonging is complex,” writes Sánchez as he underscored how different groups of ethnic Mexicans conformed to and resisted U.S. notions of citizenship. The chapters follow a roughly chronological order highlighting specific ethnic Mexican communities in each. Chapter one, for example, recounts the immigration of Mexican Nationals in the first decade of the 20th century and how they came to forge “México de Afuera,” therefore distancing themselves from the U.S.-born ethnic Mexicans. The following chapter charts the rise of Mexican Americanism whereas U.S. patriotism was central to claiming belonging and citizenship. Covering the same timeframe, chapter three tells the history of labor unionism and internationalism within and led by predominantly ethnic Mexican women such as Luisa Moreno up until the quelling of their efforts in the 1940s. The fourth and fifth chapters cover the second half of the twentieth century. In chapter four, Sánchez writes about how the postwar liberal machinations were taken up by ethnic Mexicans in attempts to find legal recourse for ethnic Mexican peoples discriminated against by the U.S. government. In turn, Chicana/o activists that makeup chapter five eventually posed a critique onto these liberalisms and sought more radical modes of belonging and relations to each other. This chapter recounts three kinds of Chicano cultural nationalism to underscore how even within this nomenclature, ideologies varied.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Cristina Beltrán has written a thoughtful and interrogating analysis of the concept of citizenship, particularly in the United States, and how the history of the United States as a country has shaped an understanding of who gets to be “belong” as a member of this society. The book, Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy is part of the Forerunners book series published by the University of Minnesota Press—this series, as we discuss in our conversation, publishes shorter works that dig into ideas across a broad and interdisciplinary spectrum. And this is precisely what Beltrán has done in this book, in terms of engaging historiography, Cultural Studies, LatinX Studies, political theory, American Studies, and other disciplines to aid her unwrapping of our understanding of immigrants and migrants, and why there is an interest in seeing these groups as “others” and, among certain segments of the population, wanting to make sure they suffer in this exclusionary position. Beltrán takes the reader through both imagined and real spaces in terms of the place of the immigrant and the migrant in the United States, weaving the role of the American frontier, the way that settler-colonialism operated inside the U.S., and an understanding of white identity within all of these contexts.

Cruelty as Citizenship is an accessible exploration of the tensions within the United States that surround our reactions to those coming to this country (forcibly, or by choice) and how racial identity has shaped the varied experiences and responses of those who come to the United States and those who have proceeded them here. As Beltrán noted in our discussion, she had come to this work in an effort to tease out the different political affiliations within the LatinX population in the U.S. What she found was that in order to understand the political responses by LatinX voters, the entire dynamic between different racial groups and the role of racial domination needs to be explored. Thus, Cruelty as Citizenship is the result of digging into the political dynamics within different racial groups in the United States, and getting at the role of white identity, and thus white democracy, within American cultural concepts and expectations of political and state power. Cruelty as Citizenship guides the reader through multiple facets of American history, politics, culture, and ideas about what it is to be American and who has the right to claim this identity as their own.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Um retrato original da Bahia no século XIX, num livro cheio de movimento e vozes, sobretudo da gente negra. Em Ganhadores: A Greve Negra de 1857 na Bahia (Companhia das Letras, 2019), o historiador João José Reis reconstitui a história dos negros de ganho, ou ganhadores, protagonistas de uma insólita greve que paralisou o transporte na capital baiana durante vários dias em 1857. Esses trabalhadores escravizados, libertos ou livres, todos africanos ou seus descendentes, se organizavam em grupos de trabalho e percorriam a cidade de cima a baixo fazendo todo tipo de serviço, sobretudo o carrego de pessoas e objetos ou a venda de alimentos e outras mercadorias. Em 1857, porém, a Câmara Municipal baixou uma postura impondo-lhes medidas que combinavam arrocho fiscal e controle policial. Mas os ganhadores, que já viviam dia e noite sob a vigilância e a violência de autoridades, senhores e "cidadãos de bem", não se deixariam abater. O resultado foi a primeira mobilização grevista no Brasil a paralisar todo um setor vital da economia urbana. Baseado em ampla investigação em documentos escritos, impressos e iconográficos, Ganhadores é um livro revelador e essencial para se compreender a intrincada rede de relações sociais, econômicas e culturais que estruturava a sociedade baiana do século XIX, ancorada na instituição da escravidão e caracterizada por um sistema de controle baseado numa economia de favores e domínio paternalista. Se o episódio de resistência aqui narrado trata mais especificamente da Bahia do século XIX, ele tem muito a dizer sobre as relações e opressões sociais e raciais no Brasil de hoje. O livro foi um dos finalistas para o prêmio Jabuti de 2020 na categoria Ciências Humanas.

