Joseph U. Lenti – författare

In Costa Rica, the adjective precario – meaning precarious or temporary – functions as a noun to denote a squatter community, encapsulating conditions of instability, poverty, and scarcity. Since the nineteenth century, eviction and squatting have shaped urban and rural landscapes across Latin America, and wherever informal housing has expanded, insecurity and poverty have followed.In Precario Joe Lenti presents a narrative-driven collection of stories that trace the loss of land, forced departures, and the occupation of new spaces in Costa Rica from the sixteenth-century moment of contact to the present. Drawing on an expansive archive of secondary scholarship, media accounts, state records, and written and oral testimonies from precaristas, politicians, lawmakers, journalists, and housing activists, this first-of-its-kind English-language history offers a ground-level account of how ordinary Costa Ricans have sought to secure land and shelter out of necessity. Their efforts are situated within the country’s broader political, economic, social, and environmental histories, yet the book’s core contribution lies in its sustained attention to agency: the everyday decisions, collective actions, and strategies through which people sought to shape their own lives.Challenging the persistent misconception that Costa Rica has somehow escaped dynamics of housing informality and scarcity, Precario foregrounds survival, settlement, and resistance as lived experiences that are central rather than peripheral to the nation’s history.

A tale of sin and redemption, Joseph U. Lenti’s Redeeming the Revolution demonstrates how the killing of hundreds of student protestors in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco district on October 2–3, 1968, sparked a crisis of legitimacy that moved Mexican political leaders to reestablish their revolutionary credentials with the working class, a sector only tangentially connected to the bloodbath. State-allied labor groups hence became darlings of public policy in the post-Tlatelolco period, and with the implementation of the New Federal Labor Law of 1970, the historical symbiotic relationship of the government and organized labor was restored.Renewing old bonds with trusted allies such as the Confederation of Mexican Workers bore fruit for the regime, yet the road to redemption was fraught with peril during this era of Cold War and class contestation. While Luis EcheverrÍa, Fidel VelÁzquez, and other officials appeased union brass with discourses of revolutionary populism and policies that challenged business leaders, conflicts emerged, and repression ensued when rank-and-file workers criticized the chasm between rhetoric and reality and tested their leaders’ limits of toleration.