Referência nos estudos Afro-Atlânticos, e um dos mais importantes historiadores brasileiros, João José Reis é professor do Programa de Pós-graduação em História da Universidade Federal da Bahia e foi em diversas ocasiões membro do Comitê Assessor de História do CNPq, do qual é Pesquisador 1A. É autor de diversos livros, incluindo A Morte é uma Festa: Ritos Fúnebres e Revolta Popular no Brasil do Século XIX, (Vencedor do Prêmio Jabuti de Melhor Obra, categoria Ensaio, em 1992, e do Prêmio Haring da American Historical Association, em 1997); Rebelião Escrava no Brasil: a História do Levante dos Malês; Domingos Sodré, um sacerdote africano: escravidão, liberdade e candomblé na Bahia do século XIX e O Alufá Rufino: tráfico, escravidão e liberdade no Atlântico negro, em co-autoria com Flávio Gomes e Marcus Carvalho. Foi professor visitante nas universidades de Michigan (Ann Arbor), Princeton, Harvard, Brandeis, Texas (Austin) e na École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Quatro de seus livros foram publicados em inglês: Slave Rebellion in Brazil (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1993; Death is a Festival (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Divining Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2015); e The Story of Rufino (Oxford University Press, 2020). Foi pesquisador visitante na Universidade de Londres, no Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford) e no National Humanities Center (Research Triangle, NC), entre outros. Recebeu a Comenda do Mérito Científico do Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia nas classes de Comendador (2004) e da Grã Cruz (2010), e é Membro Honorário Estrangeiro Vitalício da American Historical Association. Em 2017 ele recebeu da Academia Brasileira de Letras o prêmio Machado de Assis pelo conjunto da obra.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Swashbuckling tales of valiant gauchos roaming Argentina and Uruguay were nineteenth-century Latin American best sellers. But when these stories jumped from the page to the circus stage and beyond, their cultural, economic, and political influence revolutionized popular culture and daily life.

In Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay (University of New Mexico Press), William Acree guides readers through the deep history of popular entertainment before turning to circus culture and rural dramas that celebrated the countryside on stage. More than just riveting social experiences, these dramas were among the region’s most dominant attractions on the eve of the twentieth century. Staging Frontiers further explores the profound impacts this phenomenon had on the ways people interacted and on the broader culture that influenced the region. This new, modern popular culture revolved around entertainment and related products, yet it was also central to making sense of social class, ethnic identity, and race as demographic and economic transformations were reshaping everyday experiences in this rapidly urbanizing region.

Staging Frontiers is the winner of the 2020 Best Book in the Nineteenth Century Award from the LASA Nineteenth Century Section. The book has just been published in Spanish as well (Prometeo Editorial, 2021).

Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Spanish at MSOE University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Eleni Kefala's book The Conquered: Byzantium and America on the Cusp of Modernity (Dumbarton Oaks, 2021) probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems composed soon after the conquest of Constantinople and Tenochtitlán. These texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic, and articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered.

Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In the late nineteenth century, Spanish intellectuals and entrepreneurs became captivated with Hispanism, a movement of transatlantic rapprochement between Spain and Latin America. Not only was this movement envisioned as a form of cultural empire to symbolically compensate for Spain?s colonial decline but it was also imagined as an opportunity to materially regain the Latin American markets. Paradoxically, a central trope of Hispanist discourse was the antimaterialistic character of Hispanic culture, allegedly the legacy of the moral superiority of Spanish colonialism in comparison with the commercial drive of modern colonial projects. This study examines how Spanish authors, economists, and entrepreneurs of various ideological backgrounds strove to reconcile the construction of Hispanic cultural identity with discourses of political economy and commercial interests surrounding the movement. 

Drawing from an interdisciplinary archive of literary essays, economic treatises, and political discourses, The Spirit of Hispanism: Commerce, Culture, and Identity Across the Atlantic, 1875-1936 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) revisits Peninsular Hispanism to underscore how the interlacing of cultural and commercial interests fundamentally shaped the Hispanist movement. The Spirit of Hispanism will appeal to scholars in Hispanic literary and cultural studies as well as historians and anthropologists who specialize in the history of Spain and Latin America.

Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In Black Market Capital Urban Politics and the Shadow Economy in Mexico City (University of California Press, 2018), Andrew Konove traces the history of illicit commerce in Mexico City from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, showing how it became central to the economic and political life of the city. The story centers on the untold history of the Baratillo, the city’s infamous thieves’ market. Originating in the colonial-era Plaza Mayor, the Baratillo moved to the neighborhood of Tepito in the early twentieth century, where it grew into one of the world’s largest emporiums for black-market goods. Konove uncovers the far-reaching ties between vendors in the Baratillo and political and mercantile elites in Mexico City, revealing the surprising clout of vendors who trafficked in the shadow economy and the diverse individuals who benefited from their trade. 

Andrew Konove, he is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas, San Antonio. He is Ph.D. in History by Yale University and his research focuses on the political, economic, and social history of urban Mexico and Spanish America in the late colonial and early national periods. Konove's Black Market Capital Urban Politics and the Shadow Economy in Mexico City received the Social Science Book Prize from the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association and was a finalist for the Business History Conference’s Hagley Prize.

Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is an economic and business historian. She is also the CEO of Edita.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Evo Morales, Bolivia's first Indigenous president, won reelection three times on a leftist platform championing Indigenous rights, anti-imperialism, and Bolivian control over the country's natural gas reserves. In Bolivia in the Age of Gas (Duke UP, 2020), Bret Gustafson explores how the struggle over natural gas has reshaped Bolivia, along with the rise, and ultimate fall, of the country's first Indigenous-led government. Rethinking current events against the backdrop of a longer history of oil and gas politics and military intervention, Gustafson shows how natural gas wealth brought a measure of economic independence and redistribution, yet also reproduced political and economic relationships that contradicted popular and Indigenous aspirations for radical change. Though grounded in the unique complexities of Bolivia, the volume argues that fossil-fuel political economies worldwide are central to the reproduction of militarism and racial capitalism and suggests that progressive change demands moving beyond fossil-fuel dependence and the social and ecological ills that come with it.

This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”

Bret Gustafson is Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of New Languages of the State: Indigenous Resurgence and the Politics of Knowledge in Bolivia.

Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Megan Ryburn’s Uncertain Citizenship: Everyday Practices of Bolivian Migrants in Chile (University of California Press, 2018) is a multi-sited ethnography of citizenship practices of Bolivian migrants in Chile. The book asks readers to think beyond a binary category of citizen/noncitizen when looking at migrant practices and spaces. Instead, Uncertain Citizenship emphasizes the transnational, overlapping, and fluctuating forms of citizenship that migrants engage with and inhabit as they move through their lives and across borders. While Ryburn understands the importance of legal and bureaucratic status as a determinant of the experience of migration, her book fundamentally considers “papeleo” as a practice and an experience in which there are many opportunities for regularization as well as marginalization.

Uncertain Citizenship is an essential read for scholars of the Andes and the Southern Cone, as well as scholars of migration generally. Her reflections on ethnographic practice and engaging style make this book a good fit for undergraduate classrooms as well with chapters on solidarity, dance troupes, and the Chilean Dream. Dr. Ryburn is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the London School of Economics Latin America and Caribbean Centre. Uncertain Citizens: Bolivian Migrants in Chile received an honorable mention for the Best Book of Social Sciences in 2019 from the LASA Southern Cone Studies Section She is the Book Review Editor of the Journal of Latin American Studies.

Elena McGrath is an Assistant Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, NY.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